Introduction by Georgia Haddad Nicolau - Atypo.org: artist's books in the post digital era
Introduction by Georgia Haddad Nicolau - Atypo.org: artist's books in the post digital era
Atypo is a virtual publishing house that deals with the promotion and production of artist books (www.atypo.org). It proposes a creative and experimental approach to publishing, working on the idea of artist books as "real" and unique objects, and questions how to challenge their unicity. It is a practice-based reflection on the concept of e-books, proposing artist books that e-books cannot yet replicate. The workshop is structured in two phases. Initially, four artist books are presented, resulting from a collective process dealing with both the materiality and dematerialization of artistic objects: L’Arte delle mine, by Luca Leggero and Luca Giorgi; Philatelic Album: 20 Years of Berlusconismo in Italy (1994-2011), by Marcantonio Lunardi; Multi Book: Italian Table 2001/2011, by Giacomo Verde; and Unhappening, not here, not now, by Les Liens Invisibles. The second part of the workshop is dedicated to exploring “material/immaterial codes” hidden behind two of the four projects. Unhappening, not here, not now, by Les Liens Invisibles, is an art catalog printed online that contains 100 "works of art"created by using a text generator and a selection of images from Google Images. The exhibition of such non-existent works will never happen, neither here nor now. The artists examine the invisible code that generates the “artworks” drawing up possible developments for realizing other serial artistic books. Multi Book: Italian Table 2001/2011, by Giacomo Verde is a project that started by printing frames extracted from a video on transparent sheets, mixing political images on a dinner table and shattering them. The project was expanded with three book versions on Lulu.com. One of them is a cookbook where every political image has been associated with a recipe playing on the connections between food and political events. In this workshop, Giacomo Verde explores techniques and development of the project focusing on the possibility of invading Lulu.com with books of "political recipes.