There was one finding from the survey that felt, in retrospect, almost too neat.
The risograph-printed versions of the survey sheets were consistently perceived as more liberal, or more radical, than their digitally printed counterparts showing the same designs. This held even when the underlying colour and typographic combination was one that had been rated as relatively conservative in the digital format. The medium was not merely a neutral carrier of the design. It was doing its own ideological work.
This is, of course, exactly what the previous posts in this series have been arguing. That the form of political communication shapes how its content is interpreted. That analogue aesthetics carry historical and cultural associations that precede any conscious reading of text or image. That imperfection signals something.
But arguing it theoretically and watching it happen in a survey conducted in Graz are two different experiences.
The risograph’s characteristic visual qualities – soft ink textures, slight colour shifts, the gentle misregistration between printed layers – appear to activate a set of cultural associations that respondents connected with grassroots politics, protest culture and anti-establishment communication. No one used those words directly, necessarily. But the feeling they described when encountering the riso-printed sheets consistently placed those designs further left, further from institutional authority, further toward the register of collective and community-produced political media.
Marshall McLuhan’s argument that the medium is the message has perhaps never felt more directly confirmed in small-scale empirical form (McLuhan, 1964).
It is worth being honest about the methodological complication here, which was acknowledged during the printing process itself. The risograph versions were not colour-accurate reproductions of the digital versions. Riso ink colours diverge from screen-designed palettes in ways that cannot be fully controlled. This meant that respondents in the riso condition were not responding to identical visual objects with only the texture and medium changed – they were also responding to slightly different colours. The cleaner methodological isolation that the research design originally intended was not fully achieved.
And yet the consistency of the riso-as-liberal response across design variations that differed in colour, typography and overall composition suggests that medium was doing significant independent work. Even when riso colour shifts pushed a design toward tones that might conventionally read as more conservative, the tactile and textural qualities of the print appeared to override or substantially complicate that reading.
This points toward something interesting about the hierarchy of cues in political visual communication. Colour dominated the responses to the digital prints. For the riso prints, medium appeared to compete with colour for primacy – and in many cases won.
Part of this may relate to the specific cultural positioning of risograph printing within contemporary visual culture. Riso has become closely associated with independent publishing, zine culture, small-circulation political pamphlets and artist-run spaces. In Graz as elsewhere, people who have encountered riso-printed material have most often encountered it in contexts coded as alternative, independent or politically left-leaning. The print method carries those contextual associations with it into whatever it reproduces.
Walter Benjamin wrote about the aura of an object – the quality of presence and uniqueness that mechanical reproduction alters (Benjamin, 1935). Risograph printing, paradoxically, reintroduces something aura-adjacent into reproduced political communication. Its slight imprecision makes each printed sheet feel slightly individual. Its texture makes the process of production visible. Its colour behaviour makes it impossible to fully standardise.
Respondents appeared to respond to all of this, even without consciously analysing it.
Which is, in the end, precisely how political visual communication is supposed to work.
Not through conscious argument.
Not through careful decoding.
But through accumulated feeling – the slow, largely invisible process by which aesthetic experience becomes ideological orientation.
The survey was small. Its methodology was imperfect. Its sample was local and specific. None of these results can be generalised into universal claims about how all audiences read all political print.
But they confirm, in a situated and material way, what this series of blog posts has been trying to articulate from the beginning.
Politics is visual. Aesthetics are ideological. And the medium – even a slightly misregistered, colour-shifted, imperfectly reproduced medium – is still very much the message.
Sources:
- McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media. McGraw-Hill.
- Benjamin, W. (1935). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
- Hearn, A. (2008). “Meat, Mask, Burden”: Probing the Contours of the Branded Self. Journal of Consumer Culture.
- McQuiston, L. (1993). Graphic Agitation: Social and Political Graphics Since the Sixties. Phaidon.
