I like it. What is it?
Letterpress poster by Anthony Burrill.
As mentioned in the last post, I've been pretty productive working through the first publications I want to release via Matter vs. Spirit. I've also been doing a lot of thinking about the project overall and its relevance in the current moment (both personally and more broadly). I've been writing fragmented notes across multiple journals and in my Notes app, but when people ask me what I'm working on, I still have a pretty hard time articulating it.
I know as I work through and reflect on the individual publication processes and documentation, things will become clearer, and I want to just jump into this, but it seems a bit premature (or even irresponsible) to do that work before at least taking a stab at the overall what and why of what I'm doing. I'll soon have to formalize all my thoughts into a coherent funding proposal, which is stressing me out a bit, so I feel it's important to at least get some words down here, as sketchy as they might be.
So what (the hell) is it...?
Matter vs. Spirit is a research-creation project in the field of design studies investigating publishing as a material practice in relationship with contemporary counter-cultural production and social movement studies.
Through the project, I will be regularly developing, designing, and distributing a series of small-run publications via a micro-press established in the VC (Visual Communication) Lab at Concordia University. Each publication tacitly asks, embodies, and/or enacts specific research questions, whereas the development of the press itself, entitled Matter vs. Spirit Press, will be the primary focus and design object/subject of the research-creation. This chicken and egg approach will allow theoretical questions to be tested rather quickly and iteratively in practice while also resulting in a functioning pedagogical, research dissemination, and community resource within the university.
The project will pose definitional questions of what a press or publisher is, materially, gesturally, and relationally, and subsequently work through its situated role and emergent possibilities within movements for social justice and social change. Through this research I seek to create a framework for an anarchist analysis of print culture, i.e. how power flows through print, how this power can be shared through collaboration, mutual aid, and solidarity, how print circulation might contribute to greater collective and individual autonomy, and how it might intervene upon or subvert existing discursive regimes. This analysis also aims to make practically explicit the micropolitical material decisions and dimensions of design and publishing practice, as part of a radical design critique of capitalist cultural production and platforms and as generative strategies against recuperation. Acting against design solutionism, the research-creation will be productive of objects and questions, useful for further research and practice.
That's it for now. Will tackle some of the why and how stuff a bit later. Hope it makes some sense... Thanks for reading!