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Instead of blowing it on chocolate or soft drinks, from early next year you might well find yourself perusing a vending machine to select from an array of original zines.
The CanberraZine Emporium has just received funding from the ACT government to create a machine designed to dispense zines, one that will travel to at least seven Canberra arts events throughout 2014, and hopefully more as the project gathers momentum.
Canberra artist Bernie Slater, from the emporium, said zines - small publications of self-published works, often in the form of a small magazine or fanzine - were by their nature often hard to come by, which was why the group wanted to make them more accessible to Canberrans.
''We're quite excited about taking them out into some different public spaces where people who haven't encountered them before might get their curiosity piqued, enough to pick up something that they're not used to being able to buy in shops,'' he said.
''It does broach a variety of artistic practices.
''We've got writers, visual artists, comic makers - and the writers are of fiction or poetry, or it might be underground journalism, so there's this really broad spectrum that gets covered under this zine umbrella.''
Mr Slater is the co-ordinator of visual art at the Canberra Institute of Technology, but said he began his career in the arts making zines.
''I started off as a zine maker when I was a punk-rock kid growing up in Canberra, and that led me into doing underground comics and eventually visual art,'' he said.
The zine machine will make its debut as part of the You Are Here festival in March.
The zines will be dispensed from a re-purposed snack machine, and will cost $2 each, with the money going straight back to the artists.
''We'll restock it as it goes to each location, and as it runs out we'll be topping it up as we go,'' he said.
The emporium has received $4000 to get the project up and running, and is one of several diverse projects and programs to receive funding next year from Arts ACT's $1.8 million Arts Fund.
Among the main projects to be funded will be a full-length debut album by rock band Super Best Friends, a comic book about environmental sustainability, and a series of new dance works for teens with special needs and older people developed by Canberra Dance Theatre.
Arts ACT director David Whitney said this was the first annual funding announcement to be made under its new arts policy. One of the main principles of the policy, he said, was that art should be accessible, and artists had been encouraged to make a stronger case than ever for funding.
''Artists need to make work not just for themselves but for all people,'' he said.
This was why organisations that received program funding were those that had demonstrated a commitment to making art accessible to all.