Over the last few years, I’ve become increasingly curious about moving from digital to physical media for my creative practices. Throughout my life, except for handwriting and acrylic paintings, I’ve always only worked with digital design and photography (without printing anything).
Now, I really want to move into a physical space, where I can use it as a studio and have a small bookstore. That’s why I started @zinoteket this year, as a base for the future bookshop and physical practices. I want to handle, display, and sell physical media like photo books and printed graphics, both my own and other people’s.
One reason is that I’ve become really tired of constantly hearing about AI all the time. Digital media is already a bit removed from our physical world and reality, and now even the digital things we create aren’t created by our hand, manually. I don’t think it feels authentic anymore. What about the physical world all around us? Don’t we want to touch and feel the things we create and that are a product of our human experience?
Another part is social media. I’ve been critical of social media for some time, but I still use it to keep in contact with friends and acquaintances, and I also know that it’s where people discover new things today. So, I’ve always felt that my creative work needed to be suited for digital platforms to have any chance of reaching an audience.
But now, possibly because I have an income from a stable job (as opposed to when I was freelancing and running my own businesses), I can afford to play around more. I’m grateful for my work, because having a stable income takes away the pressure to perform creatively. I feel like I can afford to experiment and spend my money on testing out different materials, papers, and textures, without counting the costs too much. That’s the good thing with having a job, even if one might want to spend one’s entire time on exploration.
I want to experiment with printing my photography on physical media – different papers, textures, colors, and in various combinations. I want to start writing and painting on my physical prints. I want to try to do my own zines and photo books.
I don’t want it to be too fancy, and I don’t want to mass-produce anything. I also don’t necessarily want to sell it. If anyone would offer to buy in the future, sure, but it would be nice to do this without a goal of profiting financially.
