[ recap ]

Last week we looked at Sol LeWitt, wall drawings and Casey Reas.

[ thoughts ]

Bruno Munari was an Italian artist and designer whose work crossed graphic design, books, objects, education and experiments with machines.

In 1963, he began experimenting with a Xerox 914, a plain paper copier. He was interested in what happened when the material being copied moved while the machine was scanning it.

Corraini, Munari's long-time publisher, describes the results as reproducing both the image and its movement.

Munari's Xerografie Originali.

Munari kept testing the process. He moved images diagonally and sideways, rotated them and varied their speed. He changed the materials on the glass and examined the machine's reading limits, toner concentration and other parts of the copying process. Corraini describes the experiments as systematic.

By 1970, Munari could describe what those experiments had shown him:
"Invented to reproduce images, today they can produce them."

His interest in machines went back further. Munari had begun developing his Macchine inutili, or Useless Machines, in the early 1930s. These suspended constructions moved with the air around them and served no conventional purpose.

The Xerox 914 came with a defined commercial purpose: reproducing documents. Munari kept that mechanism intact and changed one part of the procedure, moving the source while it was being scanned.

Once he understood how different movements changed the image, he could use those effects deliberately.

[ creativity ]

By 1969, Munari was demonstrating the Xerox experiments in public.

At an exhibition in Karlsruhe that year, he produced around 200 Xerografie Originali in less than ten minutes. The following year, a Rank Xerox machine was installed at the Venice Biennale for the public to use. Rank Xerox also published a book, Xerografia: Documentazione sull'uso creativo delle macchine Rank Xerox, documenting the work he had been doing with its machines.

In 1970, Munari argued for "an art by all". He wrote that artists should experiment with tools that could be widely used and then pass on the methods and the "secret of the trade".

Around the same period, poets and artists were finding possibilities inside another piece of office equipment:
the typewriter.

In concrete poetry, the position of letters and words on the page is part of the poem. A typewriter made that particularly physical: each key produced a character in a fixed position, and the person controlled the spacing, repetition and placement.

Pérez Art Museum Miami traces how artists and poets including Carl Andre, Henri Chopin and Dom Sylvester Houédard used the typewriter for experimental art and poetry.

Houédard was a Benedictine monk and one of the first English-language concrete poets. He made hundreds of compositions on a typewriter, including Sonic Water in 1964. Instead of typing words in lines, he used repeated letters from the title to build ten squares inside one another.

Munari made his own argument about the limits of a machine using a piano. A piano cannot produce every possible sound, but nobody would therefore dismiss it as an instrument. The Xerox had its own boundaries. For Munari, using it creatively meant "operating within certain limitations".

[ making ]

Fifty years after Munari's Xerox experiments, Hito Steyerl and Volker Möllenhoff are building an image generator around deliberate limits.

Their project, Lossy, uses Creative Commons and public-domain material. Steyerl describes "scarcity as design choice" and says the project is "less about output than process".

They have also been testing how little the system needs to do the work. Steyerl says changes made during development reduced the energy used for training by as much as 75 percent.

There is a useful making method in both this and Munari's experiments.

Change one condition and watch what happens.

Munari moved the image while the copier was scanning it, then repeated the experiment with different directions, speeds and materials. Steyerl and Möllenhoff are changing the material available to their system and the resources it uses.

You can do something similar.

Take a tool you already know and change one condition you normally accept. Reduce the number of colours. Fix the page count before you begin. Use only material you already have. Give yourself one typeface.

Then make more than one version.

The repetition matters because the first result can be an accident. A few versions start to show you how the constraint is affecting the work.

For example, a single-sheet zine gives you those conditions before you begin: the size of the paper, number of pages and a fold that determines how those pages fit together.

Zines are also having another resurgence. Makers are returning to the format, while zine fairs, workshops and small publishers are popping up.

Zines existed long before photocopiers. The Amon Carter Museum traces their origins to self-published magazines made by science-fiction fans in the 1930s and 40s. Decades later, when copy machines and copy shops became widely available in the 1970s, zine production expanded and became cheaper to do yourself.

I've been building Zineware, a free browser tool for making DIY zines.

Access is one reason I wanted it to be free and browser-based. Making a zine can still send you towards professional (predatory) software.

With Zineware, you make the pages in reading order and it handles the arrangement for printing and folding.

The result is a piece of work you can print on a single sheet of paper, fold into a zine and hand to someone.

[ sign off ]

Morning Brew is supporting this week's issue again. As I mentioned, I'm already a subscriber, so I'm stoked to have them on board again.

Stay the one doing the noticing.

Thanks for taking the time to read.

See you next Sunday.