Search, compile, publish (2013)

This essay has had a long life. I initially wrote it as a talk that I presented at The Book Affair in Venice, Italy in May 2013, held on the occasion of the 55th Venice Art Biennale. At that event, which took place outside in the courtyard of the Biblioteca di Castello in San Lorenzo, I displayed examples of artists’ publications that I had collected for Library of the Printed Web, and described the kinds of methodologies that may have gone into creating them. A few months later, I published the text as a newsprint broadsheet and distributed an edition of 500 copies at Printed Matter’s 2013 NY Art Book Fair by leaving them in a pile at the entrance to MoMA PS1; they disappeared within hours.

In June 2016, I updated the essay and delivered it as a talk at the Miss Read art book fair in Berlin, organized by Michalis Pichler. Pichler later included the essay in the first (beta) edition of his book Publishing Manifestos. When a new edition was published by MIT Press in March 2019, my essay was again included, along with texts by Gertrude Stein, Tauba Auerbach, Seth Price, Lawrence Weiner, Ulises Carrión, and many others.

“I collect artists’ books, zines and other work around a simple curatorial idea: web culture articulated as printed artifact. I began the collection, now called Library of the Printed Web, because I see evidence of a strong web-to-print practice among many artists working with the internet today, myself included. All of the artists—more than 30 so far, and growing—work with data found on the web, but the end result is the tactile, analog experience of printed matter.

Looking through the works, you see artists sifting through enormous accumulations of images and texts. They do it in various ways—hunting, grabbing, compiling, publishing. They enact a kind of performance with the data, between the web and the printed page, negotiating vast piles of existing material. Almost all of the artists here use the search engine, in one form or another, for navigation and discovery. ”

Read “Search, compile, publish’ [original Venice version] →

Read “Search, compile, publish’ [NY Art Book Fair broadsheet PDF] →

Read “Search, compile, publish’ [2016 Miss Read update] →