Post- Digital Print - Monoskop

The three phases
of Helmut Smits’
Pamphlet, 2006
more this ‘tactility’ becomes a vibrant and pleasurable experience –
and something that once again physically links individuals, as a kind of
temporary neural connection.
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi proposed and tested a possible countermeasure
against widespread indifference towards politics, distributing his
own magazine about the Italian ‘Telestreet’ pirate TV movement by
handing out copies like political leaflets to potentially suitable recipients.
A similar ‘gestural practice’ was applied by Fran Ilich with his
Zapatista-inspired pamphlet sab0t, distributed as an easily downloadable
PDF file, then locally printed in various Mexican cities and re-distributed
in the streets – a physical gesture of distributing the content
straight into the hands of the readers. 113
The attraction of physical print may be considered an ‘instinctive’
one. The power of paper to trigger such human instincts is the focus
of Pamphlet, 114 a 2006 computer art installation by Helmut Smits
consisting of a laptop, software, and a printer placed at the edge of
a window. Visitors can type a
message on the laptop, and by
pressing ‘send’, a pamphlet is
instantly printed and dropped
by the printer from the 10th
floor. The falling of the paper,
and the resulting ‘pamphlet’ on
the street, symbolise the relatively
short distance between
personal production and public
consumption of a printed
product. The installation also
shows how the traditional parameters
of the printed product
have been disrupted: the fallen
printed sheet superficially creates
the same fascination as a
newspaper, making it possible
for someone to pick up and
read something that was printed
very recently. But the personal
and arbitrary content of
the production (and the almost
instantaneous production time)
68
give the final printed product
an entirely different value.