i-see zine : test edition
No social media, no digital advertising, simply good old-fashioned ink and paper paired with words and feelings. No intermediary. No pop ups. No distractions. We want to be the distraction. Our little world of paper pages for you and I to dive into, whether you want to escape or come back to reality.
i-see zine was founded by Theo Siri, Oscar Blair, Will Mullan and myself in collaboration with Bureau branding studio's Jeff Boardman. I-see is made for Gen-Z by Gen-Z - we aim to take back our voice and our culture from the big orgs that profit so heavily from it, so we can provide unfiltered content that young people actually want to consume without putting toxic insecurities and advertisements into their brains.
Early on in the creation process, we decided to go social-media free. I want to be clear that we're not doing this because we're anti social media, but because social media shouldn't have such a monopoly over the attention and identity of young people. Instagram, tiktok, and twitter are all valuable tools for our generation to connect, but they are also engineering us out of truly paying attention to material content, and focusing on one thing for more than a couple of seconds. Excessive use of social media as a tool for communication and validation is becoming an intensely damaging practice; it's stopping us from taking time to read things, make things, and exist in the physical world. Clicktivism, with its well-designed text posts, digital strikes and cancel culture is never going to make a real difference to our world, because it doesn't lead to physical mobilization and active change-making, and it doesn't leave our warm echochambers. We need to reclaim our attention spans in order to actually appreciate the world around us, and we need to get off of our socials in order to actually make a difference. Young people need to be on the streets, flyposting, making art, collaborating and sharing space with each other. This is why we need stuff that permeates the material world of the youth - something that can't be scrolled past, that takes time to read and think about, with a physical, not-story-sharable weight to it.
Towards the end of 2020, we launched our test edition: short-run pilot zine intended to give a taste of what is to come. With opinion pieces on racism and climate activism, commentary on the sustainability of film photography, poetry, and a photo series, and graphic design done by me, the zine is packed with some pretty cool stuff. Through our collaboration with CLOWN Skateboards, we were able to include stickers of the CLOWN Logo, designed by Banksy - we're continuing this collaboration in the first official issue, coming out soon this year.
