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This article analyses the importance of paper in the context of early modern warfare. During the war against the Ottoman Empire at the end of the 17th century, the Habsburgs were establishing a new administration in Hungary, which served both military and civil purposes. Not only did administrative tasks have to be organized, but the very success of military operations depended on the well-ordered work of the administration: communication had to be smooth, and a wide variety of tasks had to be properly and reliably processed. To fulfil these requirements, the administration needed large quantities of paper. This study follows the traces of paper in the records of the Chamber Administration in Buda and points to the vital need for paper at the heart of the new Habsburg rule. The challenges of acquiring and producing paper themselves became crucial aspects of the administration’s work. The article argues that a reliable supply of paper competed even with the distribution of arms and food to become an essential resource in warfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at re-evaluating two of Hungarian artist Dóra Mauer's films, the video work PROPORTIONS (1979) and the 16mm film TIMING (1973/80). Both films follow a rigid structure. In PROPORTIONS, Maurer uses a paper roll to compare her own body measures repeatedly; in TIMING, she repeatedly folds a white linen to compare the rhythm of her arm movements. Through her use of paper and the gesture of folding, the two films can be read as references to the very origin of the term format , as coined in early letterpress printing. When the notion of format is understood as a determination of a ratio and, as such, as an indexical reference to given social relationships (Summers, 2003), these films unfold sociocultural and political meanings. The present paper traces this spectrum of meaning through the pointed inclusion of historical discourses surrounding early motion studies, the art scene in socialist Hungary in the 1970s, and early time experiments before the advent of precision clocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]