Throw Shapes, an online culture zine, has featured the Big Fag Press in its latest issue. You can read the article - cum - interview with Lucas and Kernow here. Please take any glorified or potentially silly statements we make with a grain of salt, woncha??
It also features news on the exciting new addition to the family, the Fagette, the BFP’s little sister.
The Fagette Duplicator, recently acquired “little sister of the big fag press” was launched last week at the LiveZine Printacular Event.
The night was a big success, we raised some sorely-needed funds to go towards paying off the machine, and a hilarious evening was had by all. See more pictures here.
The above picture shows Pam and Michael from Imagetec showing Sarah the ropes on the new riso machine. Imagetec sold us the printer, and have been super-supportive in helping us get it up and running, not to mention showering us with free accessories.
Incidentally, if anyone is interested and inspired to get involved, the Fagette still needs fund-injections to help get it on its feet. Please do get in touch if you’d like to give or lend us some cash to support DIY printing in Sydney!
The BIG FAG PRESS now has a little sister, the Fagette Duplicator. Where the BIG FAG is optimised for slowness, and bigness, the Fagette is super for quick and small. What’s more, it’s easy to use, and prints in a glorious array of multi-colour. Ya gotta see this baby in operation! Which brings us to…
The Fagette LiveZINE Spectacular!
Fagette LiveZINE – making the stage a page! The LiveZINE is an infotainment printacular - with audience and presenters alike contributing to an instantaneously published magazine. Expect to be entertained, challenged, inspired, and take home your own copy of the LiveZINE at the end of the night!
The LiveZINE brings together performers, pop music samplers, cartoonists, zinesters, big minds and the terminally curious for a huge night of entertainment. Come one, come all!
Come and join us on the PACT Theatre bleachers. Make history!
Print where no printer has ever dared to print before!
17th June PACT Theatre.
107 Railway Pde Erskineville
Tues 17 June 2008, 8pm
$7 and cheap drinks!
www.fagette.net
Vancouver artist Geoffrey Farmer has just printed up a limited edition of poster prints on the Big Fag Press, entitled “Cockatoo Clock”.
It’s a poster for a sort of “fictional play” which happens (or maybe doesn’t happen) within the wall cavities of the Museum of Contermporary Art. The poster will be part of an installation at the MCA for the 2008 Sydney Biennale.
This was a 2 colour print, solid yellow with solid black overprinting, and a little cockatoo image in the bottom right hand corner. We printed an edition on fabriano paper, and a further small set of prints were done on heavy gloss coated stock.
See some more images of the print in progress, and the finished product…
Backgammon Saloon
8pm TUES 3rd June ‘08
Sydney, 302 Cleveland Street, Sth West Surry Hills
The backgammon Saloon is a super fun night with lots of backgammon, consuming a whole bunch of alcohol (or turkish tee if you dont want to drink) and an outlandish performance. We’ve made a whole lot of screenprinted backgammon boards, a rules of play instruction sheet and also made backgammon pieces by spray painting beer caps for the evening.
There will be backgammon sets and tshirts for sale on the evening to raise money for the Fagette Duplicator!
For more information see below for a description of the Fagette Duplicator. Also be sure to check out the SYDNEY website http://www.officialsydney.com and the Fagette Duplicator site http://www.fagette.net
The Fagette Duplicator: Little sister of The Big Fag, and the bastard child of social media!
The Fagette is a ’stencil press’ that prints a unique and beautiful quality. Stencil presses are best known to most of us through the old Gestetner machines that once sat in the offices of our schools before the photocopier came along. These machines are still used in many schools and churches however the technology has dramatically improved. Stencil presses are now digital, multi-colour, high definition, and incredibly fast, making them ideal for just-in-time, fast, and easy printed matter. From book-making to printing zines, posters and flyers, The Fagette Duplicator will deliver again and again and again – and again.
The Fagette IS social media involving arts-anti-heroes, metropolitan activists, underground writers, urban researchers, garage rockers and self-publishers of all walks.
The home of The Fagette is Little Fish Gallery at 22 Enmore Rd. Come by and have a look!
The launch of our big brochure was a big success! We sold out of our “first printing” brochures, with a list of orders for the second printing. They are now available so contact us if you would like to buy one (they are ten dollars each, and feature a bonus B1 sized collectable poster -see images above and below).
Meanwhile, the brochure is online page by page as images here. Click on each page to advance forward.
BIG FAG PRESS presents the launch of its special edition, collectable, snazzy, BIG FAG PRESS BROCHURE as BIG POSTER
To be opened by Glenn Barkley, curator at the MCA and one of the most prominent collectors of zine, posters and art ephemera.
