Making a Mag: Recent Episodes
A podcast about the process of making Pendora’s first (and probably last) print issue, live, from brainstorming to printing, as it is happening. If you happen to listen to it, have fun and buy the magazine at the end.
Platon sits down with Anna and Will to discuss the making of Jezga Magazine. Focusing on Eastern European artists, they “champion brilliant, beautiful and thought-provoking work being created in an area that is often misunderstood.” How did Jezga come to be, and how has it evolved through its three issues?
Follow Jezga:
JEZGA MagazineInstagram @jezgamagFacebook @jezgamag
A little update on the timeline, what is happening now, and a reminder that we are still accepting submissions, particularly from photographers and other visual artists. Submissions info here.
We also touch on Analog Sea Review, a publication celebrating offline culture to the fullest.
More is coming, including videos and a special bonus episode on here. January 9th we are celebrating 5 years of Pendora, so keep an eye out on the day.
Stay safe.
Talking about the teaser video (eventually shortened to the extreme) to present the themes of the Dead Slow issue. More ideas for content: Retro Fetishism, our changing relationship with art, performative happiness (bit.ly/2HrSYDK), fake DIY culture, hoarders, and the perverse twisting of minimalist aesthetics and ethos that Marie Kondo represents.
Recently I’ve seen people on instagram post about “retro aesthetics, not retro values” meaning to appreciate the clothes without the misogyny and homophobia and racism of those decades. The last part is solid, but the trap of the aesthetics is that this retro trend ends up being just that, a superficial trend. We would advocate at values over aesthetics, but not those rotten social morals – the values of a lower and middle class that didn’t perpetuate a culture of disposability and valued quality over quantity.
The same type of fetishim can be seen in the Ikea brand of DIY, where building furniture only serves the idea of handiwork without the effort that ultimately gives it value. Putting together an Ikea desk is the performativity of working with your hands in a very hipster-bourgeois way, and it’s cheap and convenient idea for you to buy.
What to watch on Netflix on a Friday night? Which dating app will find you your soulmate? Hang the DJ. The more choices we have the more freedom we have, except there is a point where too many choices paralyse us and we are unable to choose. And even if we do overcome the paralysis, we are not satisfied with our choice because our time and effort investment has raised our expectations too high.
In economics and industrial design, planned obsolescence (also called built-in obsolescence or premature obsolescence) is a policy of planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life, so that it becomes obsolete (i.e., unfashionable, or no longer functional) after a certain period of time. The rationale behind this strategy is to generate long-term sales volume by reducing the time between repeat purchases (referred to as "shortening the replacement cycle"). It is the deliberate shortening of a lifespan of a product to force consumers to purchase replacements.
- Wikipedia
This episode is about pitching the initial ideas and working with the themes, bouncing off one another to see what sticks and how to proceed.