New In: Lovely Little Nutmegs #3

"The third issue of Lovely Little Nutmegs, a zine which takes snippets of football commentary and turns them into verse. Illustrated with vintage football stamps unearthed from Rotherham Market."

Just in time for the new football season, Lovely Little Nutmegs are back with their third issue! 

https://www.etsy.com/listing/194726985/lovely-little-nutmegs-issue-3-full

New in: This is Me Singing #1

"This Is Me Singing takes a look at internet stardom at its least viral. The zine features a whole rafter of screenshots from videos uploaded to Youtube under the tags “Me Singing”, in which popular songs are lovingly reworked beneath the watchful eye of a webcam.

The people behind these video clips are a departure from your usual Youtube sensations, however, since each one has only received a tiny number of views and is unlikely to hit the big time any time soon. So what is it that makes ordinary people so keen to transfer their own small bursts of karaoke from the privacy of their bedrooms to the wider echelons of the internet?

It’s a phenomenon we haven’t quite figured out yet, but what comes across with many of the singers here is their sense of self-consciousness, with some apologising for awkward behaviour, or their voices not being up to scratch. Beneath the sheepishness, however, lies a quiet passion for the song they have chosen, and some deeper impulse for it to be noticed by a wider audience – no matter how small."

Taken from A Closed Caption's Etsy shop!

New in: The Inventory

"Abandon Normal Devices is an annual arts festival celebrating digital culture and the ways in which people engage with a rapidly changing technological environment. The festival alternates between Liverpool and Manchester, and is always filled with pretty groundbreaking work, so we were really pleased to receive a micro-commission this time around.

In keeping with this year’s theme –Success — we decided to create a fanzine-style publication which contrasted the traditional awestruck, home-made, low-circulation zine with content pilfered from the online profiles of artists involved in the festival. Titled The Inventory, the zine was meant as a glimpse at the changing role of the internet as a tool to promote and publicise an individual’s career.

We wanted to question how the role of artist — and to some extent, anybody who uses social media platforms — had evolved, using Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 work The Medium Is The Massage: An Inventory of Effects as our starting point. Considering the ways in which the internet creates a prism through which a person’s character and career can be viewed, it seemed appropriate to look to McLuhan’s work with its emphasis on the method of communication over the actual material being communicated.

Alongside this, we included tips from brash online marketing consultancies, which analysed how best to “extend your influence” online — right down to the length of characters needed for a successful tweet.

We handed out copies of the finished zine at as many of the festival sites as we could get to, which was a good way of making sure we got to see a lot of the work on show. Particular highlights included Wafaa Bilal’s Meme Junkyard — a huge inflatable Techno Viking head, sustained purely on #technoviking tweets, and Border Bumping, which reworked national boundaries according to where mobile phone networks placed them. Skype karaoke at the Salutation pub was another of many enjoyable moments.

There are still a couple of copies of The Inventory left, so if you’d like one, feel free to drop us a line on closedcaption@live.co.uk"

Taken from http://aclosedcaption.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/the-inventory/
https://www.etsy.com/shop/AClosedCaption

New in: Gaudy Verse

Gaudy Verse is written by Orla Foster and contains poems about things like "the pleasure of piling gherkins between three slabs of bread", looking for jobs, gap year students and Chris Martin.

You can buy a copy from A Closed Caption's Etsy page.

http://aclosedcaption.wordpress.com/