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 to Mesopotamia as early as 3000 BCE. Although paper was invented in China in the first century, woodblock printing on paper arose only in the 7t^h century, followed by alchemist Bi Sheng’s movable type technology in the 11^th century. According to the Book of Southern Qi, a 5^th-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 century 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 Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, cultural theorist Mark Fisher describes the Gothic flatline as “a plane on which the distinction between the animate and the inanimate collapses, and where agency no longer depends on being alive.”

Fisher’s invocation of the flatline as a “plane” positions death within a dimensional register. This resonates with graphic design’s long-standing orientation toward two-dimensionality, having been a discipline historically bound to two-dimensional surfaces. This condition carries semantic and cultural weight. “Flat” does not merely describe dimensionality, but often connotes inadequacy, such as “lacking in animation, zest, or vigour” (Merriam-Webster). If flatness is associated with lifelessness, then the printed page (historically confined to the surface) risks being read as inert and inadequate in contrast to the responsive, animated interfaces of digital screens. The rhetoric of the “death of print” emerges precisely within this semantic field.

Against this backdrop, the question is not how print might regain agency by approximating life, but how flatness itself might be reconfigured as an operative condition rather than a deficit. Within this framing, 3D printing introduces a critical inflection. By constructing books volumetrically, it complicates and destabilises the surface-bound ontology of print without fully abandoning it.

Most 3D printed books merely simulate codices, mistaking the constraints of conventional printing for intrinsic properties of the book form. What emerges is a book without offset, a body without organs: conceptually unchanged, yet structurally displaced. Ironically, these plastic artefacts, slower to decay than paper, outlast what they imitate.

For all the promise of the technology and its potential conferred by an “extra” dimension in print, 3D printed books 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. In this sense, they are hauntological artefacts suspended between persistence and obsolescence, bound to a form that has passed, and a futurity that never arrived.

Fisher’s title invokes Dixie Flatline (from William Gibson’s Neuromancer), a consciousness revived as a data construct after the character’s biological death. Flatline’s afterlife is a continuation of life in a counterfactual trajectory, agency beyond death. Similarly, 3D printed books project an “afterlife of print” beyond the confines of the X–Y plane. More like projections than transformations, they remain constructs of the book, merely materialised along the Z-axis—the additional dimension conferred by “3D” printing.

The Z-axis is the Gothic flatline of print. It is along this axis that print persists after its supposed “death”, with its agency displaced into 3D printing. A blip after death.