This MLA 2020 roundtable “The Letterpress Studio as Campus Maker Space” features the following speakers
- Ryan Cordell Northeastern U
- Emilie Hardman Massachusetts Inst. of Tech.
- Kirstyn Leuner Santa Clara U
- Andrew Rippeon Davidson C
- Kurt M. Koenigsberger Case Western Reserve U
- Andrew Griffin U of California, Santa Barbara
- Britt Starr U of Maryland, College Park
- Jonathan Senchyne – Respondant, U of Wisconsin, Madison
The title of my talk is “Slow Tech in Silicon Valley”
At Santa Clara University, our press does not have an official mission statement or slogan. But the philosophy that I argue best serves SCU’s letterpress program is “slow tech.” It is also the title of the letterpress course I co-teach with Art Professor Kathy Aoki. The theme of “slow tech” is urgent for us because the Silicon Valley ethos permeates campus life at SCU, which is located in the South Bay Area of California.
Many of our students build their course of study around landing internships and jobs in the local tech industry, and their parents are often attracted to SCU by its location within shouting distance of Google and Apple headquarters in Cupertino and Mountainview. We are “the Jesuit University of Silicon Valley.” In the Valley, digital, high-speed technologies are assumed values, and they have become dangerously welded to humanist understandings of technology, creativity, and communication. As “slow tech,” and some might even say “low-tech,” our 1917 Chandler & Price platen press reminds us that:
- rich and complex content creation does not have to be digital,
- effective messaging does not require instant delivery, and
- there are social networks outside of the internet.
SCU received its letterpress and studio supplies very recently, in the summer of 2018, as a generous donation from local printer Tom Davis. By the Spring of 2019, we ran our first “Slow Tech” letterpress course to immediately get the word out that we now have a press and it is part of the core curriculum and the community. We built our syllabus around the ideas of critical making, letterpress as printing craft, and slowing down to reflect on communication and interactions with technology. We also collaborate closely with the library, leveraging the press as an opportunity to study the history of print and book arts.
Through lessons in print history, we deliver the punch line to our students that they’re taking a class about “slow” technology with a type of press that was invented and honed in the early nineteenth century for speedy commercial printing. Our press is a “New Style” Chandler & Price 8×12 inch platen press, or what is also called a jobbing press, that was commonly used for swift commercial production of printed matter like tickets and advertisements, as well as a lot of stationary or blank forms to fill in, like account sheets, letterhead, and surveys (Gitelman 189-190). Lisa Gitelman writes that ephemera like the products of a jobbing press represent about a third of the historical print economy, but have not really counted as part of “print culture” or textual history because they don’t have publishers, readers, or authors in a traditional, literary sense (189). The message for students is that understandings of “high-speed” and of “text” are constructs determined by capitalism, consumer culture, and especially in our case, geography. With “slow tech” letterpress printing, students can reimagine technology in Silicon Valley before the silicon chip’s invention in the 1960s.
As geographical location in the Bay is an essential part of our press’s philosophy, so is its location on campus. After its donation, the press was temporarily placed in a shared, access-limited printmaking and photography studio of the art building. I am happy to announce that this year, the press will have a new home in SCU’s Maker Lab, which many see as a far better permanent placement. The Maker Lab is in the School of Engineering building and has a very strong engineering and STEM entrepreneurial DIY vibe. Their website boasts recent creations including “robots, water purity testers, devices to process DNA, and a fully-functional prosthetic arm.” Adding the letterpress studio to the Maker Lab will be a step toward balancing STEM notions of creation and innovation with diverse humanist ideas of making derived from language and the arts, historical and cultural studies, literary criticism and theory, philosophy, and political science. It is also an opportunity to cultivate a feminist and anticolonial structure in the Maker Lab. Here I draw on Maya Livio and Lori Emerson’s provocations on feminist labs and Jacque Wernimont and Liz Losh’s essay “Wear and Care Feminisms at a Long Maker Table.” I hope that slow tech will help the Lab become an example of a more transparent, self- and socially-aware, and generous technoculture in the South Bay.
My questions for discussion among us include but are not limited to:
- How do we balance the desire to grant access to the press and studio materials with the challenges of having to manage training, care for the press and supplies, and safety?
- For those of us with newer programs: what measures are you taking to make your program sustainable? At SCU, we made our press part of the Core curriculum as our “Slow Tech” course fulfills an Arts Core requirement, part of established initiatives like the Maker Space, and we host community printing events. I would like to hear more ideas.
- For those who have been part of longer printing programs: what has gone disastrously wrong? What have you learned as a scholar-printer-teacher of letterpress?
- How much printing of your own projects do you honestly (really!) do? How do you make time to print when, especially for the untenured, book arts projects will be extremely challenging to justify as scholarship.
- Comment: I think most if not all of us here are scholars or librarians first and printers and bookmakers second. By bringing and promoting letterpress on campus, and teaching it, I feel strongly that we are also committing to being well trained in best practices in the craft, and practicing that craft with our own projects.
Kirstyn Leuner, Associate Professor, Santa Clara University 