Mykola Kryzhan
Research Mentor: Marisol Fila
Mentor Department: Romance Languages and Literatures, LSA
Author(s): Mykola Kryzhan, Marisol Fila
Session: Session 3 (11:00 AM – 11:50 AM)
Presentation Type: Poster 128
Abstract
Current scholarship on the historically countercultural art form of zines tends to focus primarily on the textual content, with limited analysis into design elements. This research, which necessitates the archival of zines, is in active tension with zine-making communities, as well as the archival categorization methods most institutions utilize. Using a recently compiled collection of over 200 Latin American zines from the 1990s and early 2000s (approximately 50 of which are currently digitized), the focus of this study will center on their design elements, the affordances of digital platforms to effectively archive and present digitized zines, as well as comparative analysis between zines from the 1990s, with zines from the present. To explore the historical context of zines, as well the academic landscape of scholarship on zine content and design, this study utilizes literature about zines, zine-making communities, and zine-preservation from the United States and Latin American. This study also appraises and utilizes tools that can analyze large collections of zines, such as image analysis models from the open access digital tool Distant Viewing Lab. Through this comparative analysis between zines from the 1990s and the present, we identify patterns among older zines which prioritized designs that could be made quickly and cheaply. Through the “transparent design†of these older zines, in which traces of the creation process could be clearly seen within the final copy, they are more easily replicable. Conversely, zines made in the 2010s and 2020s heavily prioritize clean, digital designs along with overall design/aesthetic cohesiveness. These zines focus less on content, especially overt political content, and tend to create designs that are more “opaque†or harder to replicate. From this analysis, we can surmise how zine production, design, and the overall goals of zine-making within countercultural movements have changed over time.
