Introduction to 'Make Me A Copy' publication by Tomorrow Book Studio
(Eva Moulaert and Jens Schildt)
During this project we often felt that there was already too much of many things: of information, images, ideas, concepts. All of them endlessly reproduced, copied, distributed. And yet we decided to make another book, a publication, a magazine. The name is not very important. The problem we want to raise in it is more important: what to do when there is enough already and everything seems possible? One approach, we suggest with this publication, is not to simply produce new images or texts, but to also consider reproducing existing material and to re-use and reconsider that material in ways that allow us to question the structures, implications and possibilities of that material. The line that is followed in this publication is a line between repetition, reproduction, and the space that is opened up between the original and its copy.
There are not many books or magazines of which only one copy is printed. And if there were, there is a great chance that we would never see it. For things to become available, there needs to be more than one copy. That is the point, of course, of publishing. Things are made in numbers, small or large, they are reproduced. But the idea of a publication with a single copy is interesting. Because what it shows is that the single copy book would posses something, a unique value or aura, that is lost in its serial reproduction. Reproducing or doubling things makes them available and lets us take notice of them but never without paying the price of a loss, something that necessarily disappears in its multiplication.
We want to work with these aspects of publishing: collecting material, bringing it together, designing, copying and distributing. And we want to find ways of doing this that are better suited to use the content, rhythm, and presentation moments of this project.
At this state we think the most important thing is to preserve the loose structure of the project where the correspondence and points of contact between various contributions, which are themselves concentrated, can become visible. That is to say: not trying to filter everything through a reductive curator-concept, whatever the anxieties about editorial coherence etc. This still requires some co-operation as there isn't going to be any overall institutional organisation or curator-manager. Our recent conversations brought up some suggestions which seemed to be more open and playful and, importantly, would be more accommodating of different people's modes and rhythms of working.
The whole idea of copying brings us back to one of our initial suggestions about printing 'on the spot' and 'on demand' using rented copy machines and the theme 'Make Me A Copy' together. It shifts the copy-theme to the-method-of production and defers the editorial to the last possible moment. The production becomes part of the content.
The new plan is that we set up a workshop in the entrance hall of the LACE gallery space, facing Hollywood Boulevard with big shopping windows, and for the first two weeks of the exhibition we make, every day a new version of the catalogue, edited all the time differently with the given material from the 'Make Me A Copy' wikipage. We will make one 'master copy' of every version for people to copy themselves 'on demand' and 'on the spot', using the copy machines in the gallery space workshop. This is, as we see it, a playful way of treating the loose structure of the project and we will end up with ten or more versions of proposals for a catalogue, rather then a finished product, all in different editions depending on the demand. In the extreme, the set-up would become a kind of eat-as-much-as-you-like editorial buffet, in which every copy of the publication would be different. It's then a question of method, not of making editorial/curatorial judgements. The temporary 'just-in-time, 'on-the-spot and 'on-demand' workshop will influence the production as well as the editing.