Blank Forms for Future Applications

In its text and in its images, this article explores the use of printed forms. It adopts an expansive definition of the printed form, including all papers that are printed on to elicit handwriting, both bound and loose. By focusing on used examples from personal as well as institutional collections, it modifies recent research in the history of information, which emphasises the dehumanising and standardising functions of printed forms. Instead, the article uncovers habits of creative repurposing and personalisation that accompanied the migration of the printed form into domestic life, and in turn influenced its design and employment in institutional environments. These habits are also explored in the article’s images, which document artistic responses to and on printed forms, made during the broader collaborative project of which this article is part. The article recounts the project’s research and creative methods and explains its findings: that the printed matter on modern forms does not control but rather works in a dialectical relationship with the poetics of individual responses, and that across all environments in which printed forms are filled, their use is directed at the self rather than subsumption by institution or state. Rather than being straightforwardly restrictive, the rigid formats of printed forms have generative possibilities in terms of mark-making, possibilities that the article investigates creatively as well as historically.