Kyra Delsing

You are welcome to cut the magazine

How to digitalize a magazine that is made to emphasize the fact that it's made of paper.

Two Mediamatic Magazines (vol. 9 # 1 and vol. 9 # 4) are cut-out magazines. To see the inside of the Magazine you have to cut some pages.

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Mediamatic vol. 9#4 & 10#1 The Printed Issue. - Mediamatic Issues Tijdens Mediamatic@BABY op zondag 3 oktober 1999 werd het uitkomen van The Printed Issue gevierd, met o.a. Dirk van Weelden die de CD-ROM Small World van Florian Thalhofer toelicht.

Very interesting and very fun if you are reading it, but difficult if you are the one who has to digitalize them... You cannot just scan every page and collect them in a pdf-file. You'll lose the whole experience of cutting the magazine and opening the new pages and you don't see what pages are supposed to be next to each other.

Why a cut-out magazine?

Since 1980 researchers claimed that the future of literature will be digital and before this, people even announced the end of the paper book as a result of digitalization. Against the urge of the digital, people thought of creative ideas to emphasize the material side of books and magazines. The cut-out magazines Mediamatic made are an example of this movement. The fact that you have to cut a page to be able to see what the inside looks like, makes sure the material of the magazine actually becomes a part of it. It is no longer just a medium that you can just replace by an other medium and still have the same experience reading it.

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vol. 9#1 -

Deliberately making mistakes

To make a magazine that has pages you can fold open or big posters inside is quite expensive and not in the budget of Mediamatic at the time they made these magazines. But they remembered that sometimes the printing of the magazines went wrong and a few pages of the magazines were to short, which resulted in the fact that you couldn't open some pages because they were still stuck to each other. This brought Mediamatic to the idea of making these mistakes deliberately. They made sure a few pages were to short so people had to cut them open to be able to see the inside.

What is our plan?

Because of this it will not be possible for us to re-create exactly the same experience you have when you cut the Mediamatic Magazine yourself. But we will try to capture this experience as good as possible with some help from our colleagues and Simon Cleassen (Hack42) by filming what it looks like when you look through the magazine and cut it open. And because we also want people to be able to read the magazine we will make a pdf-file as well.