Packet: the lo-fi, bi-weekly art publication

Packet is an art publication like no other. It’s biweekly, meaning that these designers are, astoundingly, creating a publication every two weeks. In an age of publishing where we’re used to our bi-monthly art magazines, thick bound pages with enough content to last us for the next six months, Packet offers something entirely different and entirely refreshing.

You’d be sensible in thinking that this must be some kind of experiment, that they can’t be creating a completely new issue every two weeks, but you’d be wrong. Founded in 2012 and with 81 issues behind them this publication is only getting stronger. The team of Chris Nosenzo, Nicole Reber and Christine Zhu have a mission to concentrate on work “of the present rather than a theme”, with issues exploring process and experimentation. Each six issues additionally have a resident cover designer. After each residency is completed, the issues are rebound as a set and sold on their own as a “wire-bound compendium”. There is also a collection of special issues to keep an eye out for, which this time are themed but vary in their form.

Packet began after Chris graduated from the Pratt Institute in New York. “Most of my friends had stayed in the city, trying to get work and keep making art. We had a crit group to meet and look at what we had been doing: painting, photos, poems, whatever. At some point I was like ‘this is great, lets start some platform to publish it.’ The Packet came from those cheap, raw, scanned handouts we all got in school. And the biweekly element was mostly influenced by the weekly magazines I had been working at. Weekly would of been insane, biweekly was more realistic, but still had shock value. I found a Risograph on eBay and Nicole and I drove out to pick it up in Long Island. A few weeks later we printed the first issue. Almost four years later we’ve made 81 issues with work from over 300 artists,” he explains.

When it comes to finding content, Packet is hands-on in its approach. “When it comes to the body of each issue," Nicole explains, “we personally reach out to artists whose work we admire, but we also always carry an open submission policy. There really isn’t a hierarchy to what we’ll print, as long as the work is original, unprinted content, and that it feels cared about.” Packet additionally takes care of its distribution in a similar way, encouraging the community that a publication like this creates. “We’re very DIY, everything we do is by hand, from printing, down to dropping issues in the mail. We drop off all the books by hand at our distributors. We keep tabs on developments in people’s work, and try to stay active in the community, letting emerging artists know that we’re a resource where they can experiment in print and get their new work out there. Being excited about the project, it will just naturally come up in our social lives, as something that new friends can get involved in,” describes Nicole.

The quick turnaround of designing, editing and printing clearly works well for the Packet team, it has given them an edge and alternative style. “The fast output is so essential to having the incentive to make mistakes and experiment,” explains Nicole. "I also love it because the art world is so slow and overweight; it differentiates us in the sweaty jungle of printed consumables.”