The Algorithms of Late-Capitalism Zine Co-creation workshop lets participants collectively co-create a single issue of the Algorithms of Late-Capitalism zine, critically decoding and recoding contemporary tech trends and events in a creative and playful format.
Guided by a thought-provoking editorial, each participant creates their contribution to the zine with our help. They use content from the ‘Algorithms of Late-Capitalism’ blog, internet-found images, text, and their own creativity. It can be in the form of a collage, comic, story, poem, essay, or any other output and can be digital, analog, or mixed.
The aim of the workshop is for participants to engage more critically with algorithms in their daily lives, allowing them to become more aware of, critical towards, and knowledgeable about how, when, and to what ends ubiquitous algorithmic systems impact our lives.
We keep in touch with participants via a mailing list, inviting participants to join future workshops. We also of course send out the completed zine compiled after editing and design to all participants and encourage them to print & distribute it under a Creative Commons license.
We emphasize that the outcome of the workshop - the completed zine - is co-owned by all the contributors.
We also keep looking for and finding ways to promote and distribute the zines created through these workshops.
How will you deal with varying numbers of participants in your session?:We are very flexible in terms of participant numbers. Our ideal number is 20. If there are more, it is of course not a problem as they work semi-independently on their individual contributions. (We have experimented with 'break-out' rooms for people to collaborate on a single contribution as well).
With fever participants, we can still do the workshop itself. To fill up the zine, we either create the zine content ourselves and find ways to incorporate the participants' contributions within that, or we ask participants to do 'double-pages' instead of single pages.
I am co-founder of the research & design studio internet teapot. I work for an open-source start-up in Amsterdam as well as a podcasting company from Johannesburg.
Karla holds an MA in Media Arts Cultures, and is a PhD student at University of Amsterdam in the Department of Media Studies.