Common Margins
Participatory research project on zine-making, exploring paper-based culture, co-creation & bibliodiversity as adversarial fronts in times of AI proliferation
Common Margins is the action research initiative behind the pliegOS open editorial project. Through co-creation processes and DIY publishing, the project explores how communities generate, share and preserve knowledge and cultural artifacts, grounded in and oriented toward the Commons. From zines, toolkits, leaflets and stickers to experimental collective archives, Common Margins studies self-publishing and DIY circulation across print, postal and digital infrastructures as media practices of craft, care and commoning.
In collaboration with the pliegOS collective and other communities of practice, the project co-facilitates editathons, zine-making retreats and print sprints, using a mobile publishing station for on-site collaborative publishing within community contexts. These activities approach paper and other (s)low-tech materials not as relics or luddite nostalgia, but as convivial and appropriate technologies that enable collaborative ethnography, distributed learning and alternative peer-to-peer communication in an era of extreme data extractivism and algorithmic acceleration.
Common Margins also experiments with zine-making as a method for critical inquiry and temporary autonomous zine-zones for collective expression and reflection, adapting paper-oriented techniques such as collaging, prototyping, elicitation and think-aloud protocols. In parallel, the R&D side of the project project develops open infrastructures for DIY publishing, including pliegOS-Maker, a lightweight tool for quick zine pagination and (soon) PDF obfuscation techniques designed to push reading back toward paper, away from screens and large-scale GenAI content extraction.
Conceptual pillars
Algorithmic caution & analog creativity
Against the current digital push toward AI-automation and speed, we embrace cautious, critical engagements with LLMs to study cultures of resistance in front extractive and authoritarian tendencies in technology. Typewriters, collage, hand-made layouts and PDF obfuscation reclaim slowness, error and intimacy, reasserting human creativity, transdisciplinary perspectives and careful modes of knowledge generation.
Open knowledge & relational writing
Embracing openness beyond software and data, built through relationships of care, accountability and best practices in collective authorship. We share tools, methods and publications under open licenses and fair conditions, linking analog/digital practices, community archiving and experimental zine-journal formats.
Bibliodiversity & (s)low technologies
We treat zines and and other paper formats as vital but fragile forms of knowledge. Inspired by the concept of bibliodiversity, we value and stand for plural voices, formats and aesthetics. Paper is slow technology; modest, but resilient and convivial. Ephemeral print cultures offer alternative powerful ways to share memory, creativity and collective meaning.
Main research methods
- Co-creation around the field: workshops and participatory design sessions where zine-making, collaborative writing and prototyping are both method and result.
- Conversations as networks: peer-sharing, zine-oriented interviews & focus groups with zinesters, collectors, editors, students, users, activists.
- Analyzing content & discourse: exploring themes, aesthetics, storytelling and contexts across co-created outcomes.
- Collective archiving & publishing: open repositories and a (forthcoming) peer-reviewed, print-only journal in postal-zine format.