pretty printer show me your colors\ \ principles of pretty printing\ pretty printer printing pritty prints\ pretty printer printing pretty colors\ pretty printer printing pretty patterns\ on pretty printer pretty printer printer\ printing pretty prints for the pretty pretty \[scrap 1\] ----------- How can a paper in defense of crappy printing be credible if it is not itself also a bloody mess? \[later insert\] ---------------- \[This text originated on an Etherpad (an Open Source collaborative online text editor). After exporting the pad into a word processing document, some formatting conversion errors occurred and have been preserved.\] \[scrap 2\] ----------- One writer of this text once offered a (collective-pseudonymously published) print-on-demand book to a number of European and North American artists' and artist-run book shops, and always received the same answer: "we generally don't like to sell print-on-demand books, but will review yours and maybe make an exception." (Prematurely spilling the beans on the source of anger; see Marc's → second-layer insert.) - * [bounce/antiphon] * Ghettoization works both ways; A zine library closely connected to an other writer of this text often receives artist publications labeled as zines with a request to add it to the collection, and usually gives the same answer: "we generally do not take artist publications but will review yours and maybe make an exception." * \[diskarted notes\] ------------------- - Examples of crappy print include: the cheap print shop near a university campus that reprints college scripts, plastic ring-bound and on photocopy paper; photocopies made at a copy shop; print-on-demand. ```{=html} ``` - Working hypothesis: the Internet may have pushed print-on-demand, along with other forms of digital print and photocopies, into a no-man's land between the two binary opposites of (a) neo-artisanal prettyprinting (glossy coffee table books as well as small-edition Riso and stencil printing, silk-screening and other handmade publications) and (b) 'quick and dirty' social media (including memes, spamming, trolling etc.). ```{=html} ``` - Therefore, hardly anybody wants print-on-demand: artists' book stores don't really want it, artist book fairs don't really want it, zine fairs don't really want it either. ```{=html} ``` - This was epitomized in a 2015 cartoon published in the online contemporary art magazine *HyperAllergic* in which a zine maker desperately tries to trade his crappy Xeroxed zine with an artisanal pretty zine printed "with soy-based inks on biodegradable, sustainably harvested toilet paper."[^1] \[title page\] ============== Against the \[cozy\] prettyprinters:\ a defense of crappy print \[Marc van Elburg & Florian Cramer & Clara Balaguer\] \[Florian's first (and rather crappy) attempt of theorizing crappy print\] ========================================================================== Crappy print could be most generally characterized as a poor medium, i.e. as the opposite of what in creative industries is referred to as "rich media." This characterization, however, does not suffice alone. On top of being poor, crappy print is the poorest among, and of, the poor media. In most cases, its impoverishment is not designed; it's not a product of conceptual cleverness or aesthetic rationale. Crappy print is unpretentious, and therefore vulnerable. Where its makers are actually aware of its crappiness, they may be driven by anti-aesthetic sentiments, or rather, resentments. In media-theoretical terms, poor media is largely synonymous with what McLuhan (oddly) called "cool media" in 1964: media that are low definition, low resolution, low density. "Rich media," on the contrary, are largely synonymous with McLuhan's (oddly named) "hot media": glossy products in high definition, high resolution, high density, high-quality finishing; such as cinema and coffee table books. As early as in the 1960s, McLuhan noted the paradox that poor ("cool") media tend to be better engage audiences than rich ("hot") media. Back then, it was crappy black-and-white television that engaged the masses more than Technicolor widescreen cinema, despite or rather: precisely because of, its low definition. Today, this example easily extends to Twitter tweets and imageboard memes versus billboard and tv ad campaigns. But where does it leave crappy print? - \[Marc's mining (for something to defend)\] ------------------------------------------- - As a zine maker and small publisher, I am a user of printers, not a developer of them. Referring to McLuhan, I like print-on-demand because I like what it does to me, rather than what I do to it. And I do not like as much what Riso or offset print or online publishing do to