Zine Remix workshop: An art assignment
I thought about making zines for a long time before I made any. I had grand plans for my first zine, but I was never quite ready to do the idea justice. So I waited.
After months of indecision I finally decided I needed to start with something less ambitious with lower stakes. An acquaintance had recently shared with me an abridged version of Bruce Mau's An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, and I thought it would be nice to have a little hard copy zine. So that was my first zine—an ugly printout of somebody else's text. But by making something I had given myself creative momentum. I made another version that was more aesthetic, and defined the style of my early zines. I also made a zine of my own creative principles (with an embarrassingly pretentious name.)
Early on I also remixed National Geographic articles into zine format, like Jane Goodall's New Discoveries Among Africa's Chimpanzees and Ukraine's Train Ladies. (And I later made Archetypes form idols, a remix of Paul Jacques Grillo's letter To a young designer, which helped me through another point of indecision. From this experience I got my principle: Declare intentions, not manifestos.)
These remixes were my first steps into zine making, and soon I was making all kinds of original micro zines. The small experiments that I had intended as a training ground eventually became more interesting and exciting than the holy grail zine I had been scared to mess up.
So I know from experience that remixing the work of others can be creatively empowering: it can help you find your voice and build confidence in a new medium.
When I started to dream up a creative workshop for the Hillside music festival, I realized that I could draw on my own zine remix story to help others make their first zine.
A zine remix felt like the perfect starting point for a collage zine workshop. First off, a zine remix solves practical problems with running a collage zine workshop. The workshop was only 50 minutes long; that is not a lot of time to learn how to fold a zine, sort through collage materials, come up with a concept, and make a collage. (I myself have left a 2.5 hour zine meetup with zines half finished!) Remixing a text makes it possible to create a satisfying result quickly by choosing a few ideas that resonate with you and pasting them in. The zine remix also has a lot of interesting creative dimensions. I love a creative process where people start in the same place and end up somewhere unique and unexpected; I was excited to see how people would remix the same starting point in their own unique way. And finally, remixing An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth wouldn't just be a fun callback to my first zine—it meant that everyone in the workshop would leave with their own little manual for future creative exploration.
A zine remix felt like the perfect starting point for a collage zine workshop. First off, a zine remix solves practical problems with running a collage zine workshop. The workshop was only 50 minutes long; that is not a lot of time to learn how to fold a zine, sort through collage materials, come up with a concept, and make a collage. (I myself have left a 2.5 hour zine meetup with zines half finished!) Remixing a text makes it possible to create a satisfying result quickly by choosing a few ideas that resonate with you and pasting them in. The zine remix also has a lot of interesting creative dimensions. I love a creative process where people start in the same place and end up somewhere unique and unexpected; I was excited to see how people would remix the same starting point in their own unique way. And finally, remixing An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth wouldn't just be a fun callback to my first zine—it meant that everyone in the workshop would leave with their own little manual for future creative exploration.
Once the idea crystallized (and the workshop application was accepted!) I needed to design the specifics of the activity. The core of the workshop would be the packet of materials people would get for the activity:
- A collection of creative advice from Bruce Mau's An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, Paul Jacques Grillo's letter To a young designer, and my own creative practice
- Shared image inputs that would be the same for everyone
- Unique image inputs that would be different for everyone (one interesting page from a National Geographic, one interesting page from a collection of art photography)
- A page of randomly generated titles with random fonts (based on An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, e.g. "An Unfinished Proclamation Of Unmaking")
I wanted the amount of content to give a sense of both creative constraints and creative abundance; having enough material to be exciting, but still make interesting tradeoffs with the shared materials. I also thought about ways to inject small amounts of randomness in the inputs, like generating random title variations and randomizing the order/orientation of the images so that different packets would have different "conflicts" in the double-sided printing (cutting out one part to use always subtracts something from the other side.)
For the shared image inputs, I made four pages of collaged images. Using collage instead of uncut images would pack more points of interest into the limited space, and also fit the "remix" theme (I remixed the images, and they remixed my collage).
Before starting the collage, I made a list in my notebook of the qualities I thought would make good image inputs for this activity: visual interest, ambiguity, and amusement. So I went through my collage pile, collecting things that had at least one of these qualities. But as I was finishing up my collage, I realized I had missed an obvious source that perfectly met my criteria: the Far Side cartoons. Gary Larson's surrealist one-panel comics were simple, visually interesting, funny, and famously ambiguous even with their captions. So I pulled The Last Chapter and Worse (which has a special place in the origin of worse.ink), added in an eel party and a couple of cave people, and the packet was complete.
I did the activity for myself three times. I wanted multiple examples, with different interpretations of the text and distinct visual styles.
For An Incomplete Proclamation in the Spirit of Failure I opened myself up to connections between the text and the images, exploring associations in the moment rather than working towards a plan or concept.
For An Abridged Thesis of Creation I chose parts that resonated with my creative practice as it is now. I also kept it relatively minimalistic, to showcase a style that I thought was time limit friendly. Unsurprisingly, this one pulled in more of my own principles.
For A Ludicrous Manifesto In The Spirit Of Remakeless Proclamixion I focused on aspirational ideas that could inform my creative growth. The name is mostly nonsense, because one of the ideas I included from Bruce Mau was: Make new words. New thinking demands new forms of expression. So it felt appropriate that I make up some words for the title, and had so much I kept going on the back cover: lumix, crowth, mompion, rematifesto, eeation, gramblitivity.
The Hillside weekend itself was wonderful as always: encountering new music from across Canada and the world, camping in the legendary volunteer village for the first time, reuniting with friends I hadn't seen in a year, and helping to manage the eager horde swarming my partner's "bug in a bottle" workshop. The orange haze of wildfire smoke that had threatened to shut down the festival miraculously cleared. And everyone was talking about the surreal microtonal math rock duo that has improbably blown up online and sold out the festival.
Watching the zine remix workshop unfold, I quickly realized how badly I was overthinking the packet. Each participant had their own creative perspective and vision: not because their packet had slight random variations that required different choices, but because people are unique and brilliant and unexpected.
Seeing what people made brought me joy in so many ways. There was the joy of seeing people follow the creative path I had dreamed up. There was the joy of seeing people incorporate my favourite images, and the images I hadn't found a use for.
But I got a special thrill seeing people do things I didn't intend when I made the inputs. The point of the activity wasn't to subvert my expectations, and I was really excited to see people incorporate the text and images as-is (one changed their mind about a passage they had already glued down, so they pasted capture accidents over top.) But seeing people do things I hadn't thought about was especially exciting, because it showed how much was possible within the constraints of the workshop package.
There were so many fun visual touches, from pasting strange faces into a crowd, to a folded pop out, to a rat hanging out with the cocktail eels.
There were lots of unexpected variations on the texts as well: keeping the invocation without the subtext, remixing the text to create a new idea, incorporating text from the unique pages, and more. And the highlight of the whole thing was when a kid who had been quiet the whole workshop came and showed me a page with the eels, where he'd rearranged the text to say: Don't go deep. The deeper you go, the more likely you will die.
I am so happy with this workshop experience. Partly because it was an interesting creative project for me, and I love my own creative work to an almost embarrassing degree. Partly because I got to meet a bunch of interesting people and watch them create wonderful things. But most of all because I know that those wonderful people and their creations are still out there in the world, perhaps making even more interesting things.