Digital Folklore - To computer users, with love and respect   288 pages strong Reader, Artdirection & Design

You CAN and MUST understand computer culture, now! Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied (Ed.) asked me to design their new book. For fast order fly to Digital Folklore websiiite.

"Technical innovations shape only a small part of computer and network culture. It doesn’t matter much who invented the microprocessor, the mouse, TCP/IP or the World Wide Web and what ideas were behind these inventions. What matters is who uses them. Only when users start to express themselves with these technical innovations do they truly become relevant to culture at large. Users’ endeavors, like glittering star backgrounds, photos of cute kittens and rainbow gradients, are mostly derided as kitsch or in the most extreme cases, postulated as the end of culture itself. In fact this evolving vernacular, created by users for users, is the most important, beautiful and misunderstood language of new media.
As the first book of its kind, this reader contains essays and projects investigating many different facets of Digital Folklore: online amateur culture, DIY electronics, dirtstyle, typonihilism, memes, teapots, penis enlargement, …"

Part of the Introduction by Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied

BODY OF WORK The reader is subdivided into three parts:

DESIGN IDEAS The leading purpose was to create a real amateur spirit - though you can feel that there's a "proper" design approach which makes everything practical and clear. Like the super duper tags, that you can find on almost every page - they give you a perfect idea of digital folkore topics. The strict use of little modified system-fonts let the design appear as a wonderful fail or rather "fail better":

PART A - Observations
Several essays, short articles and observations by Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied. Each article is designed differently. This part is supposed to be the "fanzine" of this reader.

At the end of PART A you'll find a selection of works by Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied. Like "Digital Divide", my favorite beach-art so far:

PART B - Research
Four essays by former Merz-Akademie students. Each essay is printed on different colored paper. The delicate layout & a delicious Arial typeface let them look as beautiful hand-outs...

The last essay of Leo Merz tries to build a connection between the beloved font "Comic Sans" (have a look at the Euro (€) sign below !!!) and the Detroit Techno combo "Underground Resistance".

PART C - Giving Back On the last 40 pages you'll find projects of New Media and Interface Design students at Merz Akademie. Dope stuff like "Bootyclipse" by Dennis Knopf or Tobi's Timemachine (full screenshot below)

This incredible LOL CATS FAMILY TREE comes as POSTER with the reader:

Order "Digital Folklore - To computer users, with love and respect" now - or never!