me. ```{=html} ``` - What print-on-demand does to me is the following: it keeps me close to the moment, to my line of thought. I don't have to plan far ahead. And I don't have to worry about making a large investment and a large number of prints of the work. I feel comfortable making mistakes, I can be more direct, and write for specific situations and people. The item might still end up online, but only later, so that it still keeps some of that physical energy of print-on-demand. Print-on-demand has its own temporality, it is materially irreversible (unlike the format we are now working in, an Etherpad collaborative writing web page, that saves changes in time, (which actually I find quite rewarding as a collaborative tool right now :-))). Print-on-demand has an irreversible history, a timestamp. In terms of networking, it keeps the printed matter active within a network of exchange, instead of it sitting on a pile waiting for a customer. \[baseless claim\] ------------------ Poor/cool/crappy media are populist media, in every imaginable sense of the word "populist." \[fine print\] -------------- However, poor and crappy are not synonymous. Rather, *crappy* is a special case of *poor.* Not only is crappy the poorest of the poor, but it also exposes hidden richness as the concealed side of other types of poor media. Poor media, including those common in artists' publishing, may be differentiated into at least three subcategories: a) arte povera media; media whose poor production value is an aesthetic-political statement, such as: Easter European samizdat typescripts and potato stamps, mimeographed duo-tone political leaflets, protest songs accompanied by only acoustic guitars, the 'human microphone' of the Occupy movement (where a speakers' unamplified words were repeated and thus amplified by the surrounding crowd); ```{=html} ``` a) poor yet highly artisanal-crafty media; a phenomenon most common in Third World countries. In Western culture, it might have begun in the 19th century Arts and Crafts movement, with its rejection of industrial production and elaborate yet entirely self-made artisanal products. Since then, there have been countless reiterations, from post-1960s 'alternative culture,' its commodification as gentrifier coffee shop interiors up to today's cozy pretty-printed Riso zines. b) poor and crappy media. The poor media nobody wants to have: the small, snippety flyers of African spiritual mediums (widespread in the Benelux countries, France and Portugal) whose names and cellphone numbers always change about who always promise solutions to the same personal problems; the weekly ad-financed free newspaper in the letterbox; the ink- or laser-printed lamp post flyer of someone searching their runaway cat; the crappy soccer fan, music band or political activist sticker on a lamp post; the copy shop-printed, plastic-ring-bound seminar reader or Bachelor/Master/doctoral thesis; the research paper typeset in Microsoft Word (that makes university academics long for artistic research as a means of obtaining graphic design and pretty printing for their publications). At least in former times, the crappy Xeroxed leaflet or zine. - * In today's artists' publishing, small press and zine culture, (a), (b) and (c) have become increasingly conflated, as can be easily seen and experienced on any zine fest, self-publishing and artist books fair. The question is: can this cohabitation continue, or isn't it based on superficial consensus and fake community? Which also begs the question: isn't "DIY" (do-it-yourself) as the concept that bands together these practices, an empty signifier? - **\[sound of paper being torn\]** hollow commonality in aesthetics ```{=html} ``` - **\[sound of paper being torn\]** hollow commonality in modes of production ```{=html} ``` - **\[sound of paper being torn\]** hollow commonality in politics ⁠--⁠ that not only exists between DIY pretty printers and DIY crappy printers, but even among the crappy printers themselves, which (as one cannot stress it often enough) range from anarchist squatters to religious extremists and neo-Nazis. As one can learn from Ayatollah Khomeini's mass-copied, audio-taped speeches as the 1970s forerunner of 1980s DIY cassette label culture, there is no intrinsic value, and no salvation, in "DIY" and "crappiness"; just as there is no intrinsic value and salvation in the related concept of "minor literature" and other Deleuzian tropes. So what is there to defend? Is there anything to defend? (To further mess up this pamphlet, and its initial promise of a "defense.") - ### \[Marc's 'Ayatollah'-triggered thought\] - Could it be that the rise of populism and murders of controversial public figures had an effect on increasing the