From print process pictures to generative overprintings in Hansjörg Mayer’s titles of the 1960s

This article reflects on aspects of the early titles of the Anglo-German poet, publisher and typographer Hansjörg Mayer (b.1943). It traces connections between his early ‘print process pictures’ of the 1960s and the generative overprinting techniques he developed in solo and semi-autonomous works later in the decade. Mayer transformed defective rollers, fading ink and superimposed letterforms into sources of aesthetic possibility. Situating these experiments within the intersecting fields of concrete poetry, serial music and Max Bense’s generative aesthetics, the article examines Mayer’s engagement with the Brazilian poets Haroldo and Augusto de Campos. Particular attention is given to his reworkings of Augusto’s ‘Lygia fingers’ and ‘luxo lixo’, in which repeated impressions and typographical variations produce increasingly complex visual structures. By elevating properties and processes little used in industrial contexts, Mayer unsettled conventional relationships between legibility, authorship and form. His works reveal print as an open, emergent medium, complicating any clean division between the Gutenberg era and the developing logic of digital technologies.