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| "Twenty-volume folios will never make a Revolution. It is the little pocket pamphlets that are to be feared." — Voltaire, the French |
Grapheme is a laboratory of heart-core, lo-fi proportions, melding technological grunge with the sweet disposition of DIY aesthetics to furnish the living and breathing beginnings of a veritable zine subculture in Singapore. A grapheme is a fundamental unit in a written language—alphabetical letters, Chinese characters, punctuation marks—and we hope that by equipping you with the individual means within this independent experimental space, you will be moved to craft your very own zines, and partake in the language of tactile self-expression. Be an artist, be a writer, be a designer, be a publisher, be everything you want to be, be yourself. Come join in our collective Revolution today.
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A grapheme is a fundamental unit in a written language. Examples of graphemes include alphabetical letters, numerical digits, Cyrillic characters, punctuation marks and the individual symbols of any of the world's writing systems. |
A zine is an independently created publication, featuring original or appropriated texts and images. Zines can be put together by one person or a group of people and are usually photocopied. The contents are anything you want them to be; personal experiences and journals, art and design, political ideologies, music, travel stories, comics, photography, ephemera, single-topic obsession.
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A laboratory is a facility that provides controlled conditions in which scientific research, experiments and measurement may be performed. The title of laboratory is also used for certain other facilities/centres where the processes or equipment used are similar to those in scientific laboratories, or to emphasize the experimental and research-oriented nature of their undertakings. |
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The exact origins of the word "zine" is uncertain, but it was widely in use in the early 1970s, and is in all likelihood a shortened version of the word "magazine", with at least one zine lamenting the abbreviation. |
ORIGINS Following the invention of the Gutenberg printing press, dissidents and marginalized citizens have published their own opinions in leaflet and pamphlet form—the ancestral form of zines. |
Both can be thought of as significant early independent publishers and zinesters in their own right, but in their time, the mass media as we now know it did not exist. |
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1930s–1960s & SCIENCE FICTION During and after the Great Depression, editors of "pulp" science fiction magazines became increasingly frustrated with overly scrutinizing letters detailing the impossibilities of their plots. They began to publish these critical letters with their return addresses. |
In turn, these fans began writing to each other, now complete with a mailing list for their own science fiction fanzines. Fanzines enabled fans to write not only about science fiction but about fandom itself and, via perzines (i.e. personal zines), about themselves. |
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1970s & PUNK The late 1970s saw Punk zines emerge as an important part of the Punk subculture. These started in the UK and the U.S.A. and by March 1977 had spread to other countries such as Ireland. |
Cheap photocopying made it easier than ever for anyone who could make a band flyer to play around with layouts and make a zine. Punk bands often traded zines; sharing their music and the angst of the era with one another. |
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1980s & FACTSHEET FIVE From the 1980s to the 1990s, Factsheet Five catalogued and reviewed any zine or small press creation sent to it, along with their mailing addresses. Before the widespread adoption of the web and e-mail beginning around 1994, publications such as Factsheet Five formed a vital directory for connecting like-minded people. |
The idea of a networking point (the beginnings of the zine distro) for zine creators and readers was formed. The concept of zines as an art form distinct from fanzines, and of "zinesters" as members of their own subculture, had emerged. |
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1990s & RIOT GRRRL The Riot Grrrl scene of the early 1990s encouraged an explosion of zines of a raw and explicit, confrontational and more gender-balanced nature—apparently, before the 1990s, most zinesters were male. Following this, zines enjoyed a brief period of attention from conventional media and a number of zines were collected and published in book form, such as Donna Kossy's Kooks Magazine (1988—1991), published as Kooks in 1994 by Feral House. |
A number of notable magazines that are still going strong also had humble origins as zines, including Dazed & Confused, which began like as a sporadically published black-and-white poster in 1992. |
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ZINES & THE FUTURE In the late 90s, zines faded from public awareness with the propagation of the Internet. It can be argued that the sudden growth of the Internet, and the ability of private webpages/blogs to fulfill much the same role of non-mainstream expression as zines, was a strong contributor to their seeming pop culture expiration. However, in recent years, zines have subsequently been embraced by a new generation who yearn for a more tangible form of personal expression in the face of the immaterial |
nature of the Internet. This new wave of zinesters often draw inspiration from craft, graphic design and artists' books, and not necessarily from political and subcultural reasons. Even as the Internet is extending its reach, even as the book publishing industry is re-examining its working models, zines are making a comeback because they are birthed through the seed of individual expression and the beauty of the physical, and the human need for these are ever-present. Express your creativity tangibly; disseminate your thoughts and ideas into the corporeal world, make zines. |
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