Paste, Print, Resist: The Underground Art Crews Ditching the Algorithm for Real-World Connection

Somewhere in a basement in Philadelphia, a photocopier is running hot at 2 a.m. In a converted garage in East Austin, a collective is mixing flour and water into wheat paste. On a stretch of wall in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood, someone is smoothing a hand-drawn poster flat against the brick before the sun comes up. None of this will be optimized. None of it has a caption. And that's precisely the point.

The analog underground is alive, loud, and deliberately off the grid — and in 2024, it's growing faster than anyone expected.

Why the Algorithm Isn't Invited

Let's be honest: the internet promised artists a global audience and delivered a dopamine slot machine. Engagement metrics, shadowbans, platform pivots — the digital art world has become an exhausting game where visibility depends less on your work and more on your posting schedule. A lot of artists are just... done with it.

"I spent two years making digital illustrations and chasing the algorithm, and I felt creatively hollow," says Mariana Reyes, a zine-maker and organizer behind Mala Hierba, a Latinx art collective based in Los Angeles. "When I started making zines, I felt like I was making something for a person, not a platform. That changed everything."

That shift — from broadcasting to connecting — is at the core of what's driving the analog revival. It's not nostalgia. It's resistance.

The Zine Is Not Dead (It Never Was)

Zines — those scrappy, self-published booklets that have fueled countercultural movements since the 1970s punk scene — are having a serious moment. Distros (short for distributors, the informal networks that pass zines between cities and communities) are popping up in record stores, coffee shops, and art spaces from Portland to Detroit to New York.

New York's Printed Matter book fair, one of the largest artists' book events in the world, reported record attendance in recent years, with a noticeable surge in first-time zine makers who are younger than you'd expect. Gen Z creators, in particular, are gravitating toward zines not as a retro novelty but as a genuinely radical act of self-publishing in an era of algorithmic gatekeeping.

The appeal is tactile and personal. A zine can be folded out of a single sheet of paper. It can be photocopied for fifty cents a copy. It can be left on a park bench, mailed to a stranger, or traded for another zine at a swap. There's no SEO. There's no analytics dashboard. There's just the thing itself, in someone's hands.

Jordan Kwame, who runs a zine distro out of Atlanta called Burnt Orange Press, describes the experience this way: "When someone picks up one of our zines, they're choosing it. They made an actual physical decision to engage with the work. That's a completely different relationship than a scroll."

Wheat Paste and the Art of Impermanence

If zines are the underground's literature, wheat-paste muralism is its public gallery — and it operates on a beautifully rebellious principle: the work is meant to fade.

Wheat-paste street art, in which printed or hand-painted images are adhered to walls using a simple flour-and-water mixture, has been a fixture of urban art scenes for decades. But the current wave feels distinct. Artists aren't just putting up images — they're building networks, rotating installations, and creating visual conversations across city blocks.

In Chicago, a loose collective called Paper Bloc coordinates monthly paste-ups where anywhere from five to twenty artists contribute work around a shared theme. Last fall's theme? "What your city forgot." The results covered everything from displaced communities to shuttered diners to labor history most locals had never learned in school.

"We're not trying to make anything permanent," says Delia Okonkwo, one of Paper Bloc's organizers. "Rain will wash it away. Someone will paste over it. That's fine. The point is the moment — the night we were all out there together, making something for the people who walk by in the morning."

That embrace of impermanence is a direct philosophical rebuke to the internet's obsession with archiving everything forever. The work exists. It matters. And then it's gone. That's not a bug — it's the whole feature.

Building the Network: How Underground Art Collectives Actually Work

One of the most exciting things about the current analog scene is how deliberately decentralized it is. There's no headquarters, no verified account, no official membership. These networks run on trust, word of mouth, and group chats.

Typically, a collective forms around a shared space — a studio, a print shop, someone's garage — and grows through personal invitation and community events. Zine swaps, open paste-up nights, and print workshops serve as both social gatherings and recruitment tools. You show up, you make something, you meet people, you come back.

In Portland, a group called Feral Press has been running free risograph printing workshops out of a rented studio space, intentionally keeping their online presence minimal. "We have a mailing list and that's basically it," laughs co-founder Sam Birch. "If you want to find us, you have to actually find us. That weeds out people who aren't really into it and makes the community stronger."

This intentional friction — the requirement that you actually seek out and participate in the physical community — creates a depth of connection that a follow button simply cannot replicate.

What This Means for the Broader Art World

The underground analog scene isn't trying to replace the art world or even compete with it. It's building something parallel — a shadow infrastructure of creativity that operates on entirely different values. Community over clout. Process over product. Presence over reach.

For artists who've been grinding through the digital content machine and coming up empty, this world offers something genuinely radical: a reminder that art made for real people, in real places, with real hands, hits different.

So find your local zine swap. Look for the fresh paste on the walls of your neighborhood. Bring a stapler and some ideas to an open print night. The underground is out there — you just have to look up from your phone to find it.