The Zine.

Artist Statement

During WWII, the cartoonist David Langdon drew cartoons with humorous rhyming captions that tried to stop people, for their own safety, picking bomb nets off the Underground’s train windows.  In a very British response, the public added their own graffiti rhymes explaining that safety was great, but they could not see when to get off the train.  Zines are like the graffiti on official cartoons; small, created by all, imperfect, and just grubby enough to be nerdy and inviting, hinting at underground knowledge and secret messages hidden between the page imagery.

New Media Messages in Mixed Media is a composition designed to enhance the present societal sensation of dismediation that is gradually being recognised and presented through mediums such as Caryl Churchill’s play Love and Information.  I wanted my own representation to stem from classic and modern literature, purposely choosing examples that would span from the classics (Pride and Prejudice), to the futuristic (Altered Carbon) in order to dislocate the viewer in time and create something of a bergsonian affect.  To support this, I used the concept of Steven Hall’s book The Raw Shark Texts, in which memories are absorbed and carried away by ‘conceptual fish’.  The suggestion in Hall’s novel is that if enough people think of a concept, it can become real, within a virtual reality context; I use this theme in the representation of the graphical text within the zine, which is shaped like a children’s drawing of a whale, and in the electric ravens, created using an inkjet printer and then collaged.

My overarching representative theme of choice was ravens, for several reasons.  A predatory bird often used in visual media to unsettle viewers, folkloric tradition places the raven in the position of a sacred animal associated both with death and rebirth, and simultaneously with the passing of messages and knowledge, arguably core themes of new media and modern communicative methods.  The choices of media within the zine were made both to be recognisable by any potential viewer, and to match this overarching visual theme, with subtle visual cues linking their relevance.  Visual stimuli presented within the zine is designed to unsettle the viewer and invoke that subtle sensation of unease associated with dismediation and controlled panic intrinsic in society’s fascination with social media.

The first visual clue is the mixed media image representing Lydia Bennet.  This is created in the Whimsical art style, but with an over-large sensualised mouth illustrating Lydia’s appetites, offsetting the viewer, and drawing the eye to this area of the face.  Meanwhile, the cartoon-based suggested modern view of Lydia’s marriage is created from a watercolour image of an old PC with the FaceBook logo; the use of this medium on standard office grade paper immediately mutes the usually vibrant watercolours and again acts as a method of offsetting the viewer.  The inkjet collaged electric ravens on each page carry the message throughout the zine, and hint at messages of horror beneath the surface art.  Possibly one of the most remediated works of classic literature, Pride and Prejudice has been transported from its original book form into television, film, memes, and music, with one of the most modern YouTube pieces created by ASerialLove as a music video; Love’s a raven when it flies, thereby continuing the representative theme.  Austen’s works are also often considered to be timeless, supporting the timelessness of the messages represented, particularly since the release of the oddly juxtaposed novel and then film, Pride Prejudice and Zombies.

The second piece of literature chosen is American Gods by Neil Gaiman.  Specialising in gothic-style horror, collaborative work, and the use of graphic novels and comics to remediate his works as visual serials, Gaiman is something of a social media specialist, whose life, marriage, family and artistic creations are all uploaded through a dedicated Twitter page, despite having a publicly non-monogamous marriage.  Gaiman is married to Amanda Palmer, one of the first (and best-known) musicians to create a social media storm by utilising Kickstarter to generate funding to release music as an independent artist.  Despite ploughing most of the £1m raised by her army of dedicated fans back into the independent music industry, her decision to raise the money directly rather than through the traditional use of a middle-man music publisher came under heavy criticism.  Both Gaiman and Palmer are supporters of social media as a celebrity platform and of independent new media labour formats, with Palmer’s most recent album, featuring Gaiman, also uploaded to YouTube.  As a celebrity couple, they are arguably positivist social media royalty with strong ties to new media arguments.  American Gods is one of Gaiman’s best-known and most remediated works; the lead character is the Norse god Odin, whose messengers are his sacred ravens, Huginn and Muninn, who fly across the world and pass their information back to him.

Huginn and Muninn are thought to have been at least the partial inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem, The Raven; also the third work of literature featured in the zine.  Within the zine, The Raven has been linked with the Netflix television series based on the science-fiction novel, and final piece of literature featured, Altered Carbon by author Richard Morgan, in which a main character is Poe, the AI hotel also known as The Raven.  This element of the zine both completes the time dilation with the use of the futuristic imagery, and hints at questions surrounding the ethical and practical applications of AI, with the main premise of the novel being the advent of AI to the point of the granting of AI rights and the ‘re-sleeving’ of ‘cortical stacks’; effectively human consciousness through the retention of memory is now contained in a piece of technology inserted at birth in the base of the brain.  Upon death, should the cortical stack be intact, that person can effectively be re-sleeved into another body, either organically or synthetically produced.  In terms of the zine, this hugely popular Netflix series is associated with concerns about technological development into the future and concepts of posthumanism.  In the zine, it is displayed using an image of death and ravens collaged from a Neil Gaiman comic (the image itself part of an advertisement for the forthcoming American Gods graphic novel), represented as Poe’s Lenore, with Poe The Raven of Altered Carbon sat with his Miss Elizabeth.  This creates a folded representation of remediation with a series of imagery linked by raven messengers.  The final page of the zine displays the decaying shape of a raven stained with blood in the form of watercolour, with hidden folkloric shapes in its skeletal form, further suggesting the unease of modern society in this period of digital development.

Finally, the use of Atavist Ebook Creator achieves two aims; firstly the zine is moved into the mainstream, and secondly, it loses part of its mystique, power and imagery. The original art form of the zine contains the text hidden between the pages, and the art is far more tactile, making the messages more immediate, available, and brutal. This harks back to early critiques of digital remediation such as Walter Benjamin’s The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In these ways, I have used the medium of a zine to attempt to depict a Western societal aesthetic inherent in new media development.