Research season, here.
I love this part of the year.
Quietly staying in and studying. I liked studying. I always found my way to the library to look things up and explore. Now, it’s YouTube at times, for tutorials, but it’s cool. It works. They’re pretty amazing at times.
I’m really excited to up the ante on S P A C E this coming year. S P A C E is a weekly e-mag, and I started it in 2017. The things are crowdfunded.
In the title of this post, I said, ‘Sometimes it is OK to reinvent the wheel because you know better from using it why the wheel needs to even exist’. So, for me, S P A C E is the wheel. I invented it in 2017. I’m reinventing it now, because after 200 issues of the weekly publishing, in N. Europe and S. E. Asia, I know why it needs to exist. (Kind of personal so I’ll save it for subscribers.)
How to make something new
I like to change things up quite a bit, whenever I feel stagnant. Sometimes it’s finding a new format. I want to try a new direction or two. Last week I made a prototype of something and it felt very, very good. It’s a zine that I printed and bound in a way that resembles what this video tutorial is, below. But not this fancy. Bookbinding. Books? Hm. This could be a new direction for S P A C E, in collaboration with writers. One Stateside library made a fabulous roundup of some of the librarian-curates variety of what they think zines can be and do. Librarians are so thorough; it’s handy to have references like this to share with a few in Phnom Penh whom I’m hoping to co-create with in the future. Let’s see.
For now, I am studying again. I am learning about some new ways to put together the bunches and bunches of conversations-recorded-as-PDF zines, and make something more tactile.
Do you work with zines? Make books? Bind them? I’m so curious to know where to go to research more ideas.
Thanks if you can share.
If you read this blog from time to time, you know already that I talk about these things a lot: quality in conversation, depth and substance and progression and continuity. I value slowness and building trust over time. This is not trendy. But, in Asia, it’s more normal than where I’m ‘from’, where stuff feels superficial and you never deepen the things because they’re discarded as soon as it becomes interesting. Happens.
I’m having a nice conversation with the internet, uncovering wild new worlds of what to do with string, scissors, glue, paper, and of course the lovely co-created writings that emerge every 12 weeks, through covnersations I host. This current block ahead is virtual. More at this link on what’s on deck: