Rotator Magazine: Print is Dead! Long Live Print!

Posted October 11, 2011 by Kate Albert Ward

If you’re reading this online magazine, I don’t think I have to tell you that the state of printed media is pretty dismal. As we become accustomed to exclusively consuming words and images digitally, it’s easy forget that there are certain things that print media does well.

Really well. Much better than digital in fact.

Print allows for large luscious images, luxuriously saturated with color. Paper size and quality further shape the feel of handling printed materials. Processed with eyes and hands, I imagine how different areas of my brain light up, like a riot in a fireworks warehouse, as I see and touch printed images and text.

To take advantage of what print does well and to celebrate what can happen through collaboration, a group of local artists, writers, photographers and graphic designers have come together to create Rotator Magazine.

The list of collaborators includes, but is not limited to: Mary Boone, Art Chantry, Dennis Flannigan, Waymond Hampton, Brian Hutcheson, Eric Jacobsen, Lance Kagey, Tyler Kalberg, Tom Llewellyn, Chloe and Chelsie Scheffe, James Stowe, Michael Sullivan, Dan Voelpel, and Adam Welch.

I met with Executive Producer Lance Kagey, Editorial Curator Tom Llewellyn, Creative Director Adam Welch and Art Curator Brian Hutcheson  over beers– which incidentally is how the whole idea for the magazine started less than a year ago– and poured over the printer’s proof of Rotator that had arrived just an hour earlier from Color Graphics in Seattle.

Form as Function
Like a phoenix coming out of the ashes, Rotator emerges as something brilliant and remarkable because the magazine as we have known it is dead. This venture re-imagines the magazine primarily as an art form rather than a news source.

The visually rich Rotator Magazine comes wrapped in a letterpress cover. Inside, office clips bind a series of loose leaf pages. This presentation makes it possible for the magazine owner to display specific pages without guilt or regret induced by harming any of part of it. Each sheet is marked with page numbers and  the traditional terms recto (front/right) and verso (back/left) should you desire to reassemble the magazine. Or you can just buy two!

Magazine. Art.
Art. Magazine.

Okay, here’s where I get really art history geeky. Avert your eyes if necessary. A friend of mine from grad school, a current MFA student taking printmaking, recently lamented to me that prints are hung on walls. I reminded her that it wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that prints were mounted in a gallery setting. Previously, prints were bound together or collected in a portfolio, rendering the experience of looking at them tactile and intimate.

Admittedly a tenuous comparison, I can’t help but see a parallel between the shifting of the artist print from hand to wall, and the transition of print media from palm to screen. In both cases, our hands are left grasping thin air.

Rotator Magazine collapses these distinct experiences by serving simultaneously as art to be held, framed, and viewed online. True to their vision, the online iteration of the magazine will not simply replicate the printed magazine, but instead focus on what the internet does well, such as interaction and moving parts. (If the concept of internet art seems completely foreign to you, consider reviewing the last fifteen years of artist web projects in the Dia Art Foundation’s online database.)

The online version will also support the print version, such as by providing a pdf of “Love/Hate,” an article by former State Representative Dennis Flannigan that in print appears as the handwriting of Chelsea Scheffe. Though it might be easier to read the article online, Llewellyn commented that “If you read the article in print, you will remember the experience like reading a letter from your grandma.”

Like a letter from your MeMa, the captivating and compelling visuals promise to make Rotator Magazine something you will want to hold on to.

Revising the Vision
Rotator Magazine‘s impulse to re-vision traditional media ties into the theme of the first issue: “Burning the Blueprints of Paradise.” The theme addresses the concept of origin stories that explain why things are the way they are, and how they differ from what they were meant to be because something went awry. In doing so, however, they highlight how going astray from the original design can produce wonderfully surprising and admirable results.

The article “Burning the Blueprints of Paradise” by Michael Sullivan exemplifies the theme as it tells the tale of a carefully articulated plan for the City of Tacoma that was never realized. In 1873, the renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted– most famous for his designs for Central  Park in New York City and the grounds of our nation’s capital in Washington D.C.– proposed a plan for “New Tacoma” that functioned in harmony with the natural landscape.

The Northern Pacific Railroad and Tacoma Land Company rejected the plan, favoring instead the grid pattern we live with today. Some may decry the rejection of Olmsted’s plan, but as Tom Llewellyn pointed out, if it had gone into practice, “I probably couldn’t afford to live here!”

An insert in the front of the magazine can be removed and constructed into a diorama of Olmsted’s “New Tacoma.” Brian Hutcheson, the designer of the diorama, described it as “an interpretation of what the city might look like if Olmsted’s plan did actually happen. The point of view represented would be from somewhere around the history museum or port looking up the hill at the city.”

It’s easy to see that Tacoma evolved into something different than what Olmsted originally envisioned, but any city, no matter how carefully planned, will have faults. Perhaps it is a tendency to prefer the flaws I know than ones I can only imagine, but I like how Tacoma has turned out despite her faults.

Tacoma and Beyond
Though Tacoma-biased, Kagey noted “We don’t shy away from the negative. This is not a tourist brochure about Tacoma.” “And it’s not all about Tacoma,” added Llewellyn.

Rotator Magazine covers art, music, design, and “anti-suburban” topics that range in location from Portland to Vancouver, B.C. For example, the inaugural issue will include “The Thorniley Collection of Antique Type,” an article paired with graphic design worthy of the over 1,500 hand-carved fonts in wooden and metal blocks found in Kent, WA.

And out of Portland comes an article about Tor Clausen who designs musical furniture; A coffee table can double as a series of percussion instruments and a bench can sound like a xylophone with each slat of the seat tuned to a different note.

Launch Party
You can engage with these stories and many more starting October 14, 2011 at Rotator Magazine’s launch party: 7pm at Fulcrum Gallery, one of the selected points of sale of the magazine.

At $20 and with only 500 editions available, Rotator Magazine is likely to disappear fast. Consider getting a prepaid subscription to the quarterly magazine to guarantee future issues will be yours.

You can also look for Rotator Magazine at “Get Excited: Advancing Print Arts in Tacoma” on November 9, 2011. For more details, follow this link: “A Vision for a Print Arts Center.”

Update:

Even if you couldn’t make the launch party last night, be sure to stop by Fulcrum and pick up your copy of Rotator Magazine. The website, rotatormagazine.com, is now up and running and serves as another way you can purchase the magazine.

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