Universal Electronic Vacuum (portfolio)

How do images circulate in a world saturated by technology? Created by Eduardo Paolozzi at a moment when artists were grappling with the emergence of mass media, Universal Electronic Vacuum samples and remixes visual references from a variety of sources into a dense, ecstatic language of psychedelic abstraction. Each silkscreen print in this poster portfolio teems with a controlled explosion of images: Disney characters appear beside diagrams of airplanes, stylized flowers, and multicolored geometric grids. Layered Ben-Day dots and bright, contrasting color fields create a sense of visual overload.

Paolozzi, then in his early forties, was working with Kelpra Studio in London, one of the most technically innovative screenprinting workshops of the 1960s. In the previous decade he had cofounded the Independent Group, the circle of artists and thinkers whose fascination with advertising, industrial production, and North American popular culture had established Pop art in Britain. By the mid-1960s, Paolozzi was pushing the screenprinting medium to its limits, and Universal Electronic Vacuum is the third major portfolio he developed with Kelpra. Separate editions are also unique—the studio printed the same screens in different colorways so that each print in the portfolio possesses a distinct palette.

The process began with Paolozzi assembling collages: wallpaper scraps, computer printout tapes, and magazine clippings of machines, cartoons, and consumer goods. These handmade compositions served as studies for the silkscreens. The final prints retain the logic of collage, layering visual fragments like garbled electronic signals. One poster, War Games Revised, strikes a darker tone, depicting bombs and planes in matt silver and blue, arranged like parts from a model kit—a visual exchange between children’s toys and the weapons of war.