Hello, Paul.
Yeah.
How are you?
I'm doing really well.
Cool.
Can you start by introducing yourself?
Sure.
My name is Paul Sulelis.
I run a project called Library of the Printed Web, and I published through that.
And it's also a physical archive, a collection of artist's books and zines.
I think I have over 200 works.
Yeah, that's the project I run, Library of the Printed Web,
but I'm also myself, an artist, a graphic designer, and I teach graphic design.
Okay.
And when did you start in making the Library of the Printed Web?
It's been pretty recent, which is hard to believe because a lot has happened.
It started in 2013 because I was making some work that had to do with the Internet,
with the network, but in the printed page.
And I had just joined ABC, Artist Books Cooperative,
and a lot of the artists in there were also doing this kind of work,
where they were working with the network, the Internet, the web, but for the printed page.
And I was really interested in this translation from one platform,
from one state or medium to the other.
So I started just gathering this work together.
I was asked to show my work at a conference,
and I decided to actually show the work of other artists as well that were doing this kind of work.
And I gathered, next thing I knew, I had like 50 things, and most of them were friends.
And I said, oh, I should call this something.
So I said, let me just call it a library, Library of the Printed Web.
And the reaction was so good, and the collection itself was so interesting,
so much more interesting than just my own work by itself.
So I decided this has a life.
Let me keep adding to it. Let me keep this alive.
I made a tumbler for it.
And yeah, so that was just three years ago.
But a lot has happened.
I've started publishing through the project.
I've been teaching around it, giving lectures, giving talks, workshops.
It's been really great.
Can you tell us about the archive? Where is it?
What do you have in the archive?
Well, the archive is a little spread out right now.
A little bit is at school.
I teach at RISD, and some of it is at home.
When I started it, I actually had somebody build a beautiful wooden case, a crate.
It really looked like a crate, but it had wheels and a door.
I put everything inside, and it was jammed.
So now it's too big for this crate.
But that first conference that I showed it at, it was at the CUNY Graduate Center,
so I was pushing this thing up to that avenue with all the collection inside.
Anyway, I don't use that anymore.
It's a little spread out.
Yeah.
And what are they?
Great things.
Yeah, so artists like Yokam Schmidt, Mishka Henner,
Stephanie Sajuko, Angela Janusa, there are so many.
And these are artists who have decided to make that translation from the web page
or the screen into the printed page.
And a lot of it is print on demand.
And I think what's interesting about these works is you think,
okay, I see the browser on the page.
This came from the web in some way.
How is my experience of this material different?
Is it slower?
I'm touching it.
I'm feeling it.
It's together here in a book.
I can save it.
I can hold it.
Yeah, I think all of that is kind of obvious, kind of in an interesting way.
But it's also doing something else.
The internet is changing so much.
Things are disappearing.
And we know that conservation on the internet is a really big problem,
especially for artists.
So when you print this stuff out, you're kind of pausing it in a way.
You're putting a hole and saying, okay, this right here is an artifact.
So I like this idea of the artifact and the archive,
which means we have to take care of these materials.
I don't do such a good job of that.
So I've just started thinking about how to take the whole collection
and put it in an institution, maybe.
Is it because it's over?
No, I wanted to continue to...
I wanted to continue and I want to keep adding to it,
but I haven't announced it yet,
but I've had an offer from a major institution to say,
let's take this whole thing and put it here.
We'll take care of it.
This is really exciting to me,
because that means the project has the potential to be larger than me
and some books in the corner of my apartment.
So I show the collection a lot,
but I have to stuff it in a suitcase and carry it around the world.
And that's just... I can't sustain that.
Can you tell us a bit more about the publications?
Some of them are print and demand,
some of them are actual editions.
Yeah, some of them are unique one-off objects.
I have this one incredible thing.
It's just called Mona Lisa's.
And it's by...
He was a student at the time, Fraser Clark in Scotland.
And it's this handmade, hand-bound, beautifully bound book object
in a slip case of hundreds of Mona Lisa's from a Google image search.
But they're on the page like this, all of them, hundreds of them.
And the way he's put them on the page,
they face out and create a sort of generic Mona Lisa on the outside.
So that's a unique object.
I can't get that again.
I think he only made a couple of them.
