Thanks to TV shows such as The Hills, the media can often seem glamorous, elusive and fast-paced. In other portrayals – HBO’s The Wire, for example – it appears murky and untrustworthy. But speak to anyone who works in the business and both notions will soon be quelled: far more often than not it is a quotidian affair.

Xelís de Toro, a Galician who has been in the UK for 15 years, is a publisher and freelance copywriter, and part of Boca2Mouth, a group of artists working out of Brighton. Its latest event, Walls Into Pieces, aims to show that with community collaboration anyone can produce newspapers or magazines to share information.

An evening of collaborative art will finish at 2am and everyone involved will have the chance to take away a magazine made that evening which charts the night’s events.

Despite interviewers, writers and photographers dotted around documenting the goings on – music, poetry, live art, projections and sound and video installations – it will not, says de Toro, be compiled journalistically.

“Basically, it is a large-scale art event which will create a magazine in real time,” says the Spaniard, who will be reciting poetry with his group Laboratoro and performing a piece called The Solitaires with Boca2mouth, which involves him hiding among colleague Jim Sanders’ paintings and dropping one-liners.

Of the four bands booked to play in the four corners of the gallery at half past the hour, every hour, from 8.30pm, including The Elastic Band, Animal Magic Tricks, Max And The Swing Commanders, and de Toros’s Laboratoro, three are from Brighton.

In the venue’s other rooms will be Linda Remahl’s video installation and a variety of performances by WilcZanka, Vicky Tremain, Colecorner featuring Marley and Phil Cole, Johanna Ronkko, Josephine Dimbleby, plus Adele Bates, Sara Popowa and Emilia Telese. Il Pixel Rosso will run a themed bar.

One space will be designated as the magazine production office, where each copy is to be produced, printed and bound before 1am. Inside each one will be a piece of wall, painted in collaboration with the audience, to make them unique.

“We want people who come down to get involved, to write on the typewriter, to contribute to the wall, to come into the magazine production room to see how everything works,” he says.

“We think people should see how a magazine is made, how something goes from being recorded to print, how something that happened in front of their eyes can be manipulated in different ways.

“We want to show how communities can get together to share information, to encourage people to collaborate on projects, to do it themselves.”

After putting on a similar event at Kemp Town’s Fairtrade gallery, Boca2mouth now believes there is the interest and scope to move on to a bigger scale. Though it seems filling the Phoenix Gallery will be the least of the group’s worries.

De Toro says midnight is the magazine deadline, which leaves the team an hour to turn the raw materials into the handmade collectible items. Anyone attending will thus be privy to the most painstaking job in media: battling the deadline.

* 8pm to 2am, £6/£5, for more details, call 01273 603700.