The absence of the image

Jacob Kadrmas was another fellow student of mine who did a remarkable concept for the yearbook of the Theater Basel in the context of the typography class at the Academy of Art and Design Basel.

His approach deals with the absence of the image. The image as a medium of conservation of unique moments in time goes against the principles of the way the yearbook of the theater, which basically provides previews of the plays of the coming season, is conceived . Before the yearbook is published images of the presented future events don't exist yet. So Jacob created a book without any images but with areas left blank to affix them later on. Like we know it from the famous Panini albums the book would be released with a bunch of stickers. Images taken from video stills of the DVD included in the book would be splitted and randomly printed on perforated self-adhesive sheets. These stickers were the basic set for the reader to introduce him to the idea of collecting the absent images and to complete the book by applying them to the marked areas.


These given images are placed in the parts of the book where the more constant information is presented. The stickers for the part which contains th season previews would be handed out directly to the reader as he was going to the theater to watch one of the plays.

Besides motivating the reader to go to the theater the concept wants him to deal deliberately with the image as a carrier of information about passed events. Also the visitor acquires impressions in a materialized form which fills up the more abstract structure given by the book with the concrete experience. The aspect of a jigsaw puzzle, the pieces of which have to be collected or earned in a way, marks out this approach as a very playfull one.

The DVD is embedded to a hole punched out of the first few pages of the book. These pages contain information about the chapters the contents of the dvd are divided into.