Mash-Up Culture

Lain edits Amateur magazine in Switzerland, though he’s rarely there—he travels constantly, moving through cities, finding artists and scenes and bringing them back to print. The magazine documents street culture globally, not as trend coverage but as genuine reportage from people making work outside institutional structures.

His observation about contemporary culture being fundamentally a mash-up isn’t particularly novel, but the way he works with it is. Everything references everything else now. Street artists pull from graffiti and advertising and fine art and music and whatever’s on the street, and someone else builds on that, and the culture develops through these layers of reference and recombination.

Most writing about culture serves either commercial interests or validates people already in the scene. Lain’s different. He’s documenting the process as it actually happens in different parts of the world, building a network of artists mostly isolated from each other, connecting them through the magazine without extracting value or positioning it for an outside audience. He’s just making space for the work to be seen.

Street culture has always been about taking what’s around you and making it new. But it’s never been this networked, traveling this fast across geography. The recombinations get richer because more people participate without ever meeting. That’s what Lain is tracking.