This artist’s book by Cédric Eisenring interweaves printed graphics created by means of used industrial metal templates with Photoshop drawings appropriated from the dregs of the entertainment industry. The Swiss artist scratches and etches this “trash for all” (as German novelist Rainald Goetz called his 1998 blog about contemporary culture) — digitally generated figurative motifs — directly onto the metal templates.

The works are presented anew in Eisenring — a book that serves as a kind of psychedelic stage: its décor and atmosphere comprise the patinated metal plates, whose punched-out portions evoke the ashtrays, ticket machines and train carriages they once served to manufacture. In Eisenring’s works, the templates become blank spaces, and yet these mechanical-organic patterns serve as vessels transporting us to alternative narrative realms and levels.

The punched-out portions are embossed on digital drawings and reproductions of Eisenring’s artworks in this book. Now taking shape as under a magnifying glass, they develop a spatio-haptic language. This industrial braille rhythmizes and provides a running commentary on the printed pictures through an onomatopoetic and repetitive form of visual babble.

If culture is reified work, then it is haunted by all its unkept promises and unrealized dreams. These ghosts of lost futures haunt Eisenring as well — between mass media fossils and increasingly obsolete industrial surfaces.