After around three years, my book “Commentary on Approximations to the Object” is published by @setmargins and available for pre-order!
In 2022, a question between language and objects, design and literature began to climb the walls of my apartment in the form of fluorescent Post-its… vines of monstrous neon that slowly turned my living room wall into a sprawling conceptual map. Each week it grew denser, more tangled, more endless.
From those walls and research came this work. After many mutations and conversations with friends, academics, designers, writers, and philosophers (without which it wouldn’t exist) it is now being released by @setmargins
Briefly (and inadequately): it’s an essay of three object case studies, commenting on a nineteenth-century treatise attributed to Edmund Stone, exploring how designed objects may have anticipated literary ways of thinking, reading, and understanding the world. In its pages, design and literature intersect, prompting us to ask… how do their devices shape interpretation and meaning? Why has Stone’s treatise remained overlooked for so many centuries?
📕 Pre-order available through the link in bio. Also available soon at booksellers across New York and Europe. Presenting at @momaps1 during @printedmatterinc NY Art Book Fair, Sept 11–14
Book launch event and readings in NY and Europe this fall.
I am very grateful
✒️ Hope to see you soon 📜
After my visit to the Centre Pompidou in the summer of 2024, where I saw Marcel Broodthaers’s Salle Blanche for the first time, I conducted two experiments, in chronological order: 1. An image of Broodthaers’s Salle Blanche reproduced by ChatGPT in response to the prompt: reproduce La Salle Blanche had it been total AI gibberish. 2. A tattoo of a tattoo, tattooed on my right wrist by artist @juanpoked , in response to La Salle Blanche, which was itself, in a way, inspired by René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images.
Taken together, these two experiments extend the recursive logic already at work in La Salle Blanche: image becoming language, language becoming image, and representation folding back onto itself; the mirror before the mirror.
Book launch at Printed Matter
EN
A week ago I presented my book at Printed Matter. I felt joy and relief. I am so grateful to the wonderful Courtney Smith, a prolific artist and friend that was in conversation with me, and who patiently and passionately witnessed the evolution of this work from a manuscript to a book. I am also grateful to printed matter, to freek at set margins, to cristina for taking the pictures, to ivan’s recording, to mica and clara’s live, and to all the friends and colleagues that joined and engaged in some of the questions the book raises.
This project began several years ago as my undergraduate thesis at Parsons, when I set out to investigate the relationship between design and literature. I never thought I would end up writing a book. And I still can’t say what kind of thing, precisely, a book is.
Perhaps it is a mark of a search: a didactic object; an object that becomes when one moves through it. An inquiry, a personal pilgrimage, a kind of isolation. A way of understanding, but also of trying to understand. A creature that is at times kind and generous, and at others monstrously hostile. A fragment of a vision, of a time, of an intuition: a “something of something,” a part of something larger, a macula of the world. A fixed order of words that does not change, but whose meaning is transformed with time and under each reader’s gaze.
Maybe that is its most wonderful quality: that it becomes as one moves through it. And it remains an inexhaustible search.
Thank you to everyone who came.
Alguien que lo vea desde Instagram
Book Launch and conversation with artist Courtney Smith @cosmivelha for my latest book Commentary on Approximations to the Objects at @printedmatterinc and published by the prolific @setmargins
On January 14, 6–8 pm, I’ll be presenting Commentary on Approximations to the Object @printedmatterinc , New York.
Books will be available, with a signing to follow.
Hope to see you there!
Info & RSVP link in bio.
𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘣𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘪𝘰𝘱𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘴, 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘴, 𝘱𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘰𝘱𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘴, 𝘸𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦:
OUT NOW:
𝓒𝓸𝓶𝓶𝓮𝓷𝓽𝓪𝓻𝔂 𝓸𝓷 𝓐𝓹𝓹𝓻𝓸𝔁𝓲𝓶𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷𝓼 𝓽𝓸 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓞𝓫𝓳𝓮𝓬𝓽
𝘈𝘯 𝘐𝘯𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘳𝘺 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘋𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘦𝘥 𝘓𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦
by Pedro Bernstein
22 €
via setmargins.press and local bookstores
“I shall corroborate the gap between objects and texts, interrogate the material order that design has imposed upon language, and compose a record which, though partial and far from infinite, will be profoundly significant for two fields that may seem merely adjacent—design and literature—yet which, upon closer inquiry, reveal themselves as mutually dependent, should one have the resolve to interrogate the very grounds of their meaning.”
— Edmund Stone, Approximations to the Object, 1827
This book provokes its reader. Aimed at bold designers, typographers, writers, and curious minds who thrive on provocation, Commentary on Approximations to the Object leads to a fundamental question: how does the flux between design and literature produce a distinct engagement with meaning?
Bernstein’s Commentary on the oeuvre of Approximations to the Object, a nineteenth-century treatise attributed to Edmund Stone, explores the possibility that certain material objects may have prefigured particular literary modes of understanding. As long as this thesis persists, the commentary keeps the reader on edge, engaging in its own material logic, only to diverge from it—reaching a peak of utmost emancipation, ultimately to: comment on it.
It is best read in nearly one sitting.
