The Rag-Men
and Miners
‘The Rag-Men and Miners’, is an essay on the modernist avant-garde in relation to film archiving.
How do we find life in a ruinous film eaten by acid? With riso-ed images and cyanotype prints this essay
both remarks upon and engages in the destructive remediation of film as an act of cultural excavation.
The scanning and printing process for the publications images.
A process of remediation and alternating printing techniques, such as cyanotype and riso, connects
the design to the essay's subject matter and allows the design to not just note upon but take part in
the processes explored. This link between content and design allowed the final publication to feel unique
and sculpted by its contents rather than an empty, yet aesthetically pleasing vessel. So the chain reaction
of photocopiers, photoshop, acidic — light reactive processes and risograph printing took sampled images and ripped them up in favour of shape and texture.
The typesetting was simple, with a focus on legibility and use. That said the core aesthetic principle
was the idea of strata. Hence, the different layers of typographic information, indented and offset,
created strata of information that reflected the essay's ideas on historical testimony.
