The idea to make physical objects rather than online I
guess is just pure vanity. We enjoy collecting things, and we have the means and resources to
produce these artefacts, so why not? It was around the time of NFTs and everyone owning digital content, so it was sort of a reaction to that, to bring back physical products. FIN? was almost the opposite to this. In 2017 when we released FIN?, the idea of owning and buying digital art was not a thing. So yeah, always trying to float against the
tide is the reason behind most of our creative choices.
MEI think since the start
we’ve always reveled in the independent DIY nature of making things,
zines, prints, merch, physical ephemera. There’s a dart of joy when you see a book
on someone’s shelf or come across a zine in the
bookshop of a gallery that you made;
and I think that as fans of physical publications,
it’s natural that we wanted to, and
continue to, put things out into the world. I’d say it
is different to online—it moves the viewer away from a screen. Making
things digitally is only going to become more and more prevalent as people
spend more time online so it’s important to make these things that people can
escape to, I think. Further to this, making the publications
creates an outlet for our minds, otherwise these ideas just kind of wash around. It’s good to vent through print on
paper.
The
aforementioned FIN? included rejected and unpublished works and was
distributed on the last Friday of each month. How did you get started, and what were the benefits this project brought to the studio? And do you plan to continue this
project? Also, is this project related to SOOT currently being developed on
your website?
DRYes, FIN? was created because as a studio working on projects,
we tend to make a lot of work that never makes the cut, or we create collages
that just aren’t as
good as what we wanted to create. We
had drawers and hard drives full of forgotten work and JPEGs
and we thought why not celebrate these mistakes and ‘bad work’?