So that's sort of on one extreme.
On the other, or maybe there are three sort of types of publications.
There's that, the unique object.
Then there are things that are being published,
like by Aperture or Jean Bois editions.
Established well-known publishers who are interested in this kind of work,
who are publishing the work of someone like Kenneth Goldsmith
or Doug Rickard, John Raffmann.
But then the third part is what I'm really interested in,
which are artists who have decided to take this on themselves
and publish and print, frequently print on demand
and take control of this whole process of making, designing, distribution.
I would say maybe 80% of the collection is that kind of work.
And the one that you publish as the library of the printed web
belong in this last category.
So I and others talk about this as publishing as artistic practice.
So it's somebody who has their publishing as a kind of practice,
usually just one person or a very small team.
And the printed web is my artist's publication
where I take some of these artists and ask them to contribute.
And so I think of each edition, each issue is kind of like a group show,
like a little exhibition.
And there are also solo shows.
Yes, some of them.
Some of the zines, yes, are solo shows.
So I have the printed web and I have four issues.
And it changes each time, always print on demand.
And then I have printed web editions where I ask one artist
to take 72 pages and fill it with one work.
And I use the cheapest, absolutely most poorly printed,
zine format, print on demand format that I can find.
They are super cheap to print.
I sell them cheaply.
So this is important to me.
It makes the work accessible.
It can circulate easily.
And it also somehow feels more digital that way.
I mean, I consider the whole project to be a kind of digital publishing.
And so how do you link or do you create links between this and your teaching job
and your design experience?
Yeah, that's pretty new for me,
because I was graphic designer with my own practice for 15 years.
I had never taught.
I didn't have an artist practice.
I had never published.
So it's only in the last five years that these things have started to develop
in my practice and how to balance them has been the trick.
I'm still working on that.
But I think of my own practice as having these four parts, teaching,
client work, I still do, writing and research.
I'm a writer and a curator for Rhizome, a contributing editor,
and my own publishing projects.
So these four things.
And so you asked, how do you make the link?
Sometimes it's explicit.
Sometimes I'm teaching experimental publishing studio at RISD.
And I'm talking with my students about something.
I'm showing them the work.
They're making some kind of variation on that work.
It's informing our understanding of what that is.
And then it goes right back into how I write about it or what I'm researching.
And then it feeds back in.
This kind of loop I really love.
This is why I'm teaching.
And so why is it important to print internet?
Why?
Yeah, is it because it's always changing or the marks of what happened on internet?
Well, it's interesting.
I've only noticed recently that I said, you know, the collection's only three years old.
At the time when I was starting, there was nothing older than 2010.
You know, so the whole, everything is really recent.
But those things made even just five or six years ago are already starting to feel dated to me.
Both in the way the publication is feeling sort of it's starting to feel handled.
But also the material itself, you know, the way our devices and our operating systems are updating constantly.
We have this kind of keen awareness of what's current that's accelerating.
It's changing.
It's getting much faster.
So just to show you what Twitter looked like in 2010 or what a webpage might have looked like and how we chose to represent it,
you would be surprised how quickly we can start dating these things.
So anyway, is it a kind of nostalgia?
No, I don't think it's that.
I think it's more like, it's more about trying to understand culture.
You know, this is what artists are doing right now.
This is what we're doing.
And also the publication of The Printed Web is internet very much for you about obsession, about compulsion, visual compulsion, because a lot of the works that you published are very obsessive and are about image consumption.
Like the last one you published with porn, for example.
Is that for you what internet is about?
I think it can be.
Yeah, I think that's a really nice point to make that there is a kind of, there's a way that we're experiencing the internet that sometimes feels addictive or compulsive.
I mean, I don't think I'm alone in saying this is sort of a common feeling that's talked about, that's experienced.
So this kind of feeling of addiction, like I need this and I need more of it and I can't stop.
I think it's leading people, especially artists to collect, you know, to sort of accumulate, to create these kinds of mass, these accumulations of material.
So a while back I wrote about grabbers, scrapers, hunters, performers, people who were sort of just grabbing this stuff, artists who were, and it's not just artists.
People are doing this when they have their YouTube channels or their Tumblr collections or Pinterest.
