2009

The six editions of this double-sided broadsheet were produced by Dexter Sinister during Performa 09, a biennial festival of performance art in New York. That year’s edition was being programmed to celebrate the centenary of Futurism, heralded by F.T. Marinetti’s statement of intent on the cover of Le Figaro in 1909. In tribute, Performa invited us to produce a newspaper, and we proposed to make one about the news industry itself—which back then was painfully working through the paradigm shift from physical to digital, while the validity of the Fourth Estate was being called into question. 

Working for three weeks from a pop-up space in the Port Authority Bus Terminal opposite The New York Times, we gathered a circle of writers from outside the news industry—artists, critics, etc.—to approach the topic from a “disinterested” vantage. Each edition was then produced in pronounced realtime by a small team working directly onto a broadsheet template that fostered collective editing at 1:1 scale. The layouts were first assembled as physical paste-up sheets, then remade as digital PDFs in order to both send to print and circulate online. Six editions were published over three weeks, and a few months later the outcome was reconstituted as Dot Dot Dot 19.

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