Automaton is a silk screen print studio based in central Oslo, established in the summer of 2008. After long discussions about the inadequate facilities that are currently available, we thought what was needed was a workshop where all are welcome, where it doesn't cost the earth and where help is available. OK, these are the early days and things are pretty simple at the moment, but we exist.

We’re all kitted up for flat stock printing but we're pretty flexible and if necessary we can develop a custom solution according to your needs.

If you’d like to print something with our help or if you’d like to come in and use the equipment, send us an e-mail and we’ll get in touch and work something out

Long time no speak…Greetings!

The workshop has now been closed for almost a year, my how time goes by! But we've not been lazy. During the years in which Automaton was active we struggled with two major problems: finance and a permanent place to work. It's been a long journey but we can see the light.

 

Automaton is now officially dead… but FELLESVERKSTEDET lives!

 

www.fellesverkstedet.no

Ok so the Sandakerveien workshop is now closed and all of our equipment has been moved into storage… sad… but… we´re working on something new that we´re rather excited about…et fellesverksted.

For those of you who don´t speak Norwegian it roughly translates as an open, communal, shared workshop. I guess it sounds a lot like what we´ve been doing over the last few years. However it´s different, it´s a much bigger idea, something that we´ve wanted to do for a long time. Now we´re talking about departments, not just screen printing, but carpentry, metal work, ceramics, electronics etc. A workshop where you can make anything!

We´ve got a group of really smart people together and the basic idea is down on paper. We´ve got a whole series of meetings lined up with various institutions, unions, schools, galleries, the local council and many others. We´re putting the idea out there in real world in order to get some feedback, have a discussion and collect information.

If you´re interested, download the pamphlet and have a read.
If you want to help, send us your comments, ideas and thoughts.
If you´d like to take part, download the questionnaire, fill it in and send it back to us.

Download pamphlet (norsk)
Downland questionnaire (norsk)

The more the merrier!

 

Firstly… no it wasn´t our building and luckily no one was hurt.

On the 28th of October 2010 a fire started in the building next door to the workshop, it was a pretty hairy evening for us, an inferno blazed away just 4m from the workshops front door! We were lucky, amazingly nothing was damaged but our neighbours building did however burn for two days and was pretty much destroyed!

...Although everything is intact we with much sadness have to close up shop...again!

We´ve no water, and screen printing doesn´t exactly work so well without it! The main water supply ran through our now ruined neighbors and our landlord is not willing to connect us up again… both buildings are going to be torn down!

What now? Well we have a plan, in fact several, some big, some small, but it´s going to take some time. We were already expecting some changes, so we´d already begun to stir up some ideas. Whatever we do now, we want to do it properly, the past two years have shown that we need to get this right we´re working on a plan to ensure we do!

Keep an eye out, we´ll back with some news soon!

We´ve been hard at work trying to improve the equipment that´s available at the workshop. One of our biggest challenges has always been with exposures. Since we began we´ve had to rely on the old skool ghetto method of a foam pad, a sheet of glass and a halogen lamp. This works fine for basic exposures but as soon as you want to go big or get any real fine detail it really shows up its limitations.

Buying a proper unit has never been a real option, it´s far too expensive so we thought we´d have some fun and make our own. After lots of research and meching, "The Rock" is finished, well almost, it still needs a stand and we should really integrate the electronics a little better, but it works like a dream. Here´s a little glimpse of our baby. There´s a thread running on the  gigposters forums if you want to get some more detailed information, and some Google Sketchup plans are available here if you like to play.

For the last week we´ve been knees deep working with Are Kleivan on a poster project for the Øya Festival and En Vegg av Lyd (A Wall of Sound). 14 designers were invited to design a poster for a band that makes them tick. After almost 2000 pulls we´re skipping all the way to Neverland with happiness. They´re on sale at the festival and on display around Oslo, here´s a list of who´s who and what´s what:

Øivin Horvei: Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti
Yourfriends (Henrik Fjeldberg & Carl Gürgens): Raekwon
Are Kleivan: Iggy & The Stooges
Erling Knudsen: Motorpsycho
Levi Bergquist og Kristian Hammerstad: Robyn
Anna Martine Nilsen: The Specials
Mari Hovden: The xx
Christian Schnitler: LCD Soundsystem
Sindre Wexelsen Goksøyr: The Flaming Lips
Dimitri Kayiambakis: Serena Maneesh
Martin Kvamme: Ost & Kjex
Bendik Kaltenborn: Shining
Robin Snasen Rengård: Four Tet
André Tehrani: Field Music

Finally...as promised...some pictures of the new studio. We've got lots more space and some much better equipment (or at least solutions). It's been two long months, many late nights some funny stories and we're still fixing and building...but with us that's a bit of a continual game. We could probably carry on forever but what we want to do is print. Want to come and play?

Although the workshop has been moved 4 times since we began, there´s been a lot of work going on. We thought we´d put out a selection of some of the projects from 2009 and let everyone take a look, mmmmmmmm

Seeing as we´re also talking about the workshop we should also mention that the new workshop in Torshov is almost finished, we´ve been building like crazy, testing new equipment and materials and will be up and running again by the beginning of february. As soon as we´re done we´ll show you some pics. Lots more space, some new shiney things and a stereo all coming your way!

