Steidlwerk no.30 - Kunsthaus Gottingen

Shaped by spontaneity and subversion, STEIDL–WERK No.30: KUNSTHAUS GÖTTINGEN redefines the traditions of offset printing. Each book in this limited edition boasts a different range of colors and is thus unique. The publication is a collaboration between Theseus Chan, Gerhard Steidl and the art space Kunsthaus Göttingen, where Chan showed WERK No.30 in “printing futures” as part of documenta 15. The installation, which he added to daily, was Chan’s love letter to printed matter in all its forms (from paper sheets and printing plates to recycled packaging), and the book is both the documentation and final piece of this work. Chan and Steidl took up the manifest of WERK No.30—“to malfunction established mindsets, techniques, and procedures by sabotaging machines and human interventions”—and realized it in book form through what they call “reverse engineering,” deconstructing the processes of printing in order to enhance the results. Embracing intuition and chance, they retained normally discarded test sheets for binding, shut off water on press to create unpredictable color patterns, and exchanged standard CMYK colors for fluorescent variants. The outcome champions “printed anarchy” and is no less than a wholly new form of book.