Underline Studio printed a media-art retrospective in silver ink and plastic paper

A bilingual catalogue for 'Les Levine: Transmedia 1964–1974', a retrospective of the artist widely recognized as a founder of media art, whose late-1960s work spanned disposable art, media sculpture and software segments.

Let the book's materials restate the art: industrial silver ink that shifts like early video monitors, plastic-paper tip-ins you touch like Levine's sculpture plastics

A distorted-lens black-and-white portrait of Levine wraps the cover over an industrial silver ground, cinched by a red bellyband printing his text piece ALL STAR CAST in three columns. Giant full-height numerals divide the chapters, with synthetic plastic tip-ins and coarse halftone archival spreads inside.

Abduzeedo's review called it a masterclass in editorial design; the plastic tip-ins let readers directly handle the material class of Levine's sculptures, which no reproduction conveys.

For 'Les Levine: Transmedia 1964–1974', a retrospective at Oakville Galleries devoted to the artist widely recognized as a founder of media art, Underline Studio designed a bilingual catalogue whose materials carry the argument. Levine pioneered disposable art, media sculpture and software segments in the late 1960s, and the studio answered with industrial finishes instead of conventional art-book stocks.

The cover wraps a distorted-lens black-and-white portrait of Levine across an industrial silver-ink ground, cinched by a bold red bellyband printed in three dense columns with Levine's text piece ALL STAR CAST. Giant full-height numerals divide chapters such as Beginnings, Disposables and Software, above curatorial essays by Sarah Robayo Sheridan, Dennis Young and Sunny Kerr.

The material choices are the point: the metallic silver ink shifts in natural gallery light, echoing early video monitors, and synthetic plastic-paper tip-ins interrupt the page turns so readers handle the plastics Levine used in his sculptures. Coarse halftone printing runs across the archival spreads.

Levine's medium was media itself — disposable art, media sculpture, software — so the studio chose substrates like silver ink and plastic paper that behave like his materials, not neutral book stock.

The distorted-lens portrait and the ALL STAR CAST bellyband put the artist's own image and words into physical tension with the metallic surface, mirroring the confrontational streak of his work.

Plastic tip-ins turn reading into touching: the reader handles the same class of material as the sculptures, which photography alone cannot deliver.

A design can argue the exhibition's thesis with its own materials: when the subject is media experiments, industrial inks and plastic pages make the reader's hands the evidence.

The catalogue accompanies the Oakville Galleries retrospective; Abduzeedo featured the design on 10 October 2026 under the heading 'Masterclass in Editorial Design'. No sales or award figures have been reported.