So I think this is significant, you know, documenting this aspect of culture right now, like sort of taking a slice through it and saying,
here's how we're archiving not just culture and everything around us, but what we're producing, you know, our own selves, our own presence on social media, our identities.
So the very last issue I did was co-published with ICP, International Center of Photography, with Charlotte Cotton, and the name of that show was Public Private Secret.
And it was specifically about artists who are somehow working with this idea of personal identity in relationship to the network.
And a lot of that work was, yeah, I would characterize it as compulsive.
And the printed web is also very visual. It's a lot about the image.
And there are a lot of other things online, and there's a whole language in terms of design.
You told me that the browsers and the websites that design are present. Are there other aspects of internet that you haven't shown yet and that are important to you?
Yes. I think the next issue is going to be devoted to bots and this idea of automation.
And a lot of that is text-based when you look at Twitter bots. And that's just one part.
There is poetry and the idea of digital literature, which is going through a kind of explosion right now.
And all the other aspects of design and language that you're talking about.
The very last issue, the one that I had up on the wall at the book fair, was completely visual.
I didn't have any text-based works there, but I have in the past, the very first issue, had a chat room.
So, yeah, there's another thing, too, which is the web as a kind of vernacular.
Which is not necessarily how artists are looking at it, but just how we are communicating and the language and the sort of codes and signs and symbols that we're using to communicate on the web.
I haven't really been doing that. I haven't been collecting that stuff.
Other people do, other people study that in a significant way, like Olia Leolina and others.
So, that's a whole part of the whole territory that I have looked at this more.
I've looked at printed web as more of a curatorial project.
Yeah, and to show the web from the point of view of artists.
Artistic production.
Because, of course, everyone has an experience of internet, but you're trying to show their obsessions and the way they transform it into art.
Yeah, yeah, and how artistic practice, how artistic production has changed in the last couple of years or even sort of moment to moment.
There's one question that I want to ask you, and I don't know if it's stupid.
So, Kenneth Goldsmith did a project called printing the internet, which was trying to be inclusive of all of the internet and trying to print the whole internet.
How is what you do different from it?
Yeah, that's a good question because sometimes it's confused.
I'm frequently approached, oh, is this the Kenneth Goldsmith project?
Yeah, that was a project, yes, that tried to be inclusive and that it was an open call for a gallery in Mexico City.
And that's interesting, I sent something, he asked everyone to print out the internet and send it to the gallery and I think he received like 20,000 submissions and he just filled the gallery.
It was like this mountain of paper, which I think was an important and significant moment.
I was starting the collection just at that moment and we were talking to each other, so we were kind of feeding each other these ideas.
I do think of my project as being very, very different.
His was talked about as being democratic or inclusive.
In the end, I really question how much it was.
The photographs showed him.
Yeah, nothing was visible.
Nothing was visible, there was no way to inspect these materials or study them or analyze them.
And it was really about the image of the artist, the single artist, not the 20,000 resting on this big pile of paper.
And like most of the Goldsmith's work, you don't need to go to Mexico to see the...
It was all about the idea.
The image and also the idea of we're going to try to print the whole internet, of course it's stupid and useless and impossible, but we're going to try anyway.
And I think that's significant.
I think it's important that he did that and the image of him laying on this pile of paper and the way it circulated and all of the discourse.
There was so much discourse, conversations generated around this project.
Super important.
My project is different in that I am trying actually to be inclusive, but in a curatorial way.
My curatorial approach is let's bring these kinds of artists, these people, let's invite them to participate.
And then let's publish this and recirculate that material and put it back out.
To try to find one that represents each aspect and you don't need to have all of it, just good examples of each.
And the Goldsmiths did a project about Aaron Schwarz and G-Store, Dorent, that is circulating.
And how do you feel about, how do you, does your project relate to that kind of internet culture?
Because there's a whole thing that we can I think call today internet culture and that people who have ideals and who are really working like Aaron Schwarz did.
How does your project relate to that?
Yeah, super important.
I love that project because that enabled me to understand that printing can be a political act.
Okay, that if something like G-Store and those materials and Aaron Schwarz activities, if those were closed off territories where access is not permitted,
and somehow, and look at WikiLeaks and other kinds of, and Edward Snowden, where there are archives of material that are changing the nature of the material when they're republished, when they are published.
