PPPPress is a press launched by students and alumni of the Art, Culture and Technology program at MIT. PPPPresss dances between the digital and the analog, between high tech and craft, between silkscreen and photocopy. PPPPress is currently experimenting with risography. A Risograph, a perfect binding machine, a guillotine, a silkscreen, a press, a digital duplicator. A mimeograph married to a xerox machine with a scanning bed on top.
This project was born during peak COVID when the need to come together to think and produce was crucial. We often tend towards the written word as a part of our artistic practice, and engaging with artist books as a conduit for experimentation was an important step to take. Certain kinds of images, words and ideas are represented best in mass-produced replicable formats where engagement with a wide audience is as crucial to the work as animation can be to video. What is best suited to be a book, we believe, should be one.
As an experimental press, we are also interested in printing and binding as a very hands-on, mechanical and acutely creative, craft-driven process. Experimenting with risography was an immense learning moment to understand the beauty and precision of crafted mass production.
PPPPress’ inaugural project was an engagement with the Center for Visual Studies (CAVS) archive at MIT. The archive-repository contains 45 years of artist work at MIT ranging from historical material that includes photos, books, posters, documents, portfolios, films, videos and audio tapes. We focused on bureaucracy, non-linear storytelling and film through repurposing image, text and alternating scales.
Scholars, designers, artists and scientists across MIT have also been invited to collaborate and publish with PPPPress through an open call. Printed matter ranges from architectural drawings, data visualization, letters, prompts, scientific imagery.
PPPPress conducted workshops for the MIT community on book making over IAP in January 2022
Original founders of PPPPress are Yimeng Zhu, Chucho Ocampo, Chi Pohao, Faruk Sabanovic and Aarti Sunder in 2021. Joined by Felix Li in 2022. In 2023 PPPPress went into decline with the original students having graduated and left. In 2024 it was revamped by ACT Media Instructor Gearóid Dolan with the help of ACT Staff and Faculty and MIT Architecture students. Currently there is a PPPPress Committee chaired by Dolan accepting print/publishing applications from across the MIT Community, but centered on ACT and MIT Architecture.
PPPPress is a community effort. Publications are printed in Risography by the artists and compiled, edited and bound by the artists with help and tuition from PPPPress members. To be involved or propose a publication you would like to produce contact us at: ppppress@mit.edu
Supported by ACT Program at MIT, CAVS Special Archive, MIT Architecture Department, CAMIT, MIT Transmedia Storytelling Initiative, and Arts at MIT.
