hyperpress

I
INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM MAGIC

The notion of the printing press being from otherworldly realms is far from new. Cylinder seal printing can be traced back as early as 3000 BCE to Mesopotamia. Although paper was invented in China by the first century, woodblock printing on paper arose only in the 7th century, followed by alchemist Bi Sheng’s movable type technology in the 11^th century. According to the Book of Southern Qi, a 5th-century sage Gong Xuanyi claimed that a supernatural being had gifted him a magical “jade seal block” that allowed him to form letters on paper without a brush. This seal has been interpreted by historians as a printing device. 

Despite advancements like the codex format, mass publication remained elusive until Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press in the late 15^th century in Europe. As a new technology in religious times, the printing press was condemned as evil. Theories of the denouncement ranged from scribes fearing obsolescence (manuscripts were hand-copied) to the threat it posed to religious dogmas. By the 17^th century, “printer’s devil” was a term for print apprentices; discarded metal type sorts to be recast were dumped into receptacles aptly named “hellboxes”, (a reference to being bound for the furnace) the fiery pit of (typographic) hell.

Amidst the press secularising in the next few centuries, the 20^th saw the press displaced between realms once more, referenced more subtly. Esteemed typographer Beatrice L. Warde, in her 1932 manifesto, consecrated the press as “sacred ground”:

 “Crossroads of civilization
Refuge of all the arts
Against the ravages of time
Armory of the fearless truth
Against whispering rumor
Incessant trumpet of trade

From this place words may fly abroad
Not to perish on waves of sound
Not to vary with the writer’s hand
But fixed in time having been verified in proof

Friend, you stand on sacred ground:
This is a Printing Office.”

The term press went on to be co-opted by the news media industry, persisting long after the separation of news and print. The separation would also be attributed/contributed to the ‘death of print’ in the 21^st century.

II
THE DISPLACEMENT OF THE PRESS VECTOR

In conventional planographic, relief, and intaglio printing processes, the material (often pulp paper) is distinct from the signs applied onto its surface (often ink on a substrate). These components are pressed together to produce printed matter in a mechanical process/machine aptly named the press.

In FFF (Fused Form Fabrication or FDM) 3D printing, thermoplastic polyurethane filament is deposited sequentially onto a flat print bed. When a 3D printed object is framed as a printed matter – a flat 3D printed base (mimicking a piece of paper) and design printed on it – there are no longer distinctions between the medium and the printed design. The 3D printer does not differentiate between material, surface, and signs—there is only the collective filament object made of a single material.

Roland Barthes contends in “Plastics”, Mythologies (1957) that plasticity fundamentally removes the distinction between form and matter. Classically, form (objecthood) is imposed upon content (material) through design (concept of an object). With plastics and processes like injection moulding, the form is inherently created along with the content itself. 

3D printing fuses the printed and the medium of printing: the material, surface, and signs become entangled as one. For (3D) printed matter/books, the 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴 is no longer a definitive process nor a determinable locus, as if in a superposition between component and composition. 

The 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴 emerges displaced as a vector beyond print—the hyperpress.

III
GOTHIC FLATLINE IN PRINT

In Mark Fisher’s Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, the Gothic Flatline is defined as “…a plane where it is no longer possible to differentiate the animate from the inanimate and where to have agency is not necessarily to be alive.”

As conventional printing and printed matter lose agency to digital screens, how might 3D printing reconcile with print (or, death-of-print) through the Gothic Flatline?

Books 3D printed in Thermoplastic Polyurethane (TPU) merely imitate paper codices—mistaking the consequences of conventional printing processes and their material constraints for properties inherent to the codex form. A Body without Organs. A Book without Offset. Decaying slower than paper, these plastic book-objects outlast what they imitate.

And yet, for all the promise of the technology and its potential conferred by an “extra” dimension in print, these 3D printed book-objects fail to reimagine the book form. Faltering against the digital screen, they bind themselves stubbornly, devotedly to the codex, as pages once bound themselves to spines. Hauntological artefacts, bound to their own death, suspended in a time that has already passed.

Fisher named his essay after Dixie Flatline (a character in Gibson’s Neuromancer) who revived as a data-fied construct in cyberspace after brain deaths. Flatline’s afterlife is nothing more than a construct of his previous life behind a screen; similarly, the 3D printed book projects an afterlife of print beyond X/Y Cartesian planes—nothing more than constructs of “books and codices”, (TPU) materialised in a different dimension, an “astral plane”. A futile fight against the death-of-print postulate, a blip in the flatline (the flatness of graphic design).

The plane of Gothic Flatline is the Z-axis in print.