Uncategorized

Page Not Found and the Master Experimental Publishing (XPUB) at the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy, join forces again with artist Lídia Pereira to publish a Special Issue on how games pervade contemporary culture. To sustain this publishing project, we are happy to invite you to a series of online lectures investigating play, productivity and leisure.

The lecture series will be kicked off with a talk by game developer, artist and educator Paolo Pedercini. Pedercini’s artistic practice examines the relationship between electronic entertainment and ideology. Working under the project name Molleindustria, he produces videogames addressing social issues such as environmentalism, food politics, labor and gender.

Pedercini teaches digital media production and experimental game design at the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. His work is enjoyed by many over the net and has been exhibited in over seventeen countries around the world. He lectured in several universities in Europe and the US and in venues ranging from the oldest squat in Italy to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Pedercini is the director of LIKELIKE, a neo-arcade devoted to independent games and playful art in Pittsburgh, PA.

Under the guidance of Lídia and the XPUB staff, this semester the master students will explore how video games are making us more, not less, productive. Getting Likes and Super Likes, choosing your avatar, unlocking badges and achievements, are but a few examples of the language of games as it is repurposed in data-extractivist software. Life and work are ‘gamified’ through social media, dating apps, and fitness apps designed to increase motivation and productivity. Gamification blurs the lines between play, leisure and labour, to release our collective dopamine for profit. Video games in themselves often perform a reproductive role, presenting capitalism as a system of natural laws, exemplified by in-game predatory monetisation schemes. On the other hand, games provide necessary down time and relaxation, helping people function in a largely dysfunctional economy and society. Yet leisure remains a contested space which is still unequally distributed, between genders, ethnicities and abilities.

The students’ works, gathered in a Special Issue, will be launched at Page Not Found at the end of March.

Starts at 16:00.

Join the online talk here

Page Not Found proudly presents a two-fold commissioned work ‘The-foot-in the-door’ by artist Arthur Cordier. ‘The-foot-in the-door’ comprises an engraved door handle and a mirrored text work in our storefront window.

To reflect on the restricted circulation of beings ‘The-foot-in the-door’ is an idiom engraved as a commercial trick used by door-to-door salespersons, in negotiation as well as in commercial communication on the entrance door handle of Page Not Found. ‘The-foot-in the-door’ comes alongside an elevator-pitch conversation with oneself about consistency, doubts and asking favors – displayed on a shop window to be read from inside. ‘The-foot-in the-door’ is a publication in the form of a door handle.

Arthur Cordier’s (b. 1993, BE, lives and works in The Hague, NL) practice tackles the aesthetics of bureaucracy, entrepreneurship, and efficiency through relational, situational and context-specific works. They often self-reflect upon artistic practice and the entangled economies of art in a production-driven society. In addition to his practice he co-initiates the studio & project space The Balcony, The Hague (NL), and contributes as guest curator to Art au Centre Liège (BE).

‘The-foot-in the-door’ is accessible from the street. The window text will be on view until February 10.

Hooray! Page Not Found turned four!

These past years have seen over a 100(!) events taking place in our space, each one a wonderful exchange about publishing, making, writing, reading. We are truly grateful to all – artists, curators, designers, board members, collaborators, volunteers, and our visitors and audience – who contributed to make our initiative what it is today. We are looking forward in the coming year to many more explorations, reflections and voices, and their sharing with you.

For now, we think this anniversary deserves a unique treat, and the amazing Silvia Martes agrees! She gracefully accepted our commission for an online screening: “Fragments” is an exclusive cut of three of her films. Silvia’s work — mystical, evocative and dark, reflects on the current surreality of our times, yet reminds us of the ever-urgent call to love the world into being. The works featured in this commission are: ‘To Confirm You Are Not a Robot, Place a Check in the Box Next to “I’m Not a Robot”.’ (2021), ‘The Revolutions That Did Not Happen’ (2021), and ‘The Restless Dread of Some(thing) Evil’ (2019).

