Callithump!

A new creative vending machine project is hitting the streets of Hamburg, Germany. I just wish I could speak German so I could be better informed, because what I can tell from looking at the pictures and reading the Google translation, what they’re doing looks pretty awesome!

Machines are where people are, where the time is even or the desire to buy the greatest. For a good machine do you make a detour, in a desolate train ride or a party would do a machine not possibly.

In other words, they’re using cigarette machines to vend books. I must confess, I’m a little envious of the cigarette vending machines the Germans get to use. Apparently, it’s still legal to sell cigarettes from vending machines in Germany, so they can still get them new there. Also, they appear to be ruggedly made, vandal and weatherproof, and much smaller than their American counterparts. So, while Art-o-mat® is confined to indoor locations, Automentenverlag can get out on the streets!

This is where projects like this really need to be. All the Callithump! machines are in or near galleries and I really regret this. It feels like we’re preaching to the choir. The only people who are going to encounter these art objects are people who are already seeking out art in the first place. Creativity should be part of everyone’s day-to-day lives, not confined to galleries. Callithump! machines should reside in the same spaces as mainstream toy capsule vending machines (Why this is unlikely to happen is too complicated to get into right now. I’ll come back to it another day). It makes me really happy to see Automatenverlag pull it off!

It really is a perfect idea. In the States we used to have small, cheap, paperback books that were designed to fit into a purse or pocket. In other words, they were designed to fit into people’s day-to-day lives. Now even the cheapest paperbacks are oversized and expensive fetish objects. A project like Automatenverlag could make books cheap, convenient and portable. You could put them into bus stops and subways for people to read on the commute to work. They could be priced cheaper than eBooks, and would provide a much more satisfying experience. They load instantly and don’t crash. Drop them and they won’t break. If they get lost or stolen, you aren’t out $hundreds. You can share them with friends.

The cigarette pack is a perfect form factor. It’s been carefully tailored to fit into our ambient extra spaces; shirt pockets, rolled up in a sleeve, tossed into a handbag. It’s a shape we can fit into our daily lives without ever noticing until we want to. Automatenverlag isn’t the first think this shape is perfect for book publishing. Tank Books publishes a series of books in cigarette boxes:

Automatenverlag takes this idea and raises it above level of novelty and into utility by providing it with a very public venue. I’m really looking forward to seeing where this goes!

If this were happening in the States, it would be part of an anti-smoking campaign. I was about to make a snarky comment about the loss of our freedoms, but hey! That’s really not such a bad idea! “Knowledge is more addictive than tobacco,” or something. Use banned books to promote the idea that reading is dangerous, too. You could even set the price point to match the cost of cigarettes to force people to compare what they’re getting for the price. Temporary satisfaction that can ultimately kill you vs. something that lasts forever & is fundamentally healthy.

Callithump! is all about reinventing the magazine for the Internet age. We don’t think that electronic publishing makes physical publishing is obsolete per se. However, if physical publishing fails recognize and utilize the unique possibilities that only exist in physical space, it deserves extinction.

We’re not the only ones who think so. Even that old dinosaur the Wall Street Journal noticed, and devoted a fine article to it: Reinventing the Magazine: Publications That Push the Boundaries of the Print Medium.

Magical things happen when publishers rise to the challenge of staying relevant in the face of electronic publishing. Take T-Post, for example:

The magazine is a T-shirt! This is one of those Damn, I wish I’d thought of that! ideas. Of course there have been t-shirt subscription services before, but this is the first time I’ve seen the idea spun this way. The t-shirt accompanies an article, so the shirt actually serves as an editorial illustration. From their website:

More than just a fashion piece, T-post uses great design as a subversive tool to instigate meaningful thought, conversation, and action.

It’s a communication experiment that typically begins with a compliment like ”Nice t-shirt” and continues with the wearer explaining the interesting news story behind the design.

I love their spin on this commonplace object, and how the wearer becomes an integral part of the piece itself.

La Lata takes an idea from Fluxus and presents itself as a can of art objects. It breaks free of what can be expressed within the limits of bound paper to what can be contained within a can. Just look at this wonderfulness:

Media purveyed in a can is actually something we’ve been planning on doing for some time. It’s in our DNA. If America’s lima bean craze hadn’t ended, Jess might be heir to the Brakeley Canning Company fortune:

One day we’ll do a series of canned art products as the Brakeley Canning Company to make sure the name lives on.

So Callithump! is really just part of a larger trend! If we’re successful, the so-called “death of print” could actually lead to a much richer physical media environment.

Patrick Farley is trying to return to web comics, and this is great news! Patrick Farley is one of the best web comics creators there’s ever been. Few web comics ever explore the potentials of the medium. Sure, some good stories are being told, but few artists have embraced the Web as a unique medium with new creative possibilities. Instead, the majority of web comics are pretty much print comics that use the Web as a delivery system. It can be so much more than that, though, as Scott McCloud showed in Reinventing Comics and with his Infinite Canvas. Patrick Farley, on the other hand, embraced the medium to its fullest, creating innovative works that could only be experienced on the Web. Check out The Spiders, for example. Even the act of scrolling contributes to the narrative, instead of being an annoyance like it often is.

Farley started strong and his work just kept getting better and better. Unfortunately, his day job curtailed creative output. Now he’s taking steps to correct that, which I wholeheartedly endorse! Using Kickstarter, a platform that allows “us regular folk” to become patrons of the arts, he’s asking for a $2 donation. When donations reach $6,000 he’ll quit his day job and go back to creating web comics full-time. Just read the comics he already has online for free. Personally, I’ve gotten way more than $2 worth of entertainment from Patrick Farley, and will happily pay for his return! If the donations don’t reach $6,000, he doesn’t quit and you don’t have to pay. But that would be a tragedy, so go pledge $2 right now to make sure it doesn’t happen!

Best of luck, Patrick! I hope this works! I also hope I can follow in your footsteps, quit my day job and work on Callithump! full time. I know all too well how that day job stifles all creativity.

Coming soon: Callithump! Broadside. A broadside, also known as a broadsheet, is a page 17″ X 22″. It’s the standard size for newspapers in the US, or at least it was before the cheesy 11″X17″ tabloid format started taking over. We’ll be screenprinting broadsides with special guests while we have them over for dinner in upcoming weeks.

We’d been wanting to do something in this format in homage to Robert Piser’s Daily Palette, the first publicly available art vending machine (that we know of). Once we started exploring, we discovered an interesting fact: Broadsheets were initially the domain of poets, artists and political activists. They became popular for newspapers in the early 1700s as a way to get around a newspaper tax that taxed papers based on the number of pages.

It’s time to take the format back! The time is ripe, since newspapers are abandoning the broadsheet in favor of the tabloid or the web.

It’s fun to work in a large format after being confined to capsules for so long! An advantage to newsprint is the the local paper gives us rolls of the stuff for free. This means our production costs are almost nothing, so we’ll be able to give Callithump! Broadsides away for free!

We’ve got a fun approach to creating these as well. It’s a variation on the Exquisite Corpse. We’re doing prints with multiple screens. The screens are done by different people who we’ve invited over for dinner, while we prepare dinner, eat, drink and make merry. The catch is, we don’t discuss the content of the prints beforehand, only the size limitations. The final result might blend nicely, or it might be a sticky mess. It’s gauranteed to be interesting!

If this sounds like fun to you, drop us a line and we’ll have you over for dinner! You are cordially invited!

If you live too far away from Brunswick, Maine to come join us, please try it on your own. Give your local newspaper a call and see if they give away remnants. We use silk screens, but really, any way to make a mark on paper will do. Let us know how it goes!