Orientation: Zine Project

Description

The concept behind my zine came from choosing any object I have had with me for an extended amount of time, I chose my cellphone. Taking this idea deeper, I focused around the idea of technological addiction with a cellphone, and my personal experiences with it. Containing both visuals and texts, I tried to execute this idea with a consistency in both.

Process

Prior to deciding on an idea, I spontaneously came in possession of an old Nokia cellphone. With this, I gained an idea where I could smash the phone into pieces and use it somehow in my zine. In the requirements for this project, we needed to attend two different workshops to create this product, I used the photography 3D table to document the smashed cellphone, and the bookbinding studio to seal everything together. Along with all of this, I taught myself Adobe Indesign and Photoshop to execute my vision as well as I could. I called my zine ‘How to Encrypt’. The idea of encryption is turning data into code on a computer, using this, I thought of the personalization that comes on a cellphone. We turn our thoughts and communications into data when using our phone, encrypting it in a way.

Once I smashed the Nokia phone and photographed it, I took the spare pieces of it and glued it down onto the pages. Further, in writing the texts for my zine, I wrote about my personal experiences with the gradual destruction of my self image due to things like social media. Adding onto the visuals and text, I did research on the coding of an iPhone which is done with a program called, ‘Swift’, and included small bits of the code on various pages of my zine. Example: “Seeing the false created personas online, I felt as if I should upload myself a certain way to appeal to other users. Knowing this person online was not who I truly was, the internet became a reality I did not want to leave, and my phone was the gateway. ”

Reflection

Though I am happy with the final product, there were a few things I could edit to make everything seem more polished. For example, when I attempted to book bind my pages together, it did not quite turn out the way I wanted it to. Instead, I left everything horizontal and had the reader turn the pages vertically, not the cleanest method. Another issue was printing out everything correctly, I had lots of issues with everything being even, causing problems with lining up the final product. The text seen in some of the pages is quite low which was not intentional, and I would change that in a future draft.

Future Ideas

Taking this idea further for the final product, I want to create a QR or AR code that leads to the digital scan of my zine, along with a video of myself smashing the phone with some sound piece I make over it.

most of my research is included in my previous Zine post 🙂