Silvia Martes, Eindhoven, 1985, completed her BA in Fine Arts at the Audiovisual Department (VAV) at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 2013. In 2019 she started a postdoctoral art residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. In July 2021 Martes had her first solo exhibition at Museum De Pont (Tilburg). In September 2021 she won the Theodora Niemeiijer Prize from the Van Abbe Museum (Eindhoven). In the same year she was shortlisted for the Prix de Rome and exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum.

Throughout the last weeks of December we present a mini-exhibition with publications made by kids during the Page of Possibilities workshops in 2021. 

The Page of Possibilities workshops introduced children (ages 4-12) in a playful manner to the practice of self-publishing. They discovered the colourful and creative world of artist books and learned how to make their own small publication.

Page of Possibilities was inspired by the pedagogics of Célestin Freinet, who started the l’École Moderne in France in 1947. In his modern schools the emphasis was on children-led education: a printing press was placed in the middle of the school and children shared their experiences and thoughts via self-made books and pamphlets. 

The works will be showcased in the window of our bookshop at Boekhorststraat 126 until 7 January 2022. You can pass by to view them from the street whenever you like.

We are happy to invite you to an afternoon launch celebrating the new book ”Koen Taselaar. Rollable Ramblings.”

During the launch Taselaar will also present a special edition commissioned by Page Not Found. Discover this jacquard-woven feline story, wear it as a bookmark, use it as a scarf or wrap it around your whiskers. Our favorite gift idea for this season!

The work of Koen Taselaar is a unique universe in which only he determines the rules. He makes skilful drawings, but also clumsy ceramics and elaborate tapestries. Taselaar’s visual language emerged from the grey area in which text is not only meaning but also form. He expresses this in drawn puns, imaginary record sleeves or large psychedelic paintings.

”Koen Taselaar. Rollable Ramblings” is the first comprehensive publication on the artist’s textile work. The majority of Rollable Ramblings comprises reproductions of his tapestries, and zoom-ins on them. This visual component is complemented with essays shedding light on the works, and on the history of textile art in general, written by art critic Katalin Herzog. The book was made in collaboration with Textiellab, the professional workshop of the TextielMuseum, and published by Jap Sam Books.

In September of 2020 Taselaar presented the solo show ‘Opinionated Aquarium’ at Page Not Found, where some of the tapestries seen in the book were first revealed to the public.

Launch starts at 15:00.

Page Not Found proudly presents the fifth chapter of Open Letters. The project invites The Hague artists to occupy our large storefront window with messages of urgency and vulnerability. 

Artist and designer Matas Buckus shares two selected graphic interpretations of Anna Tsing’s “The Mushroom at the End of the World”. Produced manually with leftover pieces of adhesive vinyl and Dymo labels, the two selected compositions were scanned and vectorized, without excessive refinement, to be displayed at a larger scale. 

The eco-systems of earth are slowly but surely collapsing. As citizens, we have minimal control over the factors which affect the environment the most. Facing that fact, are there mind-sets we could inhabit in order to help balance our relentless human impact on planet earth? 

The use of contemporary technology in graphic design has exponentially grown in the past years, but has this been solely beneficial? Can we admit that anything viewed on our screens is technically not ‘real’, a composition of microscopic pixels, replicating and imitating images and principles of the real world? This seemingly non-existent distance between the human and the machine can be distracting, especially in the design process, simulating perfection that can easily be obsessed over.

This Open Letter was unveiled on 10 December 2021 and will be exhibited until 10 January 2022.

Open Letters are freely accessible from the street at any time.

Page Not Found and the Reading Room are happy to invite you to a two-part online reading session around ‘repair’, with Cristina Cochior, amy pickles and Joana Chicau of Varia.

In this Reading Room session we will consider the modes in which our bodies interact with, are perceived by and operate through, with and against everyday communication technologies. This collective work will be carried out on an Etherpad, an open-source, web-based collaborative editor, allowing authors to simultaneously edit a text document and see all of the participants’ edits in real-time. What intimate relations are bound within our screens and machines? What does our body learn while flowing in these zones?