gap between political and artist publications // and hence a gap between a focus on 'non-political' designer print and more emotive political print // or a taboo on unfiltered opinionation on one side and a taboo on any kind of self-censorship on the other (??) // ```{=html} ``` - *(in that sense the relation between zines and print-on-demand to me is more meaningful than the relation between zines and memes because print-on-demand has a culture of immediate publishing while also* *not* *just being spread around indiscriminately like commercials/spam (although online advertising arguably now moves into the same direction of being locally specific))* \[insert Clara: *recycled shit*\] ================================= *Here's a bit about local (as in, from the Philippines) recycling framework: diskarte. True to form, it's recycled from an old interview turned essay turned lecture. Because it's seriously ridiculous how one is expected to spew out new shit all the time, survive multiple jobs, and often spew out new shit with no remuneration for the benefit of peer-reviewed high horses who assume that everyone who contributes to their hallowed halls is somehow institutionally funded. No surprise then that their indexes and tables of contents are s o w e s t e r n.* *For the millionth time, a caveat: I understand the West as a hyperreal territory that was shoved down my post-colonial throat for decades.* I first heard about *diskarte*, as a design concept, from Pamela Cajilig. She used to run a local design thinking collective called Curiosity.ph. She describes it as a strategy taken from the Filipino attitude of making the best of what you have on hand to solve problems efficiently, cheaply, quickly, and humorously. DIY is more of a back-to-the-roots movement, a critique of consumerist society wherein self-insufficiency (born of luxury) is the norm. DIY could be described as a romanticized Westernized return to autonomy, to knowing how to fix and survive outside of planned obsolescence. Diskarte*,* in contrast, is a subconscious attitude applied to design or life that stems not from luxury ennui but from the want of resources. It is a knowing how to solve seemingly insurmountable problems in the face of precarity. We tend to see diskarte attitude as something to be both proud and ashamed of, as these patchwork solutions arise when money (or any other "desirable" asset) is missing. \[second-layer insert Florian:\] -------------------------------- But DIY can also be understood as a poetics of ignoring expected expertise: doing things anyway while lacking talent and skill; such as playing in a punk or noise band without 'knowing' how to sing or play an instrument. Or being a zine maker without knowing spelling, grammar, graphic design, printmaking, binding, distribution. In other words, a "fuck it, I don't care whether people think it's crap" attitude. It's anti-consumerist only in the sense that, by removing entry barriers, it permits everyone to be a producer and thus does away with the producer/consumer dichotomy. And, in the best cases, yielding inventive solutions, poetic/aesthetic surprises and new imaginaries coming out of that lack of skill. Admittedly, this is a romanticist trope, and thus problematic in many respects. Not surprisingly, my main cultural reference for this is punk and post-punk culture; more specifically the early 1980s "Geniale Dilletanten" subculture of West-Berlin which, among many others, involved the queer band and art project "Die Tödliche Doris" (The Deadly Doris) and the 1979-1982 zine *Y-KLRMPFNST*. "Geniale Dilletanten" by itself was a product of crappy print since it had resulted from a typo: on a festival flyer, somebody had accidentally misspelled "Geniale Dilettanten", the German word for "genius dilettantes" (or "brilliant inepts"), as "genius dill aunts", and that spelling was ultimately embraced by everyone involved. My issue with "Geniale Dilletanten", nevertheless, is its romanticist urge to relativize and legitimize its own ineptitude, rather calling oneself "Dilletante" or "inept dill aunt" straight away, with no prefixed attribute. While "Dilettant" today means lack of talent and skill, in 18th century German aesthetics, it still meant "amateur." The "genius" dates back to the same time and discourse, to Klopstock, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, and the romanticist trope of the autonomous, later also naive, genius whose creativity is no longer bound by rule books. In many ways, "Geniale Dilletanten" epitomized the contradictions of 1980s do-it-yourself punk and post-punk culture which, in a populist move, removed participation barriers *and* simultaneously, in an elitist attitude, celebrated individual