INDEX—Issue #2
Free
INDEX—Issue #2 is a printed journal made through a continual remix from a shared pool of writing, photography, and drawings drawn from and added to the public domain.
INDEX started during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in 2020 as a collaboration across three states and two time zones—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 three 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.
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
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. We address the concept of freedom as a brand—for those with immigrant backgrounds and for those living and working within it.
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: †.
INDEX—Issue #2
Concept, Design, Editing: Andrew Chee, Virgilio Santos
Research, Writing: Andrew Chee
Contributors, Writing: Stella Santos
Release: June 2022
Publishing: Rote Press
Format: 210 × 297 mm
Volume: 676 pages
Edition: Limited edition of 250 copies
Language: English
Printing: Black & white
Paper: 60# uncoated white, matte cover
Binding: Paperback Copyright:
Printed in USA CC-BY-SA INDEX, New York, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-952434-09-9
Price: $35.–
BUY
