Making a 'Zine'

With my background in Advertising and Design I have created many publications in all manner of shapes and sizes, these were all initially created and then developed before becoming what we call Digital Artwork that is prepared for print, whether it's 200 or 20,000.

To create a one-off 'zine' is not something I had particularly done before and there are no rules, we treated it as a celebration of our output, a documentation of the sometimes random and obscure 2 Faulty (https://carldurban.wixsite.com/website/post/2-faulty-collective).

There are five of us in the collective and we were initially going to create x5 completely different formatted zines but in the end we all wanted to create and 'exploding book' style one. We still have developed them at different shapes and sizes and intend to hang them as part of our end of year show, with the addition of some sound art...

Each of us supplied x5 versions of each of the tasks we had undertaken over the previous weeks, this gave everyone output from everyone else. In addition to this we also developed a poem each and supplied everyone with one of these. As we were creating these at different sizes the outputs varied and once the creating of the zine took place we each embellished our own thereby making them even more individual yet still a collective celebration of everything we had all created together.

It was if we were curating our own mini exhibition, considering how one piece of work would work alongside another and which way round anything might be, as well the size of image and how we may crop it or even reprint to a size we wanted for our own zine.

When I was printing mine out I mixed up the paper I printed it on, so some was on tracing paper, coloured paper or textured paper. We booked the Make Space room at uni as it has all the facilities we needed, was near the computer room and had a spray booth to help with construction. It was while we were putting everything together that Craig Barber (acting Head of Fine Art) popped in to visit and discuss about the possibility of displaying the finished pieces as part of the Festival 22 (The official name of the End of Degree Show).

in addition to the finished pieces we have several times ended up with a recording of a song, animal noises and much more elements we all felt would work as a piece of sound art... following on from several Sound Art Workshops held by Dr Phil Archer we are looking to make two pieces that would accompany the zines. By using transducers that can take a recording and use the resonant quality of the object to become the 'speaker' we are looking at one that plays one of the songs that Sally made in response to one of our tasks to play through a plant pot and a collection of animal noises we made whilst assuming a shape to play through a wellington boot. We like a bit of chaos and nonsense.