Something Tangible In the Middle of All This Digital Blerp
I keep having this weird little fantasy of putting together a good old-fashioned zine kind of thing. You know: printed on paper, an actual, tangible item that you can hold in your hands, with pages that you can flip through and dog ear, with space in the margins for doodles or scribbles or somewhere to write a phone number down, like we used to do in the Before Times.
I'm getting tired of the ephemeral digital world. I want things that take up actual physical space. I want to be able to put something on my shelf, and take it down again later and read it again, then put it back up to do it again a year or two later.
I think it's not just the digital world I'm getting tired of. I think it's also the disposable nature of "art" now. Things aren't designed to be savored and then kept. Things are made to be used and tossed out, to make way for the next new shiny thing which will hold your interest for about thirty seconds, and then in turn get tossed into the trash for the next next new thing.
Yep: I really hate it.
I've been tossing around the idea of a zine (or something like it) for a while now, honestly. For years, really. I mean, it's not my first zine rodeo. I did a few issues of one way back in the late '90s, just for fun, just because I could. Used some desktop publishing software to put a layout together, then had the pages run off at Kinko's (you kids today don't know Kinko's, because they were bought up by FedEx and transformed into just another arm of that garbage company), and I distributed them at all of the local coffee shops and college student haunts in the city.
It was a lot of fun, putting that together, and now... well, the urge is growing stronger. I think it's the proliferation of garbage on the internet that's sending me into wanting to make something like that again (and not just the classic kind of internet garbage, that's sort of fun and charming in its own way; you know the kind of real garbage I'm talking about here). All of this AI art and AI writing, spit out and then recycled into the AI machine to make more AI art and AI writing... don't you ever just want to hold some pieces of paper in your hand, read the words on the page, look at the pictures, and see the evidence of a human being's hand in what you're being presented with? It can't just be me, an old person who wants to reclaim that kind of interaction with things other humans make. Hey, let me tell you about this band I like! Hey, look at this piece of art that I made! Hey, read this thing that I spent some time putting together! Hey, read this interview with this cool person that I know because they are super nifty!
I would genuinely like to know what you people think about a project like this. Would you, as a human being, enjoy opening your physical mailbox (not your virtual one), and finding a physical zine (not a digital one) waiting inside, with actual pages to flip through, which actual hands have touched in the act of putting it together?
Drop me a line at the contact form below this post and let me know what you think. I may decide to go ahead and do a zine just for the hell of it, but knowing that there are other weirdos out there who still like things like that might go a long way towards me actually doing it.
Thanks for the read.
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