Yeah! A review, publish on the page of Neural.
monochrom #26-34: Ye Olde Self-Referentiality
Printing a 500-page book using the look and feel of a nineties xeroxed fanzine, with an impressive number of essays is a clear statement in 2010. This is not meant to be an outrageously expensive art book for collectors, nor a sleek coffee table book to be flipped through in an alternative club. It is instead an overstuffed repository of underground culture (they’re ironically defining it “in telephone book format”), in the same form monochrom collective used to make their homonymous zine. Monochrom was a visionary zine printed in the nineties one issue at time with a reasonable amount of pages. As with similar publishing efforts, like the US-based zine “Iron Feather Journal” they helped to introduce the readers to the underground “cyberculture.” But this book is not at all about nostalgia, it is thoroughly contemporary. Creating a different graphic layout for every article, it is even reinforcing the concept that it’s not monographic at all. Monochrom has always distinguished itself for its heterogeneity of topics. Here they range as usual from politics to science fiction, from sex to sociology, from pop to modern history, and from sex to film criticism. A few titles (there’s no page numbering and so no index) are: “A pilot study on the philosophy of life of schizophrenics”, “Hacking the Spaces”, “Existential game-show experiments”, “An (anti)history of Rave”, etc… Ideally grouping nine issues, this book is a cornucopia of stimulating content, hard to find anywhere else.