ABSTRACT
This chapter presents guerrilla maker-community collectives and the events they generate. It discusses the nature of free exchange in recent community arts practices like 'yarn bombing', 'zine fests' and 'maker faires'. It explores significantly changed not only local conditions but, in some cases, global economies, politics and cultural understandings. Maker-oriented guerrilla initiatives normally function as rhizomes. Advances in the capabilities of online environments like Web 2.0 have had considerable influence on maker-oriented guerrilla initiatives. Although maker-oriented guerrilla events may differ in emphasis, certain ideological messages around democratisation, individual and small community empowerment, and non-hierarchical structures remain central and predicate how they function. Viewed in the context of wider, maker-oriented guerrilla initiatives, it may also be understood as social and political. A maker-oriented guerrilla artifact that conspicuously engages with dissent is the zine. Like other maker-oriented guerrilla groups, zine communities generate events that promote and distribute not only their artefacts but also a wider culture of craft, empowerment and ideology.
