Post- Digital Print - Monoskop

Tim Devin,
Email Flyer Project,
2006
A wonderful illustration of this relationship between text and print
(and of the ‘authority’ of the printed word) is Wordperhect, 241 created
by Tomoko Takahashi – a parody of a word processor, featuring an
idiosyncratic hand-drawn interface, a set of functioning but strangely
altered tools, and page templates such as receipt and silver paper from a
cigarette box which all somehow ‘humanise’ the software. This shrinking
of the distance between digital tool and physical reality is also
one of the themes of Evelien Lohbeck’s video Noteboek, 242 in which a
traditional paper notebook opens up to become a notebook computer
(including various peripheral devices such as a printer and a scanner).
Lohbeck playfully and surrealistically juxtaposes various meta-medium
objects (handwritten notes, software interfaces, digital hardware)
to achieve a stunning (yet stunningly simple) digital-inside-the-physical-and-vice-versa
conceptual effect.
Our instinctive ‘trust’ in printed information (including electronic
information which has been printed out) was once again put to the test
by Tim Devin in 2006 in his Email Flyer Project. 243 He printed the final
message of a fictional e-mail exchange between a woman named ‘Sue’
and her now-former boyfriend ‘Jay’, and distributed the print-out as a
flyer on car windshields in six different U.S. cities; soon he was receiving
dozens of replies by people who had picked it up. Undoubtedly,
merely ‘spamming’ out the message electronically would have produced
a very different reaction. On another level, the work is also
about accidentally encountering a narrative and believing it to be true,
since it is filtered (one single message) and printed out, and found on a
lonely windshield where paper is usually posted anonymously.
Finally, the MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group is
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