[-empyre-] Greetings from Mute magazine

[Simon Worthington]

Hi,

First off big apologies for not getting on board earlier, as usual I've 
been swamped by a self made wave of project commitments.

Thanks for the invite to take part in the conversation.

I'm Simon Worthington, @mrchristian99 , co-founder of Mute Magazine and 
OpenMute technology 'Think, Do and Share Tank'.

I'll start by giving a brief intro to Mute's current activities, in 
relationship to publishing.

As a background Mute started as a newspaper in 1994 covering issues 
relating to art, culture and technology. The magazine was founded in the 
UK by myself and Pauline van Mourik Broekman. Here's a link to the first 
copies content 
http://www.metamute.org/en/m0_can_art_survive_the_20th_century_winter_1994

BTW my colleague Pauline has just joined the Empyre list.

Fifteen years on we've published an anthology, Proud to be Flesh, which 
looks to cover what we saw as major themes that reoccurred in Mute's 
editorial;
Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, Net Art, Reinventing the Human, The UnCommons, 
Horizontality, Art and/Against Business, Under the Net, Class and 
Immaterial Labour, The Open Work.

http://www.metamute.org/proudtobeflesh

Mute magazine publishes in print and online - free 2 share, with no 
copyright, open or closed (under UK law you can't legally reject 
copyright, but this is our statement against the system of copyright 
regimes).

Mute has always been an experimental publishing collective and quite 
early we became a 'Think, Do and Share Tank', forming 
http://openmute.org to experiment with new forms of publishing and FLOSS 
tools. In 2005 we started publishing Mute magazine as POD and also 
worked on helping other people to use POD printing. Finally we formed 
http://picopress.net as a ePublishing consultancy.

Currently we are commissioned to run a series of workshops advising Arts 
Council England (London office), 285 Regular funded organisations on 
developing their digital strategies. Last week we ran a day long event 
on publishing and you can see a blog post here 
http://artofdigitallondon.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-book-is-dead-long-live-the

In parallel with this workshop we've been conducting a ResearchSprint to 
answer questions about how you actually make the vast array of 
ePublishing formats; ePub, Kindle, iPhone, iPad, Android, mobile, APPs. 
Also how you distribute these publications and finally what are the 
economic models. This work is far from complete, but we have got the 
ePub bit nailed down and later this week well get those recommendations 
posted.

Research Sprint http://wiki.openmute.org/index.php/Publishing

Last off we have a speculative proposal out to build an online software 
system to help with the conversion of works into the different 
ePublishing formats, publication management in the distribution 
platforms and for remixing of content (free and paid). See 
http://www.slideshare.net/metamute/progressive-publishing-system

Looking forward to the conversations.

All best

Simon Worthington



-- 
Beyond the stars http://www.google.com/profiles/simoneworthington 
@mrchristian99