So I have this script I wrote a while ago, a deeply personal script. That's probably why I haven't sent it out or shown anyone. Also, being slipstream, being a western, having orcs and fairies... it's probably pretty expensive to make.
But then I got the idea to make a Zine version. It's very different. At first I thought I would do this as a collage, I would complete it physically then scan it in, craft it into a book.
But I don't have the materials. So then I thought I would use royalty free images and so forth from the internet. And that was a good start, BUT the rights were not as straightforward as you would hope even when searching for creative commons you could use.
Then I remembered that zines never really bothered with stuff like that. You might pretend that it mattered, but really when you copy / pastee and remix in the grand old style of collage it transforms the work and becomes something new. Right?
At least, that's what all the talk about copyright being problematic from the 90s through the last few years seemed to suggest. Until everyone got weird about it.
The problem with avoiding using someone else's' work without right gnawed at me until I gave in and used Midjourney to create the exact images I needed. Images that I conjured up through learning how to do just that, learning how to get the right input and the output. I'm no whiz nor expert at it, but there's a large difference between my first attempts and how I used the platform currently. It required learning, an education, attempts and failures, like any artistic tool. Such images didn't exist before I typed them into existence.
Of course the anti AI-art sentiment gives me pause about releasing of finishing this story, though I have worked through the objections to the tool elsewhere. But I am also engaging in that old artistic tradition of collage and transformation.
The images I needed didn't exist. I don't have the money to get the rights to or make images similar to those I need, nor the money to produce a screenplay, a photoplay, or even a short trailer. Because I wrote a western, which means period dress, which means horses. And I made it a fantasy. So that means makeup, effects, and so on and so forth...
But I can't not release my story into the world as the screenplay it is--too personal, too expensive to make--. I am using the tools that I have a command of, not being an artist nor photographer of any skill worth mentioning, in order to create my story my way.
It's a tool within the toolbox. And while the people that make Zines tend to now say that it should only be made physically, I'm skeptical. After all, if the point is a democratic exchange of ideas where the barrier to access is ANYONE... then all tools should be accepted. (I could have just as easily used a free generator to make the images I am using, transforming, re-contextualizing, for example.)
So what is my point here? Other than I am in the middle of working on an issue of the said zine and got frustrated with the art so thought I would bash out some words?
It's a pretty simple old argument. Any tactic of communication is valid, it depends what you do with it. What you take, remix, transform.
Hopefully, remixing my own old script will transform both me and others who (even more hopefully) both read and like it. (If you're reading this, I hope you will read that.
Ah. So this becomes an ad after all for a soon to be added project on my website: Snoopier Than Light. You're already on it, if you didn't know.
I guess so, but I'm just trying to motivate myself to get through Vol 1, Issue 2 of Inner West, which you will soon find here.