As a group we will look into practices of “annotating” text. We will make digital annotations as we read, digesting the words while we highlight, underline, write in the margin, look up meanings and take notes, making the text more accessible to the next person who encounters it. By creating new modes of accessing and countering text, reading together becomes a continuous re-reading.

The thoughts central to this reparative reading session are formed by scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. In the essay, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You”, Sedgwick tells us that rearranging what we read can be a form of sustenance. Through sharing our differences in what is nourishing, we hope to recognise the limits of what can be read and what can be repaired.

Varia (NL) is a Rotterdam based initiative focused on working with, on and through everyday technology. At its core the initiative aims to be a social infrastructure from which to collaboratively facilitate critical understandings on the technologies that surround us. The initiative is a membership-based organisation striving to become a space for questions, opinions, modifications, help and action. 

Cristina Cochior is a Rotterdam-based researcher and designer. Her work revolves around situated feminist software, affective archival interfaces, digital infrapunctures, vernacular language processing and digital knowledge organisation and transmission. Together with other members of Varia, she works on collective, non-extractive digital infrastructures.

amy pickles is an artist and loosely formed educator. In her work, she experiments with ways to hold onto, and consider, pervasive colonial infrastructures we are a part of. In our work, redistribution (of knowledge, tools, finances) and collaboration are methodologies to refuse individual ownership.

Joana Chicau is a graphic designer, coder, researcher — with a background in dance — currently based in London. In her practice she interweaves web programming languages and environments with choreography. She has been actively participating and organizing events with performances involving multi-location collaborative coding, algorithmic improvisation, open discussions on gender equality and activism.

This online session takes place in two parts: the first part from 14:30-16:30 and the second part from 17:00-19:00. Participants can choose to attend one or both parts of the session.

While a small introduction will be held over Zoom, the session itself does not take place through video-call but through the interactive Etherpad document. 

Texts for this session will be provided in the moment and there is no need for reading in advance.

Please confirm your attendance for one or both parts of the session by sending an email to register@page-not-found.nl.

Page Not Found is excited to welcome you to the first of our Typographic Nights, curated by Trang Ha and Paulina Trzeciak.

Following new covid-measures, this Typographic Night has been rescheduled to take place in the afternoon of Saturday 4 December at 15:00!

“Typographic Nights” are a space for graphic designers and the public to gather around understandings and misunderstandings of the graphic design process. Audience members are asked to bring texts which they would like to see transformed into visual works. These could be either small pieces of their own writing, borrowed fragments, or hand-picked inspirational quotes. The invited designers and typographers will materialise these texts into beautiful printed matter on the spot, demonstrating their skills and knowledge. Works will be printed the same night, ready to take home. Together we will reveal the curiosity, fun, improvisation and care that are part of graphic design, from choosing a typeface to applying analog materials, and much more!

This Typographic Night features live design performances by Carmen Dusmet Carrasco, Marthe Prins & WRS_THG.

Trang Ha is a multidisciplinary designer/artist based in The Hague (NL). She uses the language of design to observe and address cultural complexities presented in modern society. Her frequent subjects are food, community, alternative knowledge, storytelling and ecology. In her practice, Trang underlines the importance of collaboration, an environment in which different thoughts can mingle and “contaminate” each other to achieve a more layered and inclusive outcome. Besides her personal works, Trang is also taking commissions in the field of creative coding and catering. She finished her BA Graphic Design at the Royal Academy of Art The Hague (KABK) in 2020.

Paulina Trzeciak is a visual artist and designer with a wide range of artistic practices. Paulina is currently based in The Hague (NL), where she is finishing her BA Graphic Design at the Royal Academy of Art The Hague (KABK). Paulina’s practice is highly influenced by her academic background, as seen in her frequent incorporation of social theories and political perspectives. In the field of design, her main interests are conceptual design, digital culture and curation. Besides these interests, she is equally fascinated by the use of fictional elements in design. She believes in its power to explore possible futures by creating speculative and alternative scenarios, shaping the complexity of the social-political landscape.

