Leopold Lenzgeiger
Leopold Lenzgeiger

This magazine is about failed communication. It is a tribute to the absurd theater and specifically to Eugène Ionesco's play "The bald Soprano".

Its content complements very well J. L. Austins speech act theory. In this play there are people babbling without communicating anything reasonable.

I disrupted the communication between text and image by splitting it into two parts and leaving white space behind. The parting is also bespoken in the content, at the end of the play it says, that everything begins from the start.

I created the imagery by staging absurd objects and let them "speak“ for themself. Therefor I used in every photo as much protagonists as used in the play and let them act always on the same stage to imitate the one room in which every takes place.

Leopold Lenzgeiger

This is one of the results of my fourth semester in typography that took place in summer 2012. It was part of my "Vordiplom" in Sandra Hoffmann Robbianis course. The topic of this semester was the episode and the subtopic the book "How to do Things with Words" by John Langshaw Austin. The episodical medium of this course was the "little magazine".

J. L. Austin was an language philosopher and founder of the speech act theory. This theory simplified says, that speech is not only describing reality, but does also change reality.

Little Magazines are simply said magazines, that were published by unknown authors to spread and share a specific idea. Also known as "Zines“. Every week we got an assignment and had to design and print a little magazine until the next week.

The zine was printed using a color photocopier that only prints one color at a time. That is why the positions of blue and yellow elements don't align perfectly.