Cut & Paste EIU Zine Symposium

Cut and Paste — EIU Zine Symposium

Wednesday, March 5^th  1pm-5pm
Eastern Illinois University Booth Library
Witters Conference Room 4440

The Cut and Paste — EIU Zine Symposium will feature a round-table panel discussion with zine makers and academics; a zine production workshop where participants can learn to make their own zine; and a screening of the DVD “Zined!: a documentary" by Marc Moscato (followed by a Q/A discussion with the panelists).

Schedule

1-2:15 pm: Zine and DIY Publishing Round-table Discussion
2-3:45 pm: Zine Production Workshop
4-5 pm: “Zined” Documentary Video Screening and Discussion

A zine display will be located near the room during the symposium, and on the third floor of Booth Library before and after the event. The display will be up from February 19th until March 12th

​This event is sponsored by the EIU Department of Communication Studies and Booth Library.

What is a Zine?

According to Steven Duncombe’s “Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Underground Culture,” Verso,1997, zines are characterized by the following:

• Noncommercial, nonprofessional, small circulation magazines which the creators produce, publish, and distribute by themselves.
• Topics outside the status quo: musical tastes, politics, transgressive ideas, ideas about sexuality, unorthodox artistic sensibilities, subcultures etc.  Characterized by honesty, kindness, anger, humor etc.. 
• DIY (do-it-yourself) make your own culture and stop consuming that which is made for you.
• They celebrate the everyday every person within in a world of celebrity and spectacle. 
• Fascination with the cultural margins.
• Not based on traditional profit models. 
• Between a personal letter and a magazine.  
• Usually 10-40 pages in length.  Cut and paste layout, handmade (sometimes by computer), uneven production.  
• Decidedly amateur.
• Exchanged through the mail.  Traded.  Zine distribution/zine stores/zine libraries/zine fests.
• Usually one-person operations. 
• No geographic center.  Done in out-of-the-way places and big cities. 
• How to count as an individual? How to build a supportive community?  How to have a meaningful life?  How to create something that is yours? 
• Zines can personalize politics, tell stories, and find nuance within dogmatic ideas.
• An outlet for identity construction. 
• Zines offer a space for people to try out new personalities, ideas and politics.
• Formulate ideas of an authentic life and build a community of support.

Zine and DIY Publishing Panel

The panelists will discuss the subcultural significance of fanzine or zine culture as a form of do-it-yourself (DIY) publishing.   The panelists will address their personal histories with zines; how they’ve been influenced by zine consumption and production; the aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) and content of zines; a loose philosophy of zines; and a look at the place and future of zines in the digital world.   The panelists will also suggest strategies for the aspiring zine maker.  Discussion will be followed by a Q/A discussion with the audience.

Panelists:

Dr. David Gracon (in-person)
Dr. Robert Petersen (in-person)
Jason Pankoke (in-person)
Liz Mason (via Skype)
Lainie Duro (via conference call)

Panelist Biographies

Dr. David Gracon

David Gracon is an Assistant Professor of Integrated media at Gonzaga University.  His research and teaching interests include the political economy of communication, critical cultural studies, alternative media, film interpretation and digital media production (documentary and experimental media).   In 2012, David completed his first feature length documentary film Walls of Sound — A Look Inside the House of Records (63 minutes/Microcosm Distribution). [Walls of Sound on Facebook]  David created Ape Fanzine between 1995-1999.  This was a very empowering experience that taught him the importance of participatory and do-it-yourself media production. 
 
Dr. Robert Petersen

Robert S. Petersen professor of Art History at Eastern Illinois University and is the author of Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels: a History of Graphic Narrative, (Praeger, 2011) as well as the essay “The Acoustics of Manga” reprinted in A Comic Studies Reader, Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, eds. (University Press of Mississippi, 2009).  Petersen has also curated an exhibition on the history of comics and graphic design influenced by the French Situationist movement which was shown at the Tarble Art Center and now can be seen online at detournementexhibition.org.

​Jason Pankoke
 
Jason Pankoke is a writer, designer, graphic artist, cinema fan,  and independent culture advocate living in Champaign, Illinois. He has worked more than 20 years in the publishing and printing fields, continuously applying that experience and knowledge to volunteer and personal projects. The latter include the nationally distributed film journal MICRO-FILM, self-published between 1999 and 2006, and the regional Weblog/print digest C-U Confidential, active since 2006. He also programs an annual community event called the New Art Film Festival, a public showcase of local filmmaking, which takes place at the Art Theater Co-op in Champaign each April. In addition, he is a member of the Champaign Movie Makers networking group and informally advises the Illini Film & Video student club at the University of Illinois in Urbana. By day, he is a publications design professional at Adept Content Solutions, also located in Urbana, and by night arguably skirts professionalism by co-hosting the irreverent pop culture podcast Damian Duffy Hates Everything! with graphic designer Eric Benson and comics historian Damian Duffy.
 
Liz Mason  

Liz Mason has been self-publishing for seventeen years. Her work has been printed in such publications as The Chicago Tribune, Punk Planet, Venus, Lumpen and The Zine Yearbook. She has appeared on a reality show to provide instruction on publishing zines, which NBC executives referred to as “pamphlets” as if they were Marxist propaganda. Recent published works include Caboose #8: Redraft Picks and Caboose #7: Britney Spears 101, which focuses on her experience undergoing treatment for Hodgkin's Lymphoma cancer, as seen through the lens of consumerism, celebrity obsession and public scrutiny. She lives in Chicago and is the manager of Quimby's Bookstore, famous for its dedication to selling zines, comix and other aberrant periodicals. For more info, see lizmasonisawesome.com. and lizsmasoniclodge.blogspot.com.
 

Lainie Duro
 
As a 9 year old in 1979, Lainie Duro, a Chicago-area native, began nurturing a lifelong love of books by spending much of her spare time curating her collection, also known as "Lainie's Little Library." In the '80s, she joined the zine movement and began publishing the poetry zine Lime Green Bulldozers (and other related species) followed by several different zines and chapbooks under the banner of Oyster Publications, including a true story zine called bAnal Probe, as well as chapbooks by Lorri Jackson, Ben Weasel, and John Porcellino. Currently, she's working on a zine called Oyster Lexicon and is in the very early phases of opening up the Crustacean Zine Library in Austin, Texas.
In the midst of this 30 years of zine experience, Lainie has raised and homeschooled her two children, earned a living as a technology trainer and computer literacy non-profit program manager, and has participated in Austin's activist community in various capacities. Currently a member of the loosely organized Unruly Mob Media team, she managed the People's Library on the floor of the Texas State Capitol during this past summer's abortion bill protests.
Lainie is passionate about social justice, unschooling, and technology. In addition to her roles as zinester, hack librarian, mother, and rabble rouser, she operates an educational services and tutoring business called Education Never Ends. Her current project is an exploration of the socio-politics of cooking called Food: A Living Curriculum.
You can find Lainie on Twitter (@drublood), on Wordpress (drublood.wordpress.com/), and on Tumblr (tumblr.com/blog/drublood, crustaceanzinelibrary, and diyeducationservices.) You can also reach her via plain old email at lainie dot duro at gmail dot com