Carmen Dusmet is a video artist and graphic designer based in The Hague (NL). Her practice involves both the pursuit of research-based works and commissioned projects. When working with clients she mainly makes books (sometimes websites), with special care for typography and storytelling. Her artistic practice materialises through the moving-image, text and sound. Beginning from personal experiences, she focuses on how socioeconomic structures affect individual and collective identities. She understands her work as a contemplating lens of an uncertain future; a tool to speculate and reflect on the unpredictability of survival, growing up, ageing, change and hope. She is interested in exploring conditions for image consumption through formats and mediums. Currently, she is co-running Home Cinema, an online temporary video broadcast that responds to the question: what can we see together now that we cannot see each other?

WRS_THG is the creation of The Hague-based print-Lover, neon Enthusiast, and paper fetishist, Anna. The label is a mixture of the two cities that she sees as home; Warsaw and The Hague. For years, Anna has been addicted to screen printing and colour research. She graduated with two graphic design diplomas; the first from Fine Art Academy in Łódź, Poland (ASP – Akademia Sztuk Pięknych), and the second from The Royal Academy of Art in the Hague (KABK – Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten), The Netherlands.

Marthe Prins is an artist, researcher and activist based in Amsterdam. They study the visual languages that shape sites of knowledge production, seeking to steer the course of its validation away from oppressive ‘enlightened’ patriarchal practices. Materialised in exhibition spaces, through writing and by performing bodies home and abroad — their recent works plea for gossip as political practice, target the visual rhetorics of privatised border security, stage a linguistic PA singing songs to ‘semio-capital’, quantify individualised spiritual labour and, point towards ‘indexing diagrams’ as key figures in the rise of a sophio-fascism. Prins teaches artistic research and performance at eminent academies both in and outside the Netherlands and works as researcher bridging the arts and academia.

Event starts at 15:00. Entrance is free.

If you have written materials (quick notes, midnight ideas, observations, poems, lyrics, etc!) which you’d like to see designed and printed, please bring them along.

Please note: This is a seated event. We kindly ask you to show a valid proof of vaccination, recovery or negative test result at the entrance. Our shop will be open for book browsing.

Page Not Found welcomes you to the third event in the Solitary Solidarity cycle, curated by activist and writer Hamja Ahsan. We present a special screening of the documentary film ‘‘Herman’s House’’, directed by Angad Bhalla and based on Jackie Sumell’s project “The House That Herman Built.”

‘‘What kind of house does a man who has been imprisoned in a six-foot-by-nine-foot cell for over 30 years dream of?’’ This film captures the remarkable creative journey and friendship of Herman Wallace, part of the ‘Angola 3’ chapter of the Black Panther Party who spent over four decades in solitary confinement, and artist and abolitionist Jackie Sumell. 

Jackie Sumell is an American multidisciplinary artist and activist whose work interrogates the abuses of the American criminal justice system. She is best known for her collaborative project with the late Herman Wallace entitled “The House That Herman Built.”

The screening will be accompanied with a display of publications by artist Marc Fischer of Public Collectors, including ‘Quaranzine’, a one-page zine published as a daily response to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Marc Fischer is the administrator of Public Collectors, an initiative he formed in 2007. Public Collectors aims to encourage greater access and scholarship for marginal cultural materials, particularly those that museums ignore. 

Marc Fischer’s publications will be on display between 13:00-18:00. The screening of ‘‘Herman’s House’’ takes place at 15:00. 

The cycle Solitary Solidarity centers on strategies of surviving isolation through publishing practices. This program in three acts centers on a consideration of solitary confinement through the prison system, psychiatric care and quarantine, and inquires how we can learn from each other while placed under different restraints.

This event is part of Hoogtij #67.

Please note: we kindly ask you to show a valid proof of vaccination, recovery or negative test result for the entrance to this event. For further information, please visit this website. A facial mask is required to enter the bookstore, however a proof of vaccination is not mandatory.