This year, for the first time, we are introducing a staggered payment system. This means if you are a EARLY BIRD/STUDENT or GROUP you can pay 50% of your ticket price at the purchase point and the remaining 50% will be taken from your card on the 31st January. We hope this helps a little bit in making sure you can all join us next March!
Deposit Ticket Option may be purchased online here.
The National Print Museum collects, documents, preserves, exhibits, interprets and makes accessible the material evidence of printing craft and fosters associated skills of the craft in Ireland.
We took a trip there with our class, where we got to see the machines used for printing before digital printing. It was really fascinating to see the machines, some of them were really huge compared to their modern equivalent, like the hole punch machine, which is something which would now fit in our pockets!
I thought the woodblock print was really nice, it creates a really nice degraded effect. I think this type of printing has its own unique aesthetic that can't be recreated with digital effects, and while digital design is way more prolific, there'll always be a place for the printing press.
And here's some similar stuff I found in other places:
In Lower Manhattan's historic South Street Seaport district, Master Printer Robert Warner ingeniously prints with the famous 1901 clamshell press, The Golding Jobber.
"Linotype: The Film" is a documentary about Ottmar Mergenthaler's amazing Linotype typecasting machine and the people who own and love these machines today.
Ludlow type fonts represent a disappearing industrial heritage in America, with most fonts ending up in scrapyards & machines destroyed. Not many people know how to run and maintain the machines properly but we are dedicated to keeping our historical equipment functioning & publicly accessible for teaching.
(You can see a Ludlow Type Caster in the National Print Museum)
The abandoned subway platform of the Underbelly Project (courtesy NY Times)
Right now, somewhere underneath Manhattan in an abandoned subway station, is a hidden art project consisting of over a hundred murals painted by graffiti artists on dusty, moldy, concrete walls. PAC and Workhorse, two prolific NY vandals, discovered the hidden tunnel a few years back and decided to invite other graffiti adventurers to paint. And they painted, in the indigo dark, near the crack of dawn, all while avoiding the authorities. The discardedtunnel, an unfinished space abandoned nearly 100 years ago, provided a sphere of neutrality, removed from the now fairly marketed and predictable culture of street art on the city’s visible surface.
I was surprised, like many, to learn about the project’s existence from a NY Times articlewritten by Jasper Rees on Underbelly’s unlikely origins. But be forewarned fellow explorer of the unearthly nether-regions beneath the crust of everyday humanity! Since the article was published, at least a couple urban explorers have purportedly been arrested in New York’s subway tunnels, searching for the mysterious, rhizomatic mural rooms. Why, then, did PAC and Workhorse want to let us know about the project? What’s the point of producing a huge gallery of underground (this time indeed really subterranean) street art, removed from the public eye, and then let the public know that it exists somewhere just beyond its grasp? Why would they even create an homepage for it? The story seems a bit maddening, if not, if you would allow me the indulgence, the least bit cruel.
The Underbelly Project’s gesture is nothing new. Graffiti writers have always expressed a somewhat contradictory relationship towards audience. On the one hand, writers make themselves known to the public through the painting of a pseudonym on the wall. A stylized signature. On the other hand, the only audience who recognizes the name as referring to an actual person is the small community of writers who participate in the art practice. No one else knows who they are, and most don’t care.
The first famous — that is, newspaper famous — graffiti artist was Taki 183. The NY Times also published an article on him, “Taki 183 Spawns Pen Pals,” but still, most of everyone didn’t know who he was even after reading the article. They had a name, a hint, a temptation, perhaps a myth.
The tension between becoming known and unknown through graffiti is expressed quite clearly in a scene from the now classic hip-hop documentary Style Wars where a 17-year-old Skeme argues with his mother over the importance of his nom de plume going all-city. After all, aren’t you more unknown, when more people raise the question: Who is this person?
Graffiti writers thus become pseudonymous by virtue of their art of signature. They are at home in pure state of purgatory, made at once present to a public audience and yet uncannily absent. The graffiti signature is marked, for those not initiated into the small graffiti community, by a spectral absence, a sense of lost presence. It’s not the death of the author, but rather the invisibility of the author, and thus the imaginary fabrication of the signature’s distanced origins, which underpins the significance — the utterly ghostly nature — of graffiti authorship.
I always like to see street art happening in Dublin getting attention on an international scale.
"This latest piece, "The Death of Death" was put up in Dublin in early September (w/Anewspace/Dublin Contemporary) during Suicide Awareness Week. These days we're continuing to explore the idea of the urban theater--the street as a stage. Also doing a lot of workshops, the most recent in Tashkent, teaching people this idea of using their body to make self-replicas to put out into public space."... Mark Jenkins
New online showcase of Oslo based design studioHeydays. Their work is amazing, but I also really love the amount of thought they put into presenting it.
Amnesty International Ads:- How visually effective are these images! Do you get the message? Powerful stuff!
A rare phenomenon which appeared on a frozen lake in Canada has been captured by landscape photographer Emmanuel Coupe. Coupe explained that seeing a frozen lake this spectacular is rare as they are usually covered in a thick blanket of snow. In this area, however, there is little precipitation which allowed for stunning views of the frozen surface and beneath.
