Visual satirist and designer Josh Gosfield recently discovered the wonders of RISO, or Risograph, a compact, high speed printer made by the Riso Kagaku Corporation of Japan, that makes making zines as easy as pushing a button. His first project is The Atlas of Emotions, which he explains below. Gosfield, the artist-in-residence at SVA’s RisoLab, believes that RISO is a “wonder” to work with (especially for the DIYer), yet just as engaging for him is the incredible hive-like community of RISO-obsessives. “Yeah,” he told me, “it’s a whole other (non-digital) world!” Here’s more of what he had to say…
What inspired you to reveal your Emotions in this printed zine?
When I was invited to be an artist-in-residence at SVA’s RISO lab, I had to come up with an idea for a zine. My first idea was called The Atlas of Imaginary Places. Why? Because living in this time, when so many people are so disenchanted with The-Way-Things-Are, I thought it would be interesting to create whacked-out Dr. Seuss meets Dr. Escher cityscapes and landscapes based on the kind of places we’d actually like to live in. But when I started sketching out some of these ideas—The City of Dreams, The Garden of Fallen Egos, Heavy Metal Mountain and Tequila Fields—I just wasn’t, you know, feeling them. Then I thought, OK, Josh, maybe if you could infuse these landscapes with emotion—you know, create places like the Lagoon of Lust, the Valley of Tears and the Laughing Forest—then maybe you’ll be more excited to draw them. But then I weirdly felt like I was serving two masters: the Landscapes and the emotions. And I wasn’t doing justice to either one of them. It dawned on me then that what I really cared about was the emotions. I mean, come on, everyone lives in a world of emotions, both their own emotions and the emotions of the people around them, so it’s a subject absolutely everyone can relate to. I said goodbye to the concept of the Landscape and hitched my star to the Emotions.
You did retain the idea of the atlas. Why an atlas?
The purpose of an atlas is to map out the world and make it known. So why not do that for emotions? Emotions are, of course, not an outer landscape, but an inner landscape of feelings that can tower over us like mountains, swell up like rivers, blow like balmy breezes or erupt like volcanoes. How cool would it be to try and depict emotions—the big ones, such as love, pleasure and pain, as well as the more obscure ones such as wanderlust, curiosity and inspiration—in a way that could, even for a split second, encourage a reader to see, feel and understand that emotion, and maybe even marinate in the sense of that emotion for a spell. Now I had an idea that excited me.
You often have a gritty approach to your work. How is this different?
I’ve done many portraits of people. And with every portrait I always ask myself the same question: In their dreams, how would this subject like to be represented? I asked this same question of these emotions. Hey, Love (or Disgust or Loneliness), if I made art about you, how would you like to be represented?
It seemed some emotions wanted to be depicted simply, subtly and cleanly, others chaotically or colorfully or in your face, and some, like love, just wanted to be represented with type, hold the images please.
Asking this question had the surprising effect upon me of releasing me and restraining me from my typically over-the-top, leave-no-white-space-untouched depictions of things. After all, who am I to question what Pleasure or Pain wants?
Tell me what it feels like working on the RISO printer?
At SVA’s RISO lab, I fell in love! My crush was 3′ 6″ tall, 57 inches wide and weighed 250 pounds. She (or he, if you prefer) was called RISO. She’s a Japanese printer. Although she is a somewhat homely, box-like contraption, she became for me a most passionate and capricious lover.
The stuff that RISO could do! The rich textures she could create were both majestic and gritty; the color combos she could make evoked everything from glorious sunsets to mystifying fog banks to garish products on supermarket shelves.
But on the other hand, the trials RISO could put you through! It turns out RISO is one temperamental #$@&%*! You spend your printing time shoving ink drums shaped liked small torpedoes in and out of the machine and talking to her through the buttons of her control panel. But there are days when she decides to jam your papers, smear your images, disobey your requests, or just refuses to even play with you and shuts down like that and stops talking to you.
Fortunately the SVA RISO lab is run by an incredible crew of cool-headed, RISO-wise artist/technicians who know how to sweet talk the machine to get you back in her good favor. Without the help of Sarula Bao, Aidan Fitzgerald, Sabii Borno and the director of the Lab, Panayiotis Terzis, there would be no Atlas of Emotions.
The lab itself is an artistic beehive. In the two small rooms you’ll find SVA students, continuing ed students and artists churning out zines, prints and whatnots on the four RISO machines that clatter rhythmically like Industrial Age mechanical devices. Other artists are spread around folding, stapling and using a giant cutter to trim their work. And it’s all offline, existing in that old-fashioned analog world, which was, once upon a time, as you know, where everything used to happen.
Is there a follow up to this in the works? If so, what?
The challenge of depicting emotions was artistically and creatively invigorating and the response has been so overwhelming that I hope to keep going, depicting more and more emotions. After all, even though I called this zine The Atlas of Emotions, I only depicted 12 emotions. There are hundreds (maybe thousands?) of emotions inside of us—some that don’t even have words in the English language to describe them—so it’s a project that could engage me and stay fresh for years. I’d love to create more zines (which is why I called this “Volume One”), as well as turn the concept into a coffee-table type book. (Hello? Are there any publishers out there?)
