Prototyping Workshop #2 - Esad•Valence, March 17th-21st 2025

Supervised by Dominique Cunin, Cédric Rossinol-Brunet and Coline Houot.

EPE - Prototyping phase

The prototyping phase of the EPE project proposes to engage groups of students and professors in the actual production of hybrid screen-paper objects. A set of guidelines and expectations are established to simulate an order from someone outside the project and our institutions. In a real-life situation, this client could be an institutional or private customer. The aim is to produce credible prototypes of graphic design objects, demonstrating one or more creative processes, both methodological and technical.

Main themes

Based on a selection of objects found on ubu Web, student groups are asked to design a program of events based on a theme taken from the site. This work will involve adapting the same content to several formats, both digital and printed (at least two different media), with a view to transposition and adaptation. The purpose is to explore the possibilities offered by web-to-print, while considering the accessibility of the content, notably through a multilingual approach. We'll also be considering the bridges between digital media and different printing techniques: laser printing, inkjet, silkscreen, risography, etc.

Particular attention will be paid to the form of the objects produced, in line with the content and the tools chosen or available. The challenge is to rethink formats and graphic treatments, without seeking to reproduce the results usually obtained with standard software. Here, the tool becomes a design leverage.

Participants

Esad•Valence

Professors

• Dominique Cunin
• Cédric Rossinol-Brunet
• Coline Houot

Students

• BERNARD Dorine (3rd year, Graphic Design Bachelor)
• CARDOSO Grégory (3rd year, Graphic Design Bachelor)
• GUIOL Sarah (3rd year, Graphic Design Bachelor)
• JAKYMIW Emilie (3rd year, Graphic Design Bachelor)
• MAHE Joachim (3rd year, Graphic Design Bachelor)
• RODRIGUES Mélanie (3rd year, Graphic Design Bachelor)
• SAMIRI Inès (3rd year, Graphic Design Bachelor)
• VEYRUNE Clémence (3rd year, Graphic Design Bachelor)
• ZARCONE Carla (3rd year, Graphic Design Bachelor)

ISAM Sfax

Professors

• Ikbel Charfi
• Ines Kamoun

Students

• Eya Bouaziz PhD Student D2
• Bea Ayadi (online)
• Jed Ben Hmida (online)

Izmir Economics-VCD

Professors

• Gokhan Mura

Students

• Berke Cinarli

Pagora

Pagora team was supposed to paticipate to this workshop, but declined the invitation. 9 students and 2 professors were then lacking for this workshop.

Students

• BAFOU Mélissa
• BAZ Rayane
• CHERFAOUI Zaky
• DEBENATH Lorène
• DIEMERT Nicolas
• GRENON Joshuah
• KERAMOAL Bastien
• PIEDALLU Coralie
• VAUTRIN Luci

Projects

What is Ubu Web ?

Ubu Web is a "pirate shadow" digital library founded in 1996 by American poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It was created in response to the marginalization of avant-garde works and provides free access to a wide collection of experimental material, including sound poetry, films, videos, audio recordings, and rare or out-of-print texts.

Ubu Web operates without funding, advertising, or institutional affiliation, relying instead on a gift economy and volunteer efforts. Its infrastructure is sustained through collaborations with like-minded partners. The platform is known for its strong stance on free circulation of creative works, often circumventing conventional copyright frameworks to preserve and share subversive and marginalized forms of artistic expression.

In January 2024, Ubu Web announced it would cease activity, stating the archive would remain online but static. However, in February 2025, in response to shifting political conditions in the U.S. and globally, the site resumed operations. This reopening was framed as a statement about archiving as a form of resistance, emphasizing the need to protect collective memory in times of systematic erasure.

Today, Ubu Web remains a vital resource for researchers, artists, and enthusiasts of experimental art, offering a unique space for exploring works that challenge established norms and enrich the global cultural landscape.

Why Ubu Web ?

On EPE website page, we wrote in our description: “In the context of unprecedented digital acceleration, the design of innovative, open and alternative, reasoned and sustainable editorial software tools requires a joint and ambitious reflection that ESAD is pleased to be able to develop as part of the first stage of the EPE research project, supported by European funding from Creative Europe from December 2023 to December 2025.”

In February, Ubu Web published on its home page this statement, in reaction to the current global context: “A year ago, we decided to shutter Ubu Web. Not really shutter it, per se, but instead to consider it complete. After nearly 30 years, it felt right. But now, with the political changes in America and elsewhere around the world, we have decided to restart our archiving and regrow Ubu. In a moment when our collective memory is being systematically eradicated, archiving reemerges as a strong form of resistance, a way of preserving crucial, subversive, and marginalized forms of expression. We encourage you to do the same. All rivers lead to the same ocean: find your form of resistance, no matter how small, and go hard. It's now or never. Together we can prevent the annihilation of the memory of the world.” A message we feel resonates strongly with EPE‘s values.