genius. Which conversely begs the question: which culture, and which practice, embraces its own crappiness without any strings attached? The source book of the "Geniale Dilletanten" subculture -- aptly called *Geniale Dilletanten* and published in 1981 by Merve Verlag, Germany's equivalent of Semiotext(e)---contained an essay on zine culture written by Y-KLRMPFNST's maker Mutfak Reisse. Mutfak in turn extensively quoted the intro of an issue of the Bavarian punk zine *Kunst-Gruft* (Art Tomb) whose rough English translation will be a ### \[third-layer insert Mutfak = fourth-layer insert *Kunst-Gruft*\] *"Hey, jerks. You fell for a crap paper again, I guess! How can you be so stupid as to spend your German marks for this. And what do you get? Every jerk and dumbass who hangs around at concerts can cough up what's in here. Just come up with a good sound bite, make it the name of your zine, roam your hometown, make a drunk riot, write about what you all fucked up, how much booze you had and how 'nuts' this was. Then maybe a few record reviews, your own billboard charts, a few parodies of the Pope, \[right-wing politician\] Strauss and the FUCKING state. It will be the best of the best of all zines. If you manage to be 'distinctive,' all fanzine writers from North to South will like it, and that's really all you want. Fanzines serve only one purpose: that college wankers and high school droolers (hello boring old fart Hollow Skai!) no longer have to leave their discharge in rags of cloth etc., but can also put it on shiny white paper, drooling over the reactions of some monotonous, opinionated SEXPISTOLSCRASSANARCHYFANATICS & get some warm lustful vibes from it. Fanzine writers never fight lost battles against the world around them because they feel confident and strong. They have the attitude of partly important personalities, of people who are influential and can cause change.... And who are usually drunk."* *Kunst-Gruft* \[Art Tomb\] no. 4, 1981 ("super luxury edition")[^2] \[back to second-layer insert Florian\] --------------------------------------- Among others, the above zine intro does: - situate crappy print within a larger nihilistic complex of crappy poetics, aesthetics and lifestyle; or \[to riff on a concept by Gert Mattenklott[^3]\] as a crappy-nihilistic aesthetic anthropology; ```{=html} ``` - neither position DIY as a critique of consumerist society, nor as a sustainable lifestyle, as opposed to much post-1960s countercultural and present-day ecologist DIY. On the contrary, consumption (of music and alcohol) is excessive, Dionysian and decisively unhealthy. Has this crappy print culture been destroyed or sidelined by the prettyprinters? If it ever actually disappeared, who would miss its---literally---toxic masculinity? Isn't what is being described here, in 1981, trolling and shitposting, which nowadays has migrated to 4chan and other electronic platforms? Did a paradigm shift, in the (almost) literal sense of Thomas S. Kuhn's *Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, occur where DIY print became synonymous with artisanal prettyprinting while crappy shitposting was delegated to even crappier---and even faster and even cheaper---online media? Does, in other words, crappy print still exist in DIY cultures? And would it qualify as diskarte? \[second-layer insert Marc\] ---------------------------- There is no radical aesthetics. A protest against the discrimination of crappy publishing seems futile since the end of discrimination in liberalism simply means assimilation. (but maybe I did not fully comprehend the source of your anger :-)) \[back to insert *recycled shit* Clara\] ======================================== Though in the North/West there is a more-or-less strong public infrastructure and consciousness for recycling, DIY exists alongside cavalier faith in the renewability, the false abundance of all resources. This is the contradiction of the most pedestrian form of Western eco-sensibility. In the Philippines, on the other hand, diskarte somewhat ignores sustainability discourse. It is merely a survival mechanism, folded into everyday life. Recycling starts at home with people saving and using all sorts of scraps and fragments to make diskarte. Then, maybe the local garbage men collect any leftover waste in wooden carts and sacks, roving the neighborhood with baskets and carts along with the *manghahasa* (tool sharpener), the sellers of *balut* (incubated duck fetus eggs) and *taho* (soybean curd with tapioca and syrup) and other mobile cottage industry microbusinesses. The independent trash men (they're usually men) buy or simply collect recyclable paper, bottles, and plastic to resell to junk dealers, maybe even back to the Coca-Cola factories