We'd been talking with Espen for almost a year about working with him on a project, finally we got the chance when he asked us if we could produce some prints for a new series of work to be shown at Galleri Trafo in Asker. They were a real challenge for us, huge prints by our standards, almost 1.5m2 of print area. We had to build a special print table, source some gigantic rolls of paper and even build a special packing case so that the finished prints could be transported to where ever they would be needed.

We are pretty damn ecstatic about the results and Espen was smiling from ear to ear, although that might have had something to do with the champagne and fresh crab breakfast he prepared for us after we delivered the prints to Arendal!

They're still on show at Galleri Trafo, so you should drop by and take a gander, better still get in touch with Espen and get hold of your very own set!

Ernst Føyn and Tone Emblemsvåg from FYET have been in working on a series of posters for their club night Playskool. Here's the second poster in the series a tasty little 3 colour with a split fountain variant. If you want to get hold of one get in contact with FYET or go to one of the Playskool nights at Soria Moria and check out what they get up to.

We were asked whether we could show some students from Studentavisa Under Dusken around our workshop last week, but really we don't have enough room at the moment. As a result we decided to invite the students and other people we've been in contact with to a short course at Unge Kunstneres Samfund. 

The idea behind the course "Ghetto" Screen Printing was to build a functioning screen printing workshop and produce a print in about an hour from easily attainable materials. Ok, we had to do a little of "here's one i made earlier" and there was quite a bit of string and tape involved but we covered the whole process and everyone got the chance to print.

The print is a little bit special, it's a design based upon contact details for all the companies, individuals, forums etc that we've used to build up our knowledge.  If you're interested, let us know and we can send you one in the post.

Unge Kunstneres Samfund (The Young Artists Society) gave us the opportunity to print a sofa! They wanted a circular pouf produced for their current exhibition Trapped in Amber: Angst for a Reenacted Decade. It was to be based upon one used in Edvard Munch's exhibition at the Equitable Palast in Berlin (1892-1893). However each artist involved in the exhibition was invited to produce their own design for a segment.  The National Theater made the sofa and we got on with printing the textiles, some of these designs needed over 20 prints on a single piece of fabric without making any mistakes. After a nerve racking week, the sofa is finished and on display. Drop by and rub yourself up against it!

Since the official launch of Automaton we've been somewhat inundated with enquiries. We've been working hard trying to expand what we can do with colour, here's a little taster of what's been happening.

Alamo on Torggata asked us to make them some stickers, they printed up really nicely and were coated with a UV, waterproof, scratch resistant varnish to preserve them for eternity. We got a bit carried away in the end and pulled a split fountain across the last sheet mmmmmm. Drop by Alamo and pick yourself up one!

Darling Clementine needed some special packaging for a trip to England so we helped them out with this spangly gold and black number. Damn it shines when the light catches it!

Harmonica wanted some limited edition bags to give away to special people, she picked out these bright and beautiful glow colours to show off this real nice design. She's got a new record coming out, keep an eye on her website, it's coming soon.

When we first tried printing on skateboard decks this summer, we found it to be a task that requires more experimenting and preparation than your average screen printing job, much of this was down to the convex print area of most decks. We ended up building a custom rig, as well as stretching up a screen with looser tension, all specifically for printing skateboards. Now we can present the first board hand printed in Norway in decades.

This graphic was printed for Ancient Babies, a small skateboard company in the making, founded by Erling and Ola. Expect more creations in the future.

We've just recieved some hand printed calendars from the U.K. These were printed in a small artist run silk screen studio in Hackney, London by Michael Wedgwood, Sarah Mclaren and Natalia Charogianni. The calendars feature the work of:

Eddie Peake - Edwy Plenel - Sean Edwards - Sarah Mclaren - Gary Woodley - Bryan Parsons - Eddie Farrell - Michael Schonke - Bruce Mclean - Corinna Till - Paul Carr - Alex Graham - David Leverett - Natalia Charogianni - The Studio - Will Mclean - Graham Hayward - Michael Wedgwood - Ruth Marquez - Erika Nordqvuist - The Henningham Family Press - Janice Harding - Lucy Skaer - Hanneline Visnes and Phillippa Hartle

The artists were paired up and asked to collaborate on a particular month. Why don't you send us a mail and pick yourself one up for the bargain price of 225kr. You can also purchase direct from the U.K. if you'd like, have a look at the2009calendar.com for more information.

The girls from Darling Clementine have been with us in the studio working hard for several long nights, printing their cute and quirky illustrative Monsieur Cabaret canvas bags. In the end they managed to print up 4 different designs, some nice tags and a set of limited edition greetings cards, pretty impressive!

The finished articles went on sale at the DogA Christmas Market in Oslo in December, but if you're interested in "bagging" yourself something special you can have a look at darlingclementine.no and place an order directly with Tonje and Ingrid through their ETSY shop.

How do you like our first poster?

It's for The Disciplines, a band who's members are Ken Stringfellow (The Posies/Big Star/etc.), and the boys from Briskeby. We printed a two-color design drawn up by Erling for their Norwegian tour of late 2008.

This was a run of 250 posters, pushing our edition size. We need a drying rack!

The print shop consists of equipment tailored to our needs, mostly hand built by Graham and Erling, and keeps getting new additions and improvements as different jobs pass through.

Right now we have the ability to do fine-detail flat stock printing up to A2 (print area), simple textile printing as well as printing on skateboard decks. However if you've got something weird and fantastic that you are wondering about, drop us a line and we can talk, we like a good challenge.