Prior to the workshop first day students were invited to choose some contents from the vast stock of archives hosted by Ubu Web. Most of the files are PDF, movies or pictures. Some text file may be found also. From this selection and after some discussions, 4 groups were defined, each produced a media stategy for a fictionnal event aiming to show a part of Ubu Web content.

Ignore all other EXHIBITIONS except this one

JAKYMIW Emilie, CARDOSO Grégory et VEYRUNE Clémence

About the collection choosen by the group, words by Kenneth Goldsmith : "This collection of street posters, mad scribblings, political screeds, religious rants, and paranoid raves was collected on the streets of New York City from 1985 to the present. Some time ago, it occurred to me that the streets are as full of art as, say, thrift shops are full of great paintings. So, inspired by Jim Shaw's collection Thrift Shop Paintings, Adolf Wölfli's visionary scrawls, and outsider music, I began carrying a portable razor with me whilst out on casual strolls. What began as a hobby has remained an obsession and this obsession is brought to you in living color here on Ubu Web." As part of the workshop for EPE, we decided to collect some of the flyers on this Ubu Web page. Then we distorted them to make funny or political messages. These messages are part of the current events of our lives in Esad Valence and in our society.

On the homepage, the students chose to display stacks and fragments of the compositions they created by hand—cutting, gluing, drawing—and then scanned. Visitors can explore these works and view their animated construction process. Each composition is paired with a pictogram—printable on the reverse side—designed in a style reminiscent of the street and the original location of the sourced materials. On the webpage, you can access, download, and print different PDF booklets: one featuring the original flyers, and others showcasing the students’ reinterpretations. Through this act of sharing and reappropriation, they aimed to encourage visitors to engage with the process themselves—or at the very least, to take a stance on what is being presented.

https://epe.esad-gv.fr/projets/iaoweto/

Concrete Poetry

Dorine Bernard (Esad•V), Eya Bouaziz (Isams), Mélanie Rodrigues (Esad•V), Berke Cinarli (IzmirEko-VCD)

Based on a collection of concrete poems retrieved from Ubu Web, the project was to produce two complementary editorial objects. The printed object is conceived as an assembly of several formats in a folded document. The large sheet is printed on both sides. On the front, a graphic composition conceived by the students from fragments of concrete poems created with typewriters is silk-screened. On the reverse side, theoretical texts about concrete poetry are displayed like a newspaper, but in two languages: French on the left and Arabic on the right. The accompanying images are also screen-printed. Inside the folded format, there are formats with a screen-printed visual composition on the front and a QR-Code on the back, enabling you to listen to the poems being recited online, directly from your smartphone. These small formats are produced from newspaper offcuts, making ingenious use of raw materials.

A website reproduces the composition on the front of the printed format, with the special feature of allowing playback of an audio file, also from Ubu Web. This is a spoken version (close to but not singing) of a concrete poem. A real-time analysis of the rhythmic characteristics and frequencies of the sound being played (FFT) is used to animate the graphic elements on the page. This is an opening (or home) page, which then provides access to the texts presented on the printed object. Both objects offer a media package that highlights a particular Ubu Web collection, and thus highlights the importance and artistic and cultural quality of the content collected on this platform. The technical chain here is quite varied. For the printed object, the text layout was created using Paged.js, then separated into layers to be printed using a digital plotter and, in a second stage, screen-printed by hand. The website's home page was custom-made with source code written for the occasion.

https://epe.esad-gv.fr/projets/waa/

DIVA

ZARCONE Carla (Esad•V) et GUIOL Sarah (Esad•V)

UBU Web's Comics category was a powerful source of inspiration for this group of students. An initial selection of 400 images was made from screenshots, of which 140 were chosen. These visuals were then sorted into six categories: texts, backgrounds, characters, body details, objects and ornamental elements. This sorting process revealed visual and thematic recurrences, including atypical compositions, raw graphic styles and intriguing narrative elements.

From this corpus, Carla and Sarah developed a series of original boards, composed by cutting and reassembling the collected elements. Printing was achieved on a Riso printer, layer by layer, front and back. Two web-to-print models were used. For the front, poster side, the dithering techniques implemented for the Prototypage #1 workshop at Pagora were used to separate the colored layers and dynamically rasterize the images, each of which was placed pseudo-randomly in the page space when the PDF was generated by Paged.js. For the reverse side, an accumulation of three black-and-white image compositions placed in a fixed layout grid was used to define each colored layer for printing: the first page is printed in cyan, the second in yellow overprint, the third also overprinted and in magenta. The technical chain thus blends automation and manual printing, enabling small-scale production of the highest quality.