that created them in the first place. Larger scale garbage collectors, with proper trucks and stuff, outsource the sorting service to junk shops or take it upon themselves for maximizing profit or simply bring unsegregated trash to landfills, where hundreds of informal dwellers---who may also live on these mountains of trash---pick doggedly through mountains of waste, mining for monetizable objects, relying on luck and persistence. *Chamba*, which is something like luck, also affects diskarte. Your efforts to make diskarte always require some element of luck, fatalistic and somewhat effortless auspiciousness. When you live so close to want and have so much faith in the supernatural, the idea of life becomes a set of bets you may win or lose---so you roll the dice and pray for favor as a natural component of action. The last particularity of diskarte involves the concept of resilient humor. A not-so-pretty individual can get a hotte hook-up with the power of their diskarte---e.g., humorous and engaging conversation; fantastic gifts; polite and charming demeanor to family and friends. Same goes for site-specific design solutions. My recent favorite diskarte find is a bench made for a patch of sidewalk that had both an elevated and depressed area. So they built a bench with one set of legs shorter than the other so it could be positioned, presumably, to maximize the hours of shade and not be in the way of passers-by. Though, maybe they just liked the view better sitting in that direction. It's a funny looking thing and you can't help but crack a grin when you see it. If you see it, that is. Often, we take for granted these tiny moments of wry ingenuity.[^4] \[glued-on question\] --------------------- diskarte = genius crappiness? (analogous to genius dilettantism/brilliant inepts) \[glued-on rebuttal\] --------------------- I'd balk at the idea that poverty or belatedness can only produce a dilettante or ineptitude. Genius, period. \[destruction of all previous arguments\] ========================================= Print-on-demand can actually be 'pretty' in a stereotypical sense of being colorful, well-designed, aesthetically pleasing, flawless. However, it then completely loses its specificity and becomes an invisible behind-the-scenes, back-end technology, a dirty little secret known only to producers. Most people will no longer be able to tell that such a publication is a print-on-demand publication. Conversely, in contrast with prettypritting, Riso print can be crappy. Even though making good crappy Riso is not easy. But crappy is not actually the opposite of pretty. Ugly is. \[thought cloud\] ----------------- Why insist on binaries? There's a spectrum of beauty that cannot be comprehended with the assertion that "ugly" lies on the other end of pretty. But if we had to insist on an opposite, here's a free association of alterworld binaries: Profound Compelling Uncanonical Stendhalian \[back to destruction of all previous arguments\] ================================================= Crappiness refers to value, and thus only implicitly to aesthetics. When speaking of prettiness, there is maybe too much love and respect for the machines of the prettyprinters; too much overall care and good maintenance to achieve real crappiness. But that is where the attribute "crappy" in opposition to "pretty" can end up becoming pretty abusive (pun intended); when you have good equipment and you break it or treat it badly, on purpose, because of your belief that harshness produces authenticity, acting self-destructively in order to appear credible. This is very similar to the nihilist punk posing trap described in the 1981 *Kunst-Gruft* (Art Tomb) zine, only that self-destruction shifts from the semantics of writing to its (re)production apparatus; or---in semiotic terminology---from symbol to index. (This shift had been anticipated, as early as in 1960, in Gustav Metzger's concept of auto-destructive art.) In this sense, the type of crappiness that manifests itself in print-on-demand---is less destructive than other forms of crappy print. This type of crappiness is also non-judgmental and doesn't discriminate, because it involves no explicit normativity, not even anti-aesthetic or any other type of negative normativity. Contemporary prettyprinting (with Riso and spiritually related techniques) tends to be non-judgmental, too, by not actually (and at best only implicitly) setting beauty norms. Both types of non-judgmentalism have permeated into contemporary zine and small publishing cultures. * … . . . ……………. ……. In the end, this leaves the question: when judgments and sentiments have shifted so fundamentally, isn’t the 2010s/2020s resurgence of zine culture and DIY printmaking