HTML Zine Club Spinner is a collection of interviews with students who took part in artist Nami Kim’s experimental two-week class HTML Zine Club at the Willem de Kooning Academy. In it, she showed how to make a webzine by teaching the basics of HTML & CSS and experimenting with the artistic potential of the two basic coding languages. Like print zines, the webzine is a personal, story-based publication, which can also be made interactive and nonlinear with code. Although the process of learning the two languages may require a lot of patience for people with little to no coding experience, coding by hand does offer a far more in-depth experience. In addition, the two languages also allow for many different aesthetic experiments, helping designers and artists to break free from the common visual constraints of dominant web culture.

“I want to be able to build it by myself so that I know what and how I want it to be.” — Aggie Chang

After the courses in January and June 2023, Kim was curious about what the students thought of the class, their experience with identifying issues and possible solutions on their own, and what they thought of her teaching skills. Through conversations with the students, she was able to reflect on how digital media is taught in the context of art school, how students develop their own visual languages within the creative industry, as well as what they thought of the course in general.

“It's about expanding my memories and feelings." — Garam Park