Brad Freeman ~ Illinois

emerging sentience
By Brad Freeman & Johanna Drucker
Charlottesville / Atlanta: JAB Books, 2001. Edition of 50.

16.375" x 11"; 33 pages. Printed paper over boards with cloth spine. Printed on Mohawk Superfine and Monadnock Astrolite (both neutral pH) with Wikoff Sunfast Ink at Nexus Press in Atlanta. Photographs, digital prepress and printing by Brad Freeman. Text by Johanna Drucker. Signed and numbered by artists.

Project Statement: "Emerging Sentience was produced for the Poetry Plastique exhibition organized by Charles Bernstein and Jay Sanders at the Marianne Boesky Gallery. The conceptual foundation of the project is expressed concisely in its title: to make a work about sentience as an emergent property of intelligent systems. The original text had been written some time before, as one of the pieces in Deterring Discourse."

Brad Freeman: "It is based on the following question: Is conscious self awareness an emergent function of complex systems or is it the spark of life? In other words, is there such a thing as artificial intelligence in, say, computers?"

Johanna Drucker interview with Tate Shaw for JAB: "The piece, "Emerging Sentience," was part of a set of short pieces that were published as Deterring Discourse in the early 1990s. They each had new technology themes and also were responses to the closing down of public information and debate in the news around the first Gulf War. We lifted it out and condensed it slightly for this book. ...

"With Emerging Sentience we took the distilled, edited text and I laid it out so it would read from a distance, on the wall, in a grid. The text is a double text, embedded—one text is visible and legible when it is on the wall but it is set into a smaller text where it reads as well. We taped up the black and white text print outs and kept reworking that design until we liked it independent of the images. Brad was shooting pictures, but he made them work within the design after the text had been structured. It was an interesting exercise for both of us to see the difference in these approaches.

"As for the language—! My head just processes this way. I'm still trying to push this continual shift of register into a highly eclectic mode. The heterogeneity of contemporary language we encounter on a regular basis and the effects in terms of producing us as cultural/social/ historical subjects is something I am so aware of all the time. I always say my sensibility is created at the intersection of Mallarmé and the tabloid press. But of course, nothing is that simple. I don't use any mechanical devices—no word lists, no processing techniques or cut up—just the random access of memory and association as I write. Punning and double entendre paraphrase are like cross-links or hypertext phrases that let me step from one linguistic zone to another in a jump."
$750

Nova Reperta
By Brad Freeman and Johanna Drucker
New Haven, Connecticut: JAB Books, 1999. Edition of 75.

16.625 x 10.125" (closed); 66 pages. Photographs and offset lithography (digital and photomechanical prepress) by Brad Freeman. Text by Johanna Drucker. Paper Mohawk Superfine. Hardbound with brass posts in boards and silk. With a stand of varnished red oak that serves as a base. Signed and numbered.

Brad Freeman: "Nova Reperta is a contemporary response to a book of engravings made from drawings by the Dutch artist Jan van der Straet (Johannes Stradanus) in which he celebrated those innovations that had shaped the modern world in the latter half of the 16th century. Produced in an era of rapid-seeming development and considerable global exploration, the spirit of Stradanus's work reflected an unqualified embrace of progress. Celebrating change wrought by various mechanical and technical inventions, including the reproduction through copper engraving that fostered the printing of images, his drawings documented many specific discoveries in pictorial formats.

“The authors' response is conceived as a dialogue with rather than an imitation of the original work. It makes no attempt to mimic Stradanus's pictorial strategies, nor to be consistent with his celebratory spirit. Rather, it is a critical reflection upon the extension of that world view of progress from a perspective possible more than four centuries later.”
$2,500 (Five copies remaining)

MuzeLink aka MzLK. THE TOURS.
BY Brad Freeman
Purchase, New York: JAB Books, 1997. Edition of 100.

11 x 8.5"; 168 pages; opens to 11 x 17". Traditional and alternative graphic arts darkroom pre-press as well as computer generated photo-based imagery offset printed by Brad Freeman on Warren's LOE dull coated 100 lb. text in around ten colors. Duotones, tritones and four color separations throughout. Case bound and hand sewn by the artist. Signed and numbered by Freeman on page 167.

Brad Freeman: "MuzeLink is a personal / printing history starting with a playful deconstruction of the offset printing process then linking to four color reproductions of 19th century chromolithographs (the progenitor of offset lithography). These images provide a succinct view of the social values of that time and place. This is a complex book which resonates backward and forward, referencing the book as concept and historical form, and the book as an artist's medium."

Nancy Princenthal, On Paper Nov. - Dec. 1997: "... There is nothing schematic about this book. Presented in unique covers collaged from set-up sheets titled in silver, and bound in Asahi silk, Freeman's visual feast can be sampled as freely as any hot-linked hypertext. It is served, however, with the composure of someone who knows his story will satisfy even those who read it from front to back."
$1,500 (a few copies remaining)