Paul Soulellis

Ghost type. A quick sketch.

  Stetson Shoes.

Stetson Shoes was one of a number of shoe factories in the town of Weymouth. The Stetson Shoe Company closed its operations in 1973. The factory building has been converted to office space. Location is on Route 18 south of Route 3.

There’s a long history of typography that evokes time and place, usually in broad strokes—a decade, an era, a nation. Since creating Divieto I’ve had this on my mind: how personal can typography be? What if letterforms could evoke a narrower scale of memory—a specific moment, a building, a corner of a room. Shapes grabbed from within a photograph of an image of a photograph. Several layers of memory at work here. I want to extract something and bring it to the surface—letterforms carrying something along. Or perhaps they carry nothing at all. Inducing an association—the place, the moment, a deep history. Maybe I can re-draw the letters and resurrect a (new) alphabet, evoke something onto a working surface. Like sighting a ghost. This isn’t about technical accuracy or details; it’s about quickly throwing up the scaffolding around a ruin. A place to look. “Here is an artifact.”

Andrew Wynter, The Nervous System of the Metropolis (1865) (via James Gleick, The Information, A History, A Theory, A Flood):

A great gap has just been filled up in our system of telegraphic communication. Cities can converse with cities, countries with countries, and even continents with continents; but house cannot communicate with house. We have the district telegraph, it is true, and by walking half a mile in town you may find a station which will send a message to within half a mile of its destination: but what is wanted is a system of telegraphy which shall dip its wires down into the library or warehouse — an elongation, if we may so term it, of our own nervous system, so simple in its construction that anyone can work it, so speedy that we may telegraph as quickly as we could write. We want, in short, in all large towns to abolish the messenger and district post…

A thread. One slice through both Weymouths is through the Holbrooks.

John Cage:

When nothing is securely possessed one is free to accept any of the somethings. How many are there? They roll up at your feet … There is no end to the number of somethings and all of them (without exception) are acceptable. If one gets suddenly proud and says for one reason or another: I cannot accept this; then the whole freedom to accept any of the others vanishes. But if one maintains secure possession of nothing (what has been called poverty of spirit), then there is no limit to what one may freely enjoy.

Finding the archive. Or rather, how does one untangle the bits, the fragments scattered about, sometimes just laying at the side of the road. How does one assemble something of interest.

Is this mythology? In the broadest sense, a mythology is a story or collection of stories that originate in tradition. There must be a reason. In its acting out, the myth explains something. Maybe this is it, perhaps I’m poking around these locales looking for undiscovered connections, old tales fermenting with latent meaning, hoping to unlock something significant. More likely, it is my poking around itself that will create these stories, from nothing.

And so I find myself right now completely overwhelmed with this prospect of making twelve books. In a way, these books have no topic, and this is difficult. This is to be a project called Weymouths, about two towns on separate continents, each named Weymouth. But as I discover details, fragments that may or may not lead somewhere — it feels like I’m pulling on the ends of loose threads — each one will become another Weymouth. There will be more than two Weymouths; how many I’m not sure. There will be as many as I can claim and assemble into these books, and many more potentially, for those who find and keep my books.

One thought is that I will simply gather the stories for awhile. I’ll find the Weymouths as they’re revealed to me and index them. Rather than curate the evidence into the books, as a historian or travel guide would do, I’ll apply chance operations to select the stories and determine their importance, in a highly ritualized way. Stumbled-upon evidence yielding a chance-determined mythology of specificity and meaning. This feels right.

For the next several months I’ll be focused on Weymouths, a 12-book project I’ve been commissioned to produce for the 2012 b-side arts festival in the UK. The work will be installed during the summer Olympics in Weymouth, a seaside town in Dorset, England, where the official sailing competitions will take place.

From the project proposal—

Weymouths explores memory, geography and cultural identity through site-specific books that draw upon the linked histories of Weymouth, Dorset (UK) and Weymouth, Massachusetts (USA). Created for the 2012 b-side Multimedia Arts Festival and installed on-site at festival locations, 12 publications will be released to visitors during the 13-day festival. Among the goals for Weymouths is to create moments for rich, page-by-page engagement in the environment for the ambulatory visitor—the printed book as a participatory art project.

The 12 volumes will be produced and presented as reliquaries of collective memory—bound containers holding text, color and imagery. Historical records, lists, archival imagery, on-site photography, tweets, interviews, maps, street names, Google Street View, Wikipedia and other raw source material will be assembled into open, thought-provoking narratives—real and imagined.

Beginning with the 104 citizens of Weymouth, Dorset (UK) who crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1635 to found Weymouth, Massachusetts (USA), the 12 books will be a celebration of temporal connections, disconnects and other trans-geographic structures that continue to hover between the twin towns, as well as a chance to “re-see” cultural identity in real-time.

Each volume will be produced using a print-on-demand Espresso Book Machine (EBM). Limited editions of 20 (a total of 240 books) will be installed at various festival locations. Each day during the festival a new volume will be revealed and installed, beginning with Vol. #1 on July 30 and ending with Vol. #12 on August 10, 2012. The books will be free to anyone exploring Weymouth during the 13-day period; they will slowly disappear from the installation sites as they are discovered and enjoyed by their new owners. Weymouths will encourage a slow, alternative presentation of time and space for visitors as they explore.

