Julie Rafalski
The nth Convention (second edition)
with David Henningham and Tahu Deans
Silkscreen-printed book
Edition of 30
27 pages, 26cm x 26cm
Henningham Family Press
2009
This collaborative work with Tahu Deans and David Henningham began during a residency in Leipzig in 2005. To make a truly shared body of work, psychic drawing experiments that took place during the Cold War were re-enacted. The Leipzig building that hosted the residency had formerly housed an East German supercomputer, which was collaboratively reconstructed as a set to be reconfigured and photographed. These pictures, films, drawings and transcripts make up the content of the second edition of the book, in which the focus was on unraveling the CMYK printing process. To create this test-card volume of screen-print experiments, the collaborators applied the principle of CMYK dots that merge to form a full colour picture.
The book contains corridor-like spaces, doctored photographs, and images of a psychic spying apparatus redolent of the building itself. Not every page is accessible without the use of a knife. The books are editioned using a vector-based system so that each book is assigned a non-hierarchical relationship to the other books.