A zine is a small, self-made publication. Sub Plot zine is concerned with architectural culture, art and activism. The cover is printed using dye-line.

Sub Plot zine #1, Dec 2001, 10 pages
Dye-line print cover, b&w photocopied pages.
Contents:
Words used in a review of some architecture / not used in a review of some architecture
Tapestry cat door
Authority #1: Fare evasion
School Cafeteria: Know Your Product
Bioterrorism and the postal system by Eliza Rudkin
No job too big or too small!

Sub Plot zine #2, Jan 2003, 14 pages.
Dye-line print cover, b&w photocopied pages.
Contents:
The dye-line machine
Authority #2: Architects designing Australian detention centres.
Images by Tarek
Tapestry forest
Federation Arch
Stencils
Let Them Eat Lifestyle
A cool building in Brunswick

Sub Plot zine #3, Jan 2004. 14 pages
Dye-line print cover and centrefold, b&w photocopied pages.
Contents:
Switches
Animals in art
Excerpt from Entropy, Design and Lifestyle Culture by Charlotte Hallows
Let Them Eat Lifestyle wallpaper and placemats
Balustrade
Granite Grove (with Eliza Rudkin)
The Shallow House
Architecture Students and architects who became better known as musicians

Sub Plot was distributed locally and by mail. It was part of PrintROOM, Melbourne 2003, multipleMISCELLANEOUSalliances, Melbourne, 2004 and PrintROOM Rotterdam, 2004.
A limited number of back issues are available. Contact Dianne at antarctica.

The text below was initially written in 2003 in reply to questions from fellow zinesters. Additional architectural context was added in response to questions from students.

Sub Plot zine is an attempt to develop a context for my work – architectural, written and visual work – and to engage in and contribute to dialogue with others. I estimate that about half of those who read it are architects or architecture students. The others are mainly people who are into zines. It also exists in some art contexts such as an artist’s publications project held at Clubs Project Space in 2003 as well as a few galleries. I haven’t had a lot of time to put it in shops. Architext actually declined to stock it. (“too slight”) I distribute about 120 copies.

I started SPz after a halftime club session in 2001. The speakers; M@tstudio, Cassandra Fahey and myself had exhibited at the first Small exhibition in 2000. Among much complaint about the lack of a suitable publication to document local architecture, Cassandra suggested that we could, in desperation, photocopy our work onto A4 sheets and just hand them around. Since then, Subaud produced that much needed publication, (I think some of those guys were at halftime that night too). Cassandra’s suggestion reminded me of the zine format and I decided that making a zine was what I needed to do for all sorts of reasons. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier, because some of my friends used to make zines; like Living on the Garbage in our Brains Forever, anarcho feminist stuff, and I used to read Grotgrrrl and others in the early 90’s. There is a tradition of zines crossing back and forth between politics and art. After making the first SPz I took it to the express media zine fair and was amazed to see how zines had proliferated and how incredibly good they were. I swapped SPz with other zine makers at the fair and by mail.

When I started, I found I had enough material to develop into about 5 issues. The first piece I intended to include was a series of images of interiors from magazines and my own photos – “why does an art gallery look like a shop?, why does a shop look like a corporate foyer?, why does a corporate foyer look like a designer kitchen?, why does a designer kitchen look like an art gallery?” followed by “why does a car look like a sneaker?” etc etc. Then other things came up and seemed more important to develop at the time.

The first page in SPz 1 was a response to a discussion with Sandra Kaji-O’Grady. She’d written a review for a magazine and was told by the editor not to use the word “dull” to describe an aspect of the building because they didn’t publish dull buildings. In my piece I took all the words on the left hand side in the order they appeared in an article in Architecture Australia about Melbourne Museum, the winning building of that year. The word “exciting” happened to be in the very first line.

I used to work at Simon and Freda Thornton Architects. They still have the dye-line machine I use for printing the covers. The zine was also a place I could develop and publish some of the things I’d been doing with that medium. I’ve since done a lot more dyeline work.

In relation to my architecture work:
Its format makes it possible to talk about one aspect of a project, like the use of visible insulation in the Strathmore SC Cafereria and the ideas about building products vs building materials, rather than produce a whole piece about the cafeteria (I would rather someone else did that). The format of SPz reflects the fact that these things need to be short or they don’t get done and that is because I do them as part of an architectural practice. (They still take a long time though.)
I worked with insulation again for LITE in 2001. So, the architectural process lead to an enquiry, which was first, announced in the building, then developed in SPz as a statement of that enquiry, then it took another form in the exhibition. Sub Plot accommodates my moves in and out of architecture. Or at least that’s what it seems to do. It accommodates a very partial take on architecture: where there can be partial authorship, partial realisation, partial success, and partial potential for discourse.

I present one piece of my architectural work in each issue. I also ask someone else to contribute a page of material.

dp