• Thu 25 04 2019 •
COPY IT On the invention of the modern photocopy – Edith Weyde and Chester F. Carlson

With KLAUS URBONS

18:00

Venue: Academyspace, Herwarthstraße 3, 50672 Köln
In German language
Free admission


Copy machines have become indispensable in everyday life. Whether in offices, schools, at the doctor’s or at home – easy to use, they enable the reproduction of documents and drive artistic interventions such as copy art.

But we rarely consider the origins of modern copying processes. Familiar and worn out, these processes are only visible to us as the repetition of profane ‘copying rituals’. We shall discover that the techniques they produce are far more complex than they seem, and that fascinating stories of their development wait to be discovered. In his lecture, KLAUS URBONS – artist, author, curator, graphic designer and founder of the photocopying museum Museum für Fotokopie in Mülheim an der Ruhr – explores these stories, which are missing from the collective memory of our time.

The protagonists of his narratives are the German chemist Edith Weyde and the American physicist and patent attorney Chester F. Carlson. Their biographies overlap at the very point where the history of modern photocopying begins...


In cooperation with Museum für Fotokopie/ Macroscope e.V.