deceptive? Is a zine today really still what was understood as a zine until the 1990s (when the Internet disrupted and reconfigured zine culture): a quickly and cheaply self-produced, low-end, low-value, low-skill small periodical? The short answer is that the old zine paradigm still exists, particularly in political activist zines and pamphlets; not, if one looks at prettyprinted zines made in the larger orbit of artist book fairs, indie comics and illustration/graphic design. \[insert Marc\] --------------- thinking about this *resurgence* and the \*deceptive\*; to me the 1980's, 1990's, 2000's, 2010's were all just as filled with the same quantities of meaningless publications as the 2020's today. And in general, I felt just as much excluded from any scene back then: for example, by the alternative comic stores whose owners thought that what I made did not qualify as comics because it neither had speech bubbles nor a linear narrative in clearly squared frames. The same could happen at some punk event where my zines were considered to be too arty or intellectual to be real punk. Crappy publishing therefore has *always* been unwanted and existing in a no man's land. Ultimately because, at least in the West, no man's land is probably the only credible ground for crappy publishing. That is maybe also why---if crappy publishing is not unwanted---it becomes immediately suspect. "DIY" of crappy publishing to me first of all means to create my own framework or context within which I publish. Prettyprinter culture, in my view, is unclear in its politics. Most often, it appears as a friendly community built around microcapitalism with objectified environmentally friendly design objects of desire---which is not something I am particularly attracted to. - *(in Western crappy publishing, 'no man's land' then is not necessarily a place of limited resources or wealth (at least not for me))* ```{=html} ``` - \[see also 'fine print' and 'diskarted notes'\] ```{=html} ``` - The danger of being disregarded---to me---is also the *privilege* of being disregarded in a culture based on attention management and attention capitalism. ```{=html} ``` - I am not poor, but more importantly I have a lot of free time because I have a working partner who provides most of our income; no man's land for me can easily become something like the equivalent of the \$2000 crappy sneakers of fashion brand balenciaga. ```{=html} ``` - That is also maybe why I am reluctant to boost the crappy print of others when it is just based on crappiness. Crappyprinting in other cultural contexts can have quite different meanings. ### \[(s)crap rant---bounce\] My personal view on zines is that all zines, including prettyprints that identify as zines, are subjective, political and opinionated. And in that context, the environmental sustainability argument, when it is used to justify occidental prettyprinter zine culture \[like in the aforementioned "soy-based inks on biodegradable, sustainably harvested toilet paper"\], is biased and politically suspect. Too often it is being diplomatically used as a unifying narrative that obscures existing differences and issues around, for example, race, gender, power or privilege with that culture. Risographic art zines that mainly focus on visual patterns and layering colors are also political, in the same way the primary colors and the rainbow symbol are political. .... .. ======= \***affectively**; in contrast to prettyprinters, crappyprinters would print what Sianne Ngai refers to as 'ugly feelings';[^5] i.e. all the irritated, the envious, the disgusted, the anxious, the paranoid, the crazy stupid and the angry affects that are excluded in prettiness culture. Zine archives are dead weight. * A salute and a farewell to the pretty printers * *did prettyprinters not end up being prettyprinters because they did what they had to do in order to survive? to make some money out of creative publishing without completely surrendering to capital, to create a community outside the mainstream that has its own moral standards while it is not a shark cage run by masculine alpha males like so many of the rebel communities in the west of the previous century? Does not the ‘against prettyprinters’ already imply that prettyprinters are not toothless, nice or tolerant to everything, that prettyprinters bring their own exclusions and that the agent behind the against is already feeling that exclusion? * * *Is this exclusion than not the best gift that the prettyprinters can give to the excluded? Will the crappyprinter position themselves as a parasite within the frame of prettyprinters, or is there a crappyprinter’s domain that exists independently of prettyprinters?