BIG FAG PRESS is a collectively owned, ethically operated, non-profit community printing press. No other such organisation has existed in Sydney for many years. Whilst much publicity and communication activity for community groups and artists has shifted its focus to an online environment, there is clearly still a need for physical, enduring documents which are, importantly, artworks in themselves.
The gala event will launch a BIG FAG PRESS brochure that folds out to a massive A1+ poster, showing what the press is capable of. A collection of the press’ output to-date will also be on exhibition.
The launch will also be the chance for the collective to introduce its latest development, THE ACQUISITION OF A RISO MACHINE!, (to be called Fagette - Little sister of the Big Fag!) therefore expanding the facilities of the press and giving an extra needed push to Sydney’s independent media.
This project was assisted by a grant from Arts NSW, an agency of the New South Wales Government, through a program administered by the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA)
[Above: stencil poster produced by Street Art Workers of San Francisco].
On January 28th, 2008, Claude Moller came and gave a talk at Sydney, an event co-presented by Big Fag Press.
Claude is an artist from San Francisco, and he spoke about the
Street Art Workers (SAW) ) and their Land and Globalization poster campaign. His presentation involved a provocative discussion about how we might judge “quality” in poster aesthetics. We also debated the effectiveness of art as activism (and vice versa).
A founding member of SAW, Claude presented the DIY entrepreneurial strategies employed by the group, and showed slides documenting their large scale international poster project.
More about SAW:
Established in the U.S. in 2001, SAW is a global network of artists who use graphic art to support social change. SAW makes and distributes posters internationally to publicize the work of local grassroots activism. The group relies on street art to take back cities and towns from the businessmen, cops, and politicians who
define public space for their own benefit. Since 2001, SAW projects have talked about prisons, the mass media, and utopian ideas for the future.
SAW’s latest campaign, Land and Globalization, looks at how corporate globalization has affected our world, how it has impacted the land, and how people are fighting back. This series includes 25 posters representing artists from 10 different countries and over 20 different cities. These posters illustrate specific struggles in countries like Brazil and the United States, and they also tackle international issues around poverty and gentrification. Along with a strong critique of imperialism, the posters show how communities throughout the world are resisting corporate power for a more just and sustainable world.
Claude’s work has been featured in numerous magazines and books, including Stencil Pirates, The Interventionists and Peace Signs.
Back in 2004, when Mickie went to auction to bid on the Big Fag Press, no-one else wanted it and so we got it for a song! One ole timer printing fella shuffled over to him, sized him up, and said “I guess we’re gonna see your handy work on telegraph poles around town then, eh?”
At the time, we would have said yes. But strangely, this poster by James Dodds is the first that has been designed specifically with poles in mind. Here he is, in the photo above, showing the print that he produced on the press (later to be guillotined in half of course). Note its three colour design: two colours off metal plates, and the third colour produced using hand-cut “ruby”, thus keeping the cost down! The gap at the bottom of the poster is for him to insert info about his upcoming events, whatever they might be, using a fat marker pen.
Notice the scratches on the right hand poster James is holding up? Well, in the process of handling the fragile metal plate, James put a scratch on it. Naturally that small scratch shows up in the print. So rather than throw in the towel, or a tantrum, he went along with it, using sandpaper to enhance the scratch effect and make it part of his overall design.
There has been a request for clear info about how to prepare your file for print. Here is a basic set of instructions.
1. If you are working with scanned images, scan them at the highest resolution. The images should be at at least 300dpi at the final size they will be printed. That is, if the original image is 10cm high, but you are intending to print it at 20cm high, then you should scan it at 600dpi minimum.
2. If your print is more than one colour, perform the colour separations on the image. Follow the tutorial linked here.
3. Prepare your print in Illustrator or Quark or similar programme, if you need to add text or vector graphics or combine images etc. Set the document up as CMYK not RGB. Set the size of the document - the maximum printable area of the press is 1000X700mm - but if you can, make it smaller. This size is slightly larger than A1. Remember to consider what paper you will be printing on. Is the available paper at a corresponding size to your print image?
4. Export the file to a PDF - if your PDF is in CMYK, that’s fine. The platemaker will divide the CMYK image into four plates (or fewer plates if there are less than 4 colours).
5. If you are having troubles, email info@bigfagpress.org making sure you leave plenty of time for troubleshooting before your deadline.
[NB: Mickie has made some addenda below in the comments!]
