The Zeens of MIDI City

At one point in the video for The Matte Flex, a list of available zeens is shown in one of the terminal windows. This is because out in MIDI City (where the footage was captured), a desire for slower, more collective forms of communication has led to the emergence of countless zeens. Artists are not put on pedestals in the way they often are here. Rather, in MIDI City people tend to be fans of ideas or styles of creative expression instead of than specific people. In this climate, zeen culture (a bit like our zine culture) flourishes. Below is the full list of zeens, taken from one of the larger zeen catalogues, Zeenocene!

Bloompunk

• Re-wilding actions
• Horticulture tips
• Seed swaps
• Music reviews
• Climate news

The Sunken Dispatch

• Research diaries
• Artifact showcases
• Notes from below
• Short histories of the underwater

Lunar Valley Nights!

• Sci-fi stories
• Local music scene news
• Local art scene spectacles/performances
• Hype zone (artist takeover)
• Tech news from artistic perspective

Ghost Club Journal

• Memories of friends by friends
• Fresh obits
• Dead scenes re-animator (tales from lost futures)

Weave Scene

• Central hub for para-lifetime art collaborations/handoffs/pickups of abandoned scaffolds
• Tangle Studies - peer-reviewed articles focussing on collective art projects deliberately and actively detached from time
• Knot of the month
• Pull out with clothing patterns & design ideas

C.R.T (Chaos Rave Team)

• Home of the Eternal Mixtape
• Music reviews
• Party listings

Shimmer Gang! Together At Last

• Fashion constructs
• Clothes swaps
• Make up manifestos

Ecco Chamber

• Monographs with a political bent

Quartz Lust

• Architectural conjecture inspired by lava flows and impermanence
• ‘Stone fiction’, a niche experimental literary genre focussed on stacked, synchronous narratives layered atop of each other and subject to immense pressures from above

Noise Project 336

• Republishing old anarchist texts, usually with a contemporary contextualisation

The Maths Arcade

• Coding & hacking tips
• Computer music
• Video game news
• Peer-reviewed journal section exploring the importance of ‘play’ in society

The Guillotine Express

• Radical politics vanguard
• Awareness raising
• ‘Memory corner’ - Unforgetting as a Radical Act
• A People’s History of Billionaire Toppling

Project Resonance

• Global trends
• A strictly maintained non-hierarchical collective of contributors spread equally across the planet
• Logics/infrastructure news
• Home to the Slownet Redundancy Project

Atom Planet

• Cosmic adventuring
• Sci-fi shorts
• Hardcore physics papers written to be understood by anyone
• Hardcore physics papers written to be understood only by hardcore physicists

Concrete

• Chemistry for fun and mischief
• Communal living strategies
• Tool-swap mutual aid group network

The Mists of Turbine City

• Poetry
• Collective world building with a heavy graphic design and illustration slant
• Collective open world game dev
• LARPing/TTRP clubs

Runway Zero

• Began as a zeppelin lobbying group. Turned more into various sustainable transport experimenting and research

Tears of Dry Ice

• Lonely heart diaries
• Glacier-based long reads
• Disco workshopping
• Political theory book clubs/event listings

Goth Club Eternal

• Fashion columns
• Sad Coding dev blogs
• Sound palette libraries
• Club night listings
• Dread manifestos

A New History of Melodrama

• Very earnest essays and discussion about how best to rebuild the conditions for extreme melodrama in music and arts from an inclusive, non-patriarchal foundation
• Over the Top Chord Progression of the Week
• Full colour, wild, paint-based artwork on the centrefold
• Relationship advice column by The Cheese Master

Weird Corp

• Design group dedicated to presenting alternate visions of society based on already-existing technology
• Reviews of performance-art actions
• Bureaucratic antagonisers

Skeleton Tactics

• ‘Good death’ advocacy
• Cautious metaphysics
• Lessons in perspective
• Support network for bereavement and community-based memorialising

Infinizine

• Specialists in generative systems, procedural algorithms, with a strong anti-AI stance
• Machine-smashing tutorials

Sonic Yrself!

• Noise sculpture
• Documenting hyper-specific sub genres of experimental music.
• Sigh’n’Wayvv FM archive
• Event listings

Stacked Romance

• Joy tales
• Specialists in happy-sad dialectics

Doom in the Afternoon

• Abyssal think pieces
• Essays on the Void Storm manifesto
• Solace
• Solidarity

AutoRiot! Weekly

• A weekly dispatch that summarises the latest goings on in AutoRiot!, an asynchronous, massively-multiplayer, offline game where everyone plays a vital role in ensuring society remains in a state of permanent revolution.

Dream State

• Loosely managed forum where people pitch and discuss shifts to various state-wide policies
• Utopia Now! A dedicated space for discussing not-yet-possible big ideas
• Critical Support Now! A dedicated space for pointing out any and all potential flaws or oversights from previous Utopia Now! discussions and offering either ways to move forward or reasons why they should be shelved

Dotcomrade

• Terminal-based, digital-only zine
• Hacking competitions
• Mostly memes

Terra Group

• Terraforming response team
• Speculative eco futures
• Fictionscapes

Noise Fiction

• Regular updates from The K.N.R.U.

Nomarda Atlas

• Ongoing cartography of previously uncharted throughways
• Hiking tips and journals
• Interviews with local guides and Nomarda-affiliated city-fixers
• Regularly maintained map of communal shelters, cooking areas, etc.
• Mountain of the week

Cyclotron

• Bike maintenance
• Route advice
• Cycle meet-ups
• Cycle Cap of the Month

Yeast Vigilantes

• Bread-based recipes
• Radical fermentation

Cake Land

• Everything cake

Grass Town Chronicles

• Allotment talk
• Communal plant-farming groups
• Outdoor events reviews

The Komoy Press

• A bi-weekly overview of all the latest zeen issues, new publications, any major shifts in zeen affiliation, etc.
• DIY printing wikis
• Guest contributors from any zeens that have requested access to the Komoy Press' bespoke printing processes that particular month

Zeenocene!

• Terminal-based zine.
• Features the zeenopedia, an open, collectively maintained catalogue of zeens, histories, backstories, and general useful info for life in The Sonorous Below and MIDI City.

That's all for now. Please make sure somebody is at home this Friday for your delivery of some glitchy utopian bangers.

// - Paul