So something is going from private to public, something is going from hidden to visible, from in the archive to printed out and circulating.
And so that sort of change in the state or it's, there's this potential when that happens for it to take on a kind of political charge in a significant way.
And so I think, yeah, I mean, how is my work relating to that?
I don't know, it's trying more to comment on that or to use those same techniques in order to look at it at the scale of one artist's practice.
I mean, when, and that's one of the reasons why I'm interested in web to print.
And by the way, there's a great article on that essay on that by Orbit Gatt on Rhizome specifically about the J-Store project.
Okay, cool.
And does your project also relate somehow to that internet culture, more geeky side, like the meme, or this kind of the culture that you might find on Reddit?
Yeah.
Or in, what's that, what that be?
4chan.
4chan also?
Yeah.
Yeah, it can.
So for instance, printed web number three was an open call.
And, you know, I didn't know who would respond, but 150 people did.
So I had all these JPEGs and PDFs from people, and this was different.
The other issues have been highly curated.
I asked nine or 10 artists, I know pretty much the kind of work I'm going to get.
This was a kind of free for all.
And most people who replied were some kind of net artists, but also lots of other people maybe who don't identify as artists.
This was fantastic because I had all of this material.
I decided to not curate it.
I decided to include all of it.
And so all of that material is there.
There's stuff pulled right from Reddit.
There are just screen grabs and text messaging threads and emails.
And there we get a little bit closer to the vernacular and like the texture of network culture.
And those are the scenes I think you have that set.
Yeah, that's the one that will be on art.
For this.
Yes.
And maybe one or two questions more.
And that thing that always struck me about the publication that you do is that you as a designer is very present.
But maybe when you're talking, that's also because when people pull images out of internet,
they all somehow look the same and they all look anonymous somehow.
Because like everyone is anonymous on internet, is that something that you talked about publishing practice?
Is that something that worries you or that you think is a good thing that this individuality of the contributors is distanced
by the fact that all the contributions are the same kind of material and they all somehow look the same because they have the same problems?
Well, it's interesting to hear you put it that way because I tend to think of it almost in the opposite way.
Which is, and maybe because you're talking about the third issue, which was this sort of massive accumulation of 150 people.
So there was a kind of texture that was created and it was less about the individual.
So you're right. With all the other publications that I'm doing, like for instance, the last one, number four is just nine artists in a big newsprint edition.
And each artist got one sheet in the front and the back and the images are very big and bold and graphic.
I tend to think it's more the opposite or that's more what I'm interested in because because of the condition that you're talking about of anonymity,
I'm interested in elevating the work of the artist who works with the network.
Like a magnifying glass.
Right. And so that's the other thing that happens when these things are published specifically in print and there's a name attached to it and it's an exhibition in print.
So there's a list of artists, there's a little explanation.
That kind of formal framing, that's what I feel my role as the curator is.
Framing the material and saying, look, here's a presentation. These are artworks. This is a group show. This actually isn't all the same.
And let's slow down for a second and take a look at this work as being significant.
So the last question. So this book, just to go back closer to what interests me in this project with our zines and why artists make zines.
And so why did you call those booklets zines? You could have called them a number of other ways. Is there a specific reason you call them zines?
Yeah, the ones you're talking about printed web number three, I call them zines because there's something about that word that interests me.
Zine, as you know, has this really charged political punk, democratic kind of charge that goes back decades.
I'm really interested in how that's changing. You know, of course, there are people who still make scenes where they're collaging or they're writing their photocopying and folding.
And that's important. These are different, but I believe what makes them different from magazines, for instance, is that there's something almost disposable, very quick, very efficient, very cheap, almost free, but not quite.
That is enabling artists to get this material right into the hands of people. You know, I was in the zine tent at the New York Art Book Fair of the last two years.
And that's also significant for me. I don't really want to be inside with the galleries and the larger publishers.
I believe that the spirit of this project is coming from that same place of, let's get this work out there quickly into the hands directly.
Maybe to keep that proximity that you can have with people.
Yes, exactly that proximity. And that's what I love about the fairs is that there's a sense of community proximity conversation that then is fueled by the networks, the social media.
Thank you so much.
