Internet Teapot, English, 20 to 40 pages, 2020, The Netherlands

This zine was conceived just before the pandemic and has outlasted it. It was co-created during workshops in Barcelona, Berlin and Linz. The editors were able to demonstrate a collective process that resulted in a technical, philosophical and activist zine about the role of algorithms in our ‘late capitalist’ society. The content is largely ‘sampled’ from self-explanatory extracts from online media, such as memes, headlines or images, and cleverly adapted to create a perceptually consistent visual style in the publication. The process lends the project a consistent aesthetic, and in terms of content, it seems to express its spirit quite faithfully. While the first three issues can undoubtedly be described as fresh “zines”, number 4 “[D/R]econstructing AI” already looks, in part, like a classic publication, created in collaboration with Johannes Kepler University and online Ars Electronica 2020. The zines intriguingly assemble their finished material on a limited and static page, something we are used to looking at briefly and then scrolling away from. And, as in the best tradition of zines, the point here is to facilitate a different learning process that connects and keeps contributors connected to readers about online censorship, surveillance, gender equality, biased AI, and resistance to technological complexity more generally.