* * \[insert: (a radical 2022 rereading of zinedepo's 2018 "Manifest of Radical Zine-culture"[^6])\] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ - The radical zine format boils down to fiction, not print or publishing. ```{=html} ``` - Radical zine culture is not network culture; it is ghettoization. It was the end of ghettoization that brought zines to the mainstream, which was also the beginning of the end of the radical zine. ```{=html} ``` - There is no life in closed systems, there is no safe place in open systems. ```{=html} ``` - The radical zine is not about borders, it is about boundaries. ```{=html} ``` - The radical zine liberates fiction from the program; the program being the feedback loops connected to funding systems in the arts and likely to funding as such. ```{=html} ``` - Occidental postmodernism that is not situated anywhere, neither in zine culture nor in capitalism, will end up in indifference to colonialism, spam, and pollution. ```{=html} ``` - Whether or not you may copy a radical zine, depends on the extent to which you are able to handle its radical content. ```{=html} ``` - All laws can be parasited. ```{=html} ``` - The radical zine is radical art. ```{=html} ``` - radical=crappy only if it exists within a culture that is hostile to crappiness. ```{=html} ``` - some zine makers have an incentive to be crappy, some have an incentive to be radical, sometimes these incentives intersect. ```{=html} ``` - . \[last page\] ============= Crappy publishing was always unwanted, was always crappy publishing in no man's land, in the West no man's land is probably the only credible ground for crappy publishing. Maybe prettyprinters are not crappyprinters because they are not in a crappy state or place. \[needs work\] -------------- prickly printers protesting pretty pricey plenty printers [^1]: Lauren Purje, Navigating the Zine Economy*, Hyperallergic,* September 18, 2015, , accessed May 28th 2022; we contacted the artist for obtaining reproduction rights here, but didn't receive a reply. [^2]: Quoted in Mutfak Reisse, "Über die Inhalte und Bedeutung der Literatur im genialen Dilletantismus" \[On the contents and meaning of literature in genius dilettantism\], in: Wolfgang Müller (ed.), *Geniale Dilletanten*, Berlin: Merve, 1982, p. 83; quote translated from German by Florian Cramer. [^3]: Gert Mattenklott, "Ästhetische Anthropologie in Goethes Zweitem 'Faust.'", in: Gunter Gebauer (ed.), *Historische Anthropologie*, Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1989, pp. 217--52. [^4]: Michelle James, "Export quality extended: an exchange with The Office of Culture & Design (full transcript)," in: *Un Magazine,* 10.2 (2016), archived copy: , accessed May 28th 2022. Interview slightly edited by C. as part of *Vernacular Language Toolkit*, a subsequent publishing and pedagogical project by Cristina Cochior and Manetta Berends of Varia Rotterdam. [^5]: Sianne Ngai, *Ugly Feelings*, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2017. [^6]: Original text \[including spelling errors\]: "The radical zineformat is basic; several pages, black & white, folded and stapled together. \| Zines = zineculture \| Zineculture = proto social network \| The radical zineformat is not about printing and printing techniques (but its content can be) \| The radical zineformat is not about bookmaking (but its content can be) \| Zines are about social networking (global and local) \| Most zines have an 'open structure', (this way they are also a network of meaning) \| The radical zine is primarily about personal interest (from the individual to the general) \| Radical zine ideology is 'do it yourself' ideology. \| Radical zine culture is not technophoic, a robot may produce and promote a zine completely automatically as long as it is a product of its personal expression. \| As long as the definition of the radical zine format is (more or less) maintained, there is no limit to subject matter (sex / death) or to discipline (drawn, written, collaged, cut & paste, scratched, photographed, coded, etc.) \| The radical zineformat is not a mass product (but many people may copy a zine) \| The radical zine is not Art (but its content can be) \| Radical zineculture = Canadian culture \| (some of the elements of the manifest have no function but to separate zine-culture from any other culture. A tongue-in-cheeck reference to South Park 'the royal canadian wedding episode'. \| The manifest is not so much a set of rigid rules but a coordinate. It more or less gives our definition of zines as opposed to artbooks or magazines. \| Zinedepo is a library with more than 1200 international zines collected over a period of 25 years by Marc van Elburg." Archived copy of the original text: , accessed May 28th 2022.