Weymouths is part of an exploration that began with Venetian Suite and continued last year with Memory Palace and 273 Relics for John Cage. Each draws together ideas about memory, place and the image within the contained book form.

Someone recently described Memory Palace as a spectral archive, which I define as traces and histories, memories of or like a ghost, collected and contained. This articulation of my book works appeals to me. The spectral archive favors the forgotten and conjures a shapeless narrative, more liquid than linear. A book of associations, loaded with suggestion and unspecified meaning; a dream tool. A rumination machine. The spectral archive is crafted with specificity, but it’s experienced on the user’s own terms, creatively and without restriction.

I want to produce this work publicly, like I did in Rome. As I generate stuff, even fragments of ideas, I’ll post them here.

Just approved the final 16 x 24 archival pigment prints on rag paper at Laumont. These are for the show at Colorado Photographic Arts Center (January 10 through February 13) in Denver, CO.

I’m addicted to Khoi Vinh‘s new social collage-making app, Mixel. This is one of a small handful of apps that gives my iPad its reason for being — always on and I don’t even have to think about using it. Something that just lets me use my finger to cut up images and push pixels around feels so natural, but it’s also unlike any creative tool I’ve ever used. It’s intuitive and easy and dream-like; they’re ripe for interpretation.

And the sharing/social/remixing aspect of Mixel just takes it to a whole other place.

I’ve made dozens of collages with Mixel and I love a lot of them. And I’m curious about what would happen if these digital works were to make the jump into the print world.

Soon I’ll find out; a few weeks ago I submitted a few collages to a juried photography exhibit at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, which was calling for digital works made with mobile devices. The jurors were Brian Clamp of ClampArt in NYC and Chuck Mobley of San Francisco Camerawork and they selected the two car images.

So next week I’m going to review proofs at small (4″ x 6″) and larger (16″ x 24″) sizes and make a decision, get them framed and send them to Denver and maybe fly out for the opening on January 13. The show will be up until February 11.

My first experience with the Espresso Book Machine.

There’s a kind of renaissance going on with the printed page right now, perhaps to counter our relatively new fascination with digital publishing. Last month’s NY Art Book Fair was evidence enough that there’s never been a better time for the self- or small independent publisher of paper-based works. A remarkably low barrier-to-entry and easy access to print-on-demand services like Blurb and BookMobile and Create Space are satisfying a growing artists’ book movement and fueling entirely new ventures, like print-on-demand publishing and artists’ book coops and self-publishing book fairs.

In the middle of this space has emerged something altogether different. It’s got one foot in the Google/Gutenberg epub swamp and another in the bookstore. It’s an inelegant, one-ton pile of plexiglas and hardware with a footprint a bit larger than a bathtub. The Espresso Book Machine doesn’t make coffee — it eats PDFs and spits out professional-grade paperback books. In a few minutes. For a few dollars.

As remarkable as it is, it’s additive technology cobbled together from component parts. It’s a mash-up machine, really not much more than a few Xerox printers, a glue-gun and some X-acto blades connected to the internet. The Frankenstein of printers. Which means that the EBM is not breakthrough technology, but more like an iterative step in the 600-year development of the printer, with the potential to support other, more innovative ideas (a print-on-demand library, for example).

That said, it’s a fantastic thing.

As soon as I heard that NYC had its first (and so far only) EBM at the McNally Jackson bookstore on Prince Street, I started thinking about a test project. It’s got some interesting restrictions — printing is 1-color black-only for the text pages, full-color cover, any size from 4″ x 4″ up to 8.5″ x 11″, and a minimum of 40 pages (max of 800).

So I decided to use it as the basis for a proposal I was writing for an arts festival in the UK — 12 volumes that would be “Espresso’d” and installed at different locations during the 2-week event, to coincide with the 2012 Summer Olympics. Since it was so easy, why not design and print Volume #1 and photograph it for the proposal? And that’s exactly what I did — it’s a 224-page, 1-color information graphic. I’ll post more about the project later, after I hear back from the festival producers.

The EBM at McNally Jackson is somewhere between “print-on-demand” and “see-you-next-week.” There’s a long queue for the service and it was suggested I check back in a few days to see when the book would be ready. Later, I was told there were no guarantees and I could pay a $25 fee to move to the front of the line (on top of an already-confusing set-up fee structure that includes a free proof; the printed book itself was about $12). I did, and got it the next day. I guess it’s a good thing that there’s great enough demand to keep it in business, but I’m willing to bet NYC could use a few more of these machines.

The bottom line — the printing is awesome. Super rich blacks and good tonal range on the photos (which were taken from Google Street View and already washed out). The text stock is a generic 60 lb. white or cream (I chose white), and a choice of dull uncoated or satin coated bright white 100 lb. cover.

The perfect binding is eerily perfect.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is that all of the world’s 50 Espresso Book Machines are networked, so the PDF I feed it on Prince Street can be printed again, on-demand, in London or anywhere else. My latest dream — to lease one of these things, stick it in an empty storefront, and open an instant bookstore with an entirely digital inventory.