Activity tagged "community"

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Community memory

Happy Labor Day. I wrote a Wikipedia article about the gay, anarchist, anti-profit publishing collective Come!Unity Press after stumbling across a poster they printed in 1971.

Serendipitously, while researching this article I came across a March 2024 talk about “Survival By Sharing” by Paul Soulellis , which features a photograph of a Community Memory terminal.

I'd come across some photos of these while looking for public domain photos of computers a couple weeks ago, and was disappointed at the time that I couldn't find a better photo than ones like this on Wikimedia Commons (derived from a scan of a 1974 newsletter):

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Soulellis’ talk, however, features a much better photo of this very same terminal at Leopold's Records in Berkeley, CA, likely taken at the same time based on the outfit of the person featured in both shots!

A high-quality black-and-white-photo of two people operating the same community memory machine as pictured in the above photo.

The talk, which focuses on community and archives and collaborative art and resistance, has some really interesting throughlines with some of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.

The Signal Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture published an interview with an early member of the C!UP collective in issue 5. You can borrow a copy for free from the Internet Archive. I was curious how the anarchists went from operating a printing press for a group of Quakers in exchange for free rent to running the whole shop. Turns out it came down to conflicts over topics including their nudism and a "political prisoner" (kitten) named Kropotkin. Signal recounts the story.

There’s another story from an early member of the collective to be found in the comments of a site called The People’s Graphic Design Archive: “They liked th[e rainbow ink] effect so much that they charged extra to print plain black ink”.

LEE MOST MON, OCT 30, 2023 I crashed at the Come!Unity Press for several months in the early 1970s. Lin was very supportive and helped me “find myself” after I left home. I eventually decided against joining their collective, and became an apprentice locksmith instead, so I left their communal living space. One interesting thing collectors of their printed materials might like to know is the way they applied ink to the rollers of their offset printing press resulted in mass producing unique printed products that had a slightly different set of foreground and background colors each time the rollers printed a new page. Each run had different colors and no flyer had exactly the same colors as the one printed before it. They had a policy of recycling as much as they could, so they often reused paper by printing over old print jobs, which sometimes resulted in printed products with so much color that they were hard for color-blind people to read them. (The ADA would not be passed until decades later, but I'm sure Lin would have simply insisted on using different colors or trying out lighter and lighter background colors until the customer would give up and say it was legible!) They liked that effect so much that they charged extra to print plain black ink because it meant cleaning all the colored ink off each of the machine's rollers before printing plain black and then after that print run when the next run would use colored ink. Anyway, each of their print jobs was unique.
"Survival by Sharing".
Paul Solellis in his website.
It means always questioning. More than that: it means always deeply examining the less visible ideologies that lurk behind the design systems that govern how we live and communicate. For me this also means working with archives as *time machines,* and dialing back through history to see how others have resisted and persisted by making public against the grain, by “performing publishing” in their lives. What can we learn from their ongoing struggles for liberation, through their acts of making public?
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"The Final XOXO".
Kit Jones in their blog. Published .
10 years after the first XOXO I attended I went to the last XOXO, held on August 22-24, 2024 at Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon. I’ve talked previously (here and here) about how XOXO reflects the importance of community and in being heard and seen, as a creator who lives entirely too much online, as well as the tension between the desire to connect and the hostility of many of the spaces on the internet where we seek that connection. This year’s XOXO, befitting the final one, felt even more focused on that tension.  It was also a space all too rare these days, one that acknowledged that we are still in a global pandemic, that gathering in person carries its own set of risks, significant and sometimes life altering. We are also all changed now by the experience of that pandemic. Whatever our own personal lessons and challenges have been, we’ve all experienced a collective trauma, loss and grief a constant undercurrent, whether we are able to express or even acknowledge it or not. One of the things that so moved me about that first XOXO was being in a space that stood apart for recognizing that the wave of harassment and toxicity hitting my industry was real, and serious, and that speaking up about it mattered. This time, the realities we were collectively acknowledging are so much larger – the pandemic, the waves of transphobia and anti-trans and anti-LGBT legislation in the US, the genocides happening in so many places (Gaza, Ukraine, Tigray). 
Read:
"casual poet library".
Rebecca Toh in rebeccatoh.co. Published .
So what’s Casual Poet Library? It’s a shared library in the heartlands of Singapore run entirely by individuals in the community. Each individual pays a small amount of money every month to be a bookshelf-owner. On each shelf, bookshelf-owners share about themselves and their book recommendations via little note cards, and tend to their shelves like they are tending to a (book) garden. The library is open to everyone and all books are for people to browse and borrow.