What if I told you there once was a small, short-lived artistic movement at the intersection of: on the one hand, Fluxus, Ulises Carrión, Ed Ruscha, Mail Art; and, on the other, net.art, post-digital, post-internet, creative coding, fake news, AI slop?

More a scene than a movement, artistic Print on Demand was exactly that. And now there is finally a book that delves into it. To be fair, it's not just a book, but the definitive work on the subject, serving at once as a catalogue, a collection of essays and a techno-historical survey of the phenomenon.

But for me, there is much more to it, since the Print on Demand scene acted as my design-artistic apprenticeship. So many memories and friendships are linked to these cheap paperbacks! I think, first and foremost, of Sebastian Schmieg, w/ whom I shared various explorations of the medium, and then Thomas Walskaar, Clara Balaguer, Florian Cramer (@fcr), Domenico Quaranta…

Impossible to name them all. Or rather, it is. In fact, this is exactly what Annette Gilbert (@abandreas bülhoff) & Andreas Bülhoff did, and I'm deeply grateful for their monumental work. As I've already said, this book masterfully preserves a little piece of art history, one that happens to intersect w/ my personal history. Looking at its pages, I see a Venn diagram of nostalgia and joy.

https://www.spectorbooks.com/book/library-of-artistic-print-on-demand