This text, realized for the second issue of HomeShop’s Wear journal (2010), was the culmination of a series of zines I had produced in printshops around central Beijing in 2009. The approach was similar to those zines, where most of the images were found on the print shop’s hard drives or made with their software, sometimes with the help of the clerks, and assembled in one night and printed in the early hours. For this text, however, I saved my work on the computers of a specific print shop, returning there consistently over several visits. Through this text I was attempting to describe an imaginary place called “the conceptual youth hostel,” where the conversion of experiences into fixed values was suspended.
See the PDF here: Conceptual-Youth Hostel_2010_Michael-Eddy
(Cleaning out data, I recently came across another trace of this project that couldn’t be included in the printed publication, which was that in the danwei housing compound in the Tuanjiehu (团结湖, literally “Solidarity Lake”) neighbourhood of Beijing where I lived, I had posted the pages on the local notice board.)
published June 13th, 2020
Series of 4 zines, edition of 10 each.
Beijing, CN, 2009
After the loneliness of my first winter in Beijing, I found the print shops, open 24 hours, to be interesting places (like timeshare studios) to have a little company late at night in the Central Business District. Following a long working day, I would stop by a print shop and produce a zine within the span of several hours, getting help from the young workers, using the word processing and office programs on their computers, and materials that had been left by other customers.
This process of red-eye writing was employed over a longer duration (by saving my document on the computers at a particular print shop and asking the non-English speaking staff for translation help) in the piece “The Conceptual Youth Hostel” for WEAR journal #2 (HomeShop, 2010).
Performance, text and participation (2012)
As part of the event Under the Fig Tree, Above the Date Tree at HomeShop, July 7th 2012, and installed until August 19th. Another version appeared as part of the project Friends of Freiheit in North Adams, MA, June 2012.
Instructions for Open Participation begins with, as the title suggests, a set of instructions for open participation I had written in advance. Initiating the event, the vinyl-cut lettering is separated out into syllables and/or characters and mixed up.
Working with the resulting fragments, people are invited to participate in the formulation of what they think should constitute instructions for open participation.
The resulting instructions are adhered to the shopfront window.
Some weeks later (on August 4th, 2012), interested passersby inquire about the text on the window. They are invited to reconfigure or add to the instructions for open participation.
I am delighted to participate with them, but I refuse to tell them what my original instructions are. We work on it for several hours on it until we are satisfied that our instructions for open participation are more clear and coherent than the previous version.
