Why Bootleg Books? / Pourquoi des livres pirates?
Why Bootleg Books? / Pourquoi des livres pirates? is a zine I made on the occasion of my exhibition at esam Caen in February 2025.
The zine is a bootleg of Why Publish Noise? by Miekal And, a zine about the open distribution of “noise”, which he defines as “those particles which escape automatic assimilation by the cognitive machine”. I drew a parallel with the practice of bootlegging, and followed And’s style of making statements that try to answer a question, beginning with "because"...
All in all, Why Bootleg Books? / Pourquoi des livres pirates? is composed of 26 statements, concerning books, texts, digital files, libraries and copies connected together meaningfully in a flow diagram. I used a tool made for graphic visualisations, GraphViz, which really shaped the writing process.
GraphViz is a very unorthodox tool for layout, so I used Inkscape to make further adjustments through its canvas-based graphic interface. This was made into 32 pages of a zine, which relies on page and edge numbers to follow the order of connections.
A copy of Mikal And's Why Publish Noise? atop copies of my zine in the esam Caen library
The diagram made with GraphViz
Laying out the zine in Inkscape
Click here to read the whole zine
