Panel 2: 'Post-Digital Matter (in Experimental Publishing)'

There is little doubt, as El Lissitzky argues in The Future of the Book (1926), that ‘an alteration in the structure and mode of language implies a change in the usual appearance of the book’. Conversely, one can argue that the formal structures of the book shape not only physical and intellectual encounters with the object, but also future modes of thought.

Drawing on a vision of the future from a hundred years ago, this symposium asks what editorial experimentation can mean in the present and how the processes of book production – design, printing and distribution – influence the interpretation of the world. Drawing on five interrelated aspects articulated in El Lissitzky’s manifesto, the workshop explores (1) the material and political history of printing techniques examining the evolving relationship between materialism and dematerialization in contemporary society, (2) the concept of the book as architecture staging a unique encounter between ‘sound’ (time) and ‘exposure’ (space), (3) the role of writing in editorial experimentation, (4) the differential bodily experiences associated with various printing techniques (e.g. the immediacy of vision in American posters versus the deliberateness of reading in Russian revolutionary poster books), and (5) the modalities of reproduction and circulation.