Atypo was a virtual publishing project operating in the early 2010s, somewhere between artist’s books, post-digital theory, and applied misbehavior. It treated the book not as a stable object, but as a process: something generated through code, circulation, printing, and occasional conceptual leakage.
Approach
Bringing together figures such as Giacomo Verde, Marcantonio Lunardi, Luca Leggero, and Les Liens Invisibles, Atypo used print-on-demand platforms and hybrid editorial strategies to produce books that were physical, reproducible, and slightly incompatible with traditional publishing logic. Its aim: artist’s books that “e-books cannot yet replicate”.
Its works moved between archive and glitch, documentation and fabrication, asking a simple question in increasingly complicated ways: what can a book still do after the digital has already happened?
Selected books
Unhappening, not here, not now — Les Liens Invisibles. An online-printed catalogue of 100 non-existent “works of art”, generated with a text generator and images from Google Images.
Multi Book: Italian Table 2001/2011 — Giacomo Verde. Born as video frames printed on transparent sheets laid over a dinner table, then expanded into three book versions on Lulu.com, including a cookbook pairing political images with recipes.
Philatelic Album: 20 Years of Berlusconismo in Italy (1994–2011) — Marcantonio Lunardi.
L’Arte delle mine — Luca Leggero and Luca Giorgi.
Presentations and exhibitions
transmediale 2013 (Berlin, HKW, 31 January 2013) — workshop Atypo.org: artist’s books in the post digital era, with Giacomo Verde, Les Liens Invisibles, and Luca Leggero, exploring the “material/immaterial codes” behind the books.
Atypo Call 01 (Studio Gennai Arte Contemporanea, Pisa, 14 February – 8 March 2014) — a “post-publishing” group show of artists’ books by seven invited artists: Enrico Boccioletti, Marco Cadioli, Massimo Cittadini, Delio Gennai, Ilaria Sabbatini, tekiuen, Tatiana Villani. Curated by Silvana Vassallo and Alessandra Ioalé.
Atypo did not defend the printed page out of nostalgia. It used it as a temporary surface where software, memory, politics, and matter could briefly agree to coexist.