This issue doubles as a catalog-of-sorts to Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language, a group exhibition curated by Laura Hoptman at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from May 6 to August 27, 2012. It is a *pseudo*-catalog in the sense that, other than a section of images at the back, it bears no direct relation to the works in the exhibition. Instead, the bulletins extend in different directions from the same title, and could be collectively summarized as preoccupied with the more social aspects of Typography. In this way we hope to throw some *glancing* light on the exhibition. For ...

The title of this project has been adapted with reference to the disputed concept of an Existenzminimum, which was conceived as an emergency measure to regulate the provision of low-cost housing for the growing working class between the World Wars, but has been criticized for perpetuating low- standard living conditions for the underprivileged. Existenzoptimum builds upon the ideals of the Existenzminimum while developing a proposal for cooperative living in opposition to family life and its ideology, considering issues such as class, gender etc.

Immutable: Designing History explores the graphic genealogy of the document and its entanglement with statecraft and colonial(ism/ity). This is framed as a roughly 5,000 year chronology, imbricating the developments of money and writing from Mesopotamian clay tablets to distributed blockchain ledgers. Immutability figures as a design imperative and hermeneutic for considering securitization techniques (material, technological, administrative) against the entropy of a document’s movement through space, time and the political. This project is proposed as a counter-position to the imperatives of graphic design education, which foregrounds logos, books, websites and branding while passports, money and property deeds constitute the field’s more profoundly ...

Styrofoam seagulls, replicant owls, and explosive donkeys casually amble through this visual primer on some aesthetics, histories, and cinematic legacies of artificial animals. Comprising three commissioned essays and a pool of visual research tracing hidden overlaps between technical and natural forms, Scrim Sinews connects DARPA robotics with the HUAC testimony of Bertolt Brecht, and the chronophotographic gun to the high realism of Pinnochio. Convened and edited by Benjamin Tiven and Per-Oskar Leu on the occasion of their joint exhibition at 1/9unosunove gallery in Rome, Nov. 2014-Jan. 2015. Includes commissioned essays by Homay King, Philip Glahn, and Jonah Westerman. Design by Lucas Quigley using ...

This year’s Annual is published in tandem with a long-term installation of The Serving Library’s collection of (mostly) framed objects at 019, an artist-run exhibition, performance and work space in a former welding factory in Ghent, Belgium. Apparently, the sole common denominator of the objects in the collection — which range from paintings, photographs, and record sleeves, to a can of green paint, a German car license plate, and an ouija board — is to have appeared as illustrations in an issue of The Serving Library Annual or one of its immediate antecedents, Bulletins of The Serving Library or Dot Dot ...

Shifter published ten issues between 2004 and 2007. Issues 1 to 9 were distributed as free PDFs. With the 10th issue a short print run accompanied its digital counterpart. This anthology presents re-edited and reformatted versions of first ten issues, in order to consider them together and take stock of the early period of Shifter.