tINY dIGEST #1 is QUEER ARCHIVE WORK newsletter. QAW has an open call for and collected 23 contributions around the theme of space—queer space, taking up space, sacred space, porous space, safe space, outer space, spaced out, shared space, screen space, etc.
This newsletter is printed on a single sheet of cheap paper and simply folded to fit in an envelope so later it could be distributed through mail in an ordinary business envelope . It was designed to be assembled quickly, easily printed, and distributed by hand.
In Ray’s practice of mail art, he made the collage with arbitrary materials gathered in his daily life, it can be a photograph cut from a magazine or a paragraph of writing about the conversation he had over lunch that day. After he finished the collage, he just send it off as mail to invite whomever receives it to modify the work and to create on top of what he made.
When having his collage work always circulating among his mail list, Ray declined to create a body of work that manifested a specific narrative arc of his own “development.” Rather, he disseminated himself and recruited others, fostering a community. With the mail art circulation, he presented a new way that detaches from the uniform, fixed sense of art exhibition. This new way also negates the common culture’s ever-widening separation of one’s life (living) from one’s art (making).
I stumbled on this when I was researching projects related to flip book. I think it is also a form of experimental publications taking place on the web. Bryce experimented with Are.na’s UI — modular blocks — to assemble a digital book that is intended to be read from left to right and line by line with captions below each image. I think the medium he chose here is particularly interesting. It is modular and emphasizes on the order that you look at the pictures, which is chronologically ordered because that is the rule of are.na’s UI. Publishing on are.na also allows a kind of distribution that is keyword based, algorithmic, very open.