—-
#setmarginspublications #graphicdesign #graphicdesignhistory #metafiction #pataphysics #typography
@pedro.bernstein@irenecasado_
for bibliophiles, designers, philosophers, writers and more:
OUT NOW:
Commentary on Approximations to the Object
An Inquiry into Designed Literature
by Pedro Bernstein
22 €
via setmargins.press and local bookstores
“I shall corroborate the gap between objects and texts, interrogate the material order that design has imposed upon language, and compose a record which, though partial and far from infinite, will be profoundly significant for two fields that may seem merely adjacent—design and literature—yet which, upon closer inquiry, reveal themselves as mutually dependent, should one have the resolve to interrogate the very grounds of their meaning.”
— Edmund Stone, Approximations to the Object, 1827
This book provokes its reader. Aimed at bold designers, typographers, writers, and curious minds who thrive on provocation, Commentary on Approximations to the Object leads to a fundamental question: how does the flux between design and literature produce a distinct engagement with meaning?
Bernstein’s Commentary on the oeuvre of Approximations to the Object, a nineteenth-century treatise attributed to Edmund Stone, explores the possibility that certain material objects may have prefigured particular literary modes of understanding. As long as this thesis persists, the commentary keeps the reader on edge, engaging in its own material logic, only to diverge from it—reaching a peak of utmost emancipation, ultimately to: comment on it.
Harnessing historical gaps, predication, speculation, and the shifting boundaries between objects and texts, Bernstein’s textual and design inferences are far from incidental deviations. They propel the commentary into something beyond a mere study of influence, raising intriguing questions: What other objects might have influenced certain literary forms? How can the interplay between design and literature uncover the structures that shape interpretation and meaning? Why has Stone’s treatise remained overlooked for so many centuries?
It is best read in nearly one sitting.
—-
#setmarginspublications #graphicdesign #graphicdesignhistory #metafiction #pataphysics #typography
@pedro.bernstein
Three authors of books out this month: Pedro Bernstein and Otto von Busch out of NY, and Mexico city based Franco Dupuy will join Set Margins’ for a signing at the Artbook bookshop at PS1, Friday 12, at 3pm.
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐃𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐝𝐲: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐃𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐈𝐧𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐨
Design is a hellmouth of disappointment and a harrowing pit of professional failure. In this paraphrase of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Otto von Busch, a pitiful design professor, searches for the design workshop at Parsons. Proving inaccessible, the lost professor falls into despair. However, a recently fired workshop technician, Virgil, appears to know the way. They descend the crumbling corridors of design’s collapse, through the ruins and anguish of broken promises, failed research, self-absorbed design theorists, and hypocritical designers, to the very nadir of design’s inferno.
𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐨𝐧 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐱𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐎𝐛𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐀𝐧 𝐈𝐧𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐫𝐲 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐃𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐋𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞
This book provokes its reader. Aimed at bold designers, typographers, writers, and curious minds who thrive on provocation, Commentary on Approximations to the Object by Pedro Bernstein leads to a fundamental question: how does the flux between design and literature produce a distinct engagement with meaning?
𝐂𝐫𝐮𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐃𝐢𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬
This photobook/diary by Franco Dupuy explores the elusive visual language of cruising—a queer practice of anonymous desire played out in public spaces, where bodies negotiate consent through gaze, gesture, and instinct.
SEE YOU AT ARTBOOK@AT PS1 NY DURING THE NY ART BOOK FAIR:
FRIDAY 12, 3PM
peace, love and regulated chaos!
@pedro.bernstein@franco.dupuy@artbookps1@printedmatter_artbookfairs
#artbook #artbookfair #criticaldesign #setmarginspublications
Launch of COMMENTARY ON APPROXIMATIONS TO THE OBJECT
by Pedro Bernstein
with Pedro Bernstein in conversation with Florian Cramer and publisher Set Margins’
Thursday September 4, 6.30pm @ San Serriffe
“I shall corroborate the gap between objects and texts, interrogate the material order that design has imposed upon language, and compose a record which, though partial and far from infinite, will be profoundly significant for two fields that may seem merely adjacent—design and literature—yet which, upon closer inquiry, reveal themselves as mutually dependent, should one have the resolve to interrogate the very grounds of their meaning.”
— Edmund Stone, Approximations to the Object, 1827
This book provokes its reader. Aimed at bold designers, typographers, writers, and curious minds who thrive on provocation, Commentary on Approximations to the Object leads to a fundamental question: how does the flux between design and literature produce a distinct engagement with meaning?
Bernstein’s Commentary on the oeuvre of Approximations to the Object, a nineteenth-century treatise attributed to Edmund Stone, explores the possibility that certain material objects may have prefigured particular literary modes of understanding. As long as this thesis persists, the commentary keeps the reader on edge, engaging in its own material logic, only to diverge from it—reaching a peak of utmost emancipation, ultimately to: comment on it.
Harnessing historical gaps, predication, speculation, and the shifting boundaries between objects and texts, Bernstein’s textual and design inferences are far from incidental deviations. They propel the commentary into something beyond a mere study of influence, raising intriguing questions: What other objects might have influenced certain literary forms? How can the interplay between design and literature uncover the structures that shape interpretation and meaning? Why has Stone’s treatise remained overlooked for so many centuries?
It is best read in nearly one sitting.
@pedro.bernstein@setmargins@fcrphoto
