The worlds thickest block calendar is finished. Last week was spend on printing the 2865 pages, perforating them and constructing the calendar. The printing turned out to be more of a challenge then expected.
The inner peace visualisation consists of several layers of circles with varying transparency. Printing those pages resulted in extra thick lines in other parts of the print. To solve this the layers had to be flattened and saved in a PDF 1.3 document. As it took me quite some time to figure out how this is done, this is how I solved it. I opened the document in Acrobat and saved it as a PostScript file. I then opened it in Acrobat Distiller and saved it as PDF/X-3:2002. The whole process took a couple of hours because hundreds of pages had to be flattened. It took the printer around 8 hours to print the whole document! Thanks again to Tiggelman, they’ve done a great job.
After the printing was done I went to the print workshop at St Joost art academy, thanks to John too. Here I perforated 1400 pages by hand with the nice stamp perforation. After I got the hang of it and managed to perforate 4 or 5 leaves at a time it only took me around 6 hours in total.
Then the pages and tab sheets had to be cut and drilled (also done by Tiggelman). I then had two big stacks of pages which had to put into the right order. I then added the tabs and noted the years on them.
The final challenge was to actually build the calendar by pushing the pipes through the drill holes and slowly building one big stack. I had to use small stacks of around 50 pages. The whole was secured by using a long piece of threaded end inside the pipe and rings with wing nuts. Inside the pipe was also strong rope to hang the calendar from the ceiling.
Looking forward to the exhibition: FINAL SHOW 20 april – 23 june at Lokaal 01, Kloosterlaan 138, Breda. Together with 200 other artists.