The project was entitled DIVA, in reference to an urban observation made prior to this workshop: a neon sign in the Gare Saint-Lazare district of Paris, displaying a sexualized female figure under the name “Diva”. This image echoed the recurring representations of the female body observed in the comics studied, notably in Un Faulduo's La historieta en el (Faulduo) mundo moderno or Bernard Joubert's Polyepoxy, where female figures often appear nude or in suggestive postures, sometimes in total contradiction with their narrative environment.

The intention of this project was to question these often stereotyped representations of the female body - whether sexualized or sacralized - and to question their contemporary relevance. By taking the images out of their initial context and reassembling them freely, the aim was to expose, divert and criticize the visual codes that convey fixed gendered roles. Made up of an all-female group with a wide range of sensibilities and backgrounds, this project is part of a critical, feminist approach. It seeks to offer a counter-view of the way women's bodies are represented, manipulated and interpreted in recent graphic productions, particularly in the alternative spheres of comics.

https://epe.esad-gv.fr/projets/diva/

UBU Exquis

MAHE Joachim (Esad•V), SAMIRI Inès (Esad•V), Jed Ben Hmida (Isams) et Bea Ayadi (Isams)

The exquisite corpse is a principle of collective creation inaugurated by the Surrealists “which consists in having a sentence, or a drawing, composed by several people without any of them being able to take into account the previous collaboration or collaborations.” (Le Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme, André Breton, 1938). UBU Exquis is a reworking of this principle, with the ambition of making available some of the visual content gathered on UBU Web. Viewers are invited to select an image from among those online on UBU Web and deposit it in a dedicated zone. Once loaded into the drop zone, the image moves to a temporary storage area and remains displayed. A new image can then be added, replacing the one displayed in the storage area. Only two images are therefore visible in this interface, but in the background, all the images that have been loaded are added to a temporary memory: a long strip of images is thus built up by viewers. This strip of images, accumulated in the manner of an exquisite corpse, is then printed on a small thermal printer, usually used for sales receipts in shops. This ephemeral format is particularly well-suited to fast, light production, for example in public spaces (we're all familiar with the kiosks that distribute stories printed on demand on this type of ticket in public transport shelters or railway stations).

Ideally, such a principle would be integrated directly into the UBU Web site itself, as a form of special layer on top of the original site. While the technical principle of a proposal like this could be found (in the form of a browser extension, for example, or using an iFrame system and some form of exo-menu), a major obstacle quickly became apparent: most of the documents hosted on UBU Web are PDFs. This means that they are stand-alone documents that a web browser can display, but not directly manipulate. Browsers use PDF rendering modules that are totally distinct from HTML. It is therefore impossible, from a browser, to select an image located in a page that is itself included in a PDF document. Once again in EPE, PDF files are a major source of difficulties in designing an editorial proposal.

The prototype we created overcame this problem by separating two different sites. The first consists of a large image gallery displayed in a navigable grid. These images are exported as separate image files from PDF files previously downloaded from UBU Web. By clicking on one of the thumbnails, the image URL is copied to the clipboard, allowing it to be pasted into an editable field for loading into the exquisite corpse interface. Printing on receipts is effective, and allows us to observe surprising objects in their format and medium of presentation.

https://epe.esad-gv.fr/projets/ubuex/

Conclusions and future works

This workshop was designed to confront the students with a realistic external commission: how to showcase a corpus of works by designing a set of media taking advantage of the potential of web-to-print and avoiding traditional DTP software altogether? The results have fulfilled the expectations of the EPE project. Various editorial chains have been implemented, taking advantage of our past experience (CSS/Paged.js layout templates, screening and color layer separation systems) while at the same time exploring strong, so far unexplored hypotheses, combining manual gestures and automated systems. This is probably the aspect that emerges most strongly from this workshop: the power of programmed layout tools is in no way antithetical to more manual, analog techniques. The use of manual screen-printing, often much appreciated by graphic design students for the richness of color it allows, is symptomatic of this collaboration between the digital and the manual. This also confirms our initial hypothesis: mastering the complete technical chain in the production of graphic media enables us to make the best possible adjustments to the resources and raw materials involved.

The final stage of the EPE project is a direct continuation of this prototyping workshop: the final production workshop at the Hexagone theater to showcase their residency activities.