A Hundred Years of
The Future of the Book

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.

Janneke Adema
Claudia de la Torre
Michael Hagner
Nicolas Helm-Grovas
Jae Kyung Kim
Gill Partington
Michalis Pichler
Niki Rhyner
Rachel Robinson
Verónica Stedile Luna
Madeline Zehnder

Rachel Robinson
and Verónica Stedile Luna

An ICI Berlin event in cooperation with University of Galway

Artworks and photographs by Leticia Barbeito