English / 한국어
Each issue of Cover adopts a radically different format reflecting the theme. Three “readers” make up the first issue on “the decentralized landscape of online reading.” Four volumes of “newspaper” cover the topics of the second issue, design-related social and political movements. Variously sized printed matters are packed in a box as the third issue, which investigates the relation between poetry and imagery. The “Cover Report” special issue reports on, literally, cover designs of various magazines.
As Lu Tao proclaims, there is certainly a post-web 2.0 sensibility to this printed magazine, to its densely layered visual elements, dizzyingly diverse codes and formats “sampled” from different cultures and times, interwoven as a mesh of allusions and references. But the apparent maximalism also speaks of its ambition, which is “reconfiguration and reconstruction of contemporary texts and images, decoding and recreation of graphic codes.”
If the approaches of Cover sound like a method of contemporary DJs, one might as well consult the art critic Nicolas Bourriaud, who in Postproduction (2001) argued: “Notions of originality (being at the origin of) and even of creation (making something from nothing) are slowly blurred in this new cultural landscape marked by the twin figures of the DJ and the programmer, both of whom have the task of selecting cultural objects and inserting them into new contexts.” Cover is an example of contemporary graphic authorship as postproduction DJing.
No. 1, “Collective Intelligence.” 2011
No. 2, “The Last Newspaper.” 2012
No. 3, “Visual x Poetry.” 2012
Special edition, “Cover Report.” 2013
