A—C

Print publication series based on continual remix from an open-source, controlled library of writing, art, and design. Issue #2 explores what we observe as enabling, inhibiting, using, and defining the idea of ‘free’ and related qualities of living today.

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Rote Press

INDEX ↴
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INDEX

INDEX—2 'FREE' ↴
210 x 297 mm, 676 p
Black & White
Paperback
English
ISBN 978-1-952434-09-9
Design & Editing: Andrew Chee, Virgilio Santos
Contributors, Writing: Stella Santos
Publishing: Rote Press

June 2022
$35 USD

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INDEX—2 'Free'

Summary ↴
INDEX is a print publication made by a continual remix from a shared repository of writing, photography, and drawings— our own and from the public domain.

INDEX was founded during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in 2020 as a collaboration across 3 states and 2 time zones, as a way for friends to share visual journals of their respective experiences during lockdown. The design process evolved to encourage chance operations, each designer free to additively modify, deconstruct, and reuse elements from each other’s work. After 3 consecutive rounds of edits, the resulting collective work is published online and via print-on-demand, inviting further chance operations in the printing process, bookbinding, and shipping.

The name INDEX is inspired by the manicule. The manicule ☞ is a shared symbol between the reader, printer and publisher that indicates and points at notable parts of the text. Usually seen in the form of a pointing hand in the margins of the text, the manicule (from the Latin maniculum or “little hand”) or ‘mutton fist’ has been used since at least 1535, but lost favor during the advent of the automated printing which preferred industry accepted footnoting devices such as the * and the dagger: †.

The first issue ‘Flat’ explored what we observed as the flattening, flatness, and related qualities of life in an emerging new normal.

Issue 2 ‘Free’ explores what we observe as enabling, inhibiting, using, and defining the idea of ‘free’ and related qualities of living today.

In each issue, we expand upon a common set of visual techniques to communicate and explore how much is designed, including history and place. And how we are now together unpacking the sedimentary layers, excavating bias, then dismantling, mocking, remixing, recasting, reclaiming. The International Style as a carrier wave to redeliver historical oppression as a mirror. Mangling modernism. Free improvisation and cut-up. Détournement and dérive. Experimental publishing. Design as therapy. Design practice as acts of reclamation.

“Those with the power of definition can, in a sense, create ‘place’ by arbitrarily regionalizing the external world.”
—Kay J. Anderson

Notes ↴
The 2nd issue of this collab with my good friend Virgilio Santos, is out now. This one gets personal as we each address the idea of freedom as a brand— for those with immigrant backgrounds, and also for those living and working within it.

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Contact ↴
@andrewchee
[email protected]
1 917 375 2524

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Updated ↴
2024 Apr 24 07:51:18 UTC, CC BY-SA International, Andrew Chee.