[-empyre-] UNFINISHED publishing - Mute/MetaMute and Neural/Neural.it

[Pauline van Mourik Broekman]

Dear Craig,

My apologies to take so long to answer you...

I had a hunch I knew where that quote was from, but it was still a bit
strange to read without context. They come from an event held here in
London in 2015*, when I'd also recently put out the book mentioned in my
biog (Open Education, authored with Gary Hall). And yes, I suppose I do
think there's some similar aspects, given that the university is by now
fully neoliberalised (Gary has even dubbed it 'Uberfied'), which we can
also take to mean looted. The analogy between OA and Web 2.0 (as a
harbinger of ease and seemingly massively expanded productive powers) would
be a little more complicated to draw, but where it holds, I think, is in
the way that in both cases capital harnesses human instincts towards
sharing, socialising knowledge, and the desire to communicate, to create
free inputs. Recently I saw a little video interview with Rosi Braidotti
and she said something like, "As we know, capitalism doesn't break, it
bends", and I thought that was a very beautiful way to put it.

This is also why, from the beginning, there was a general scepticism and
concern over the moniker openness, and Mute and many others spent time
analysing that in the early 2000s, e.g. through explorations of the
transposition of the paradigm of the 'commons' to the digital realm
<https://www.metamute.org/editorial/magazine/mute-vol-1-no.-20-%E2%80%93-digital-commons>,
or the de facto valorisation of open-anything as good (e.g. Jamie King's The
Packet Gang <https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/packet-gang> and Ted
Byfield's interview with James Boyle
<https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/control-shift-commons>).

>From that same point in 2015, Coventry and other allies went on to do much,
much more work on the question of how open access could retain/regain its
radicality, e.g. by creating the alliance for 'radical open access'
<http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk/>, so I can best probably point to
that!

In the context of the truly planetary crisis we're now in, the question of
how capitalism might stop merely bending, and actually *break, *is ever
more stark.

Thanks,
Pauline.



*The Open Access University: Exploring an Oxymoron
This talk explores some of the dilemmas facing the Open Access imperative
as, after a long struggle for recognition, it becomes enshrined in
significant elements of the higher educational landscape (e.g. in the UK,
post Finch report). Building on the recent study Open Education: a Study in
Disruption (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), which discussed a variety of
open access learning initiatives inside and outside the university, I will
aim to take stock of the contradictory tendencies at play as 'OA' fuses
with the ascendant 'financialised university', asking whether there is such
a thing as a politics of open access and, if so, if it is necessarily
progressive. Open Education placed particular emphasis on the impact of
self-organised efforts emerging out of the anti-austerity and Occupy
movements. It also discussed their roots in the techniques and discourses
of Peer to Peer, and their cavalier (often openly hostile) attitude to
copyright. Here I pursue these discussions further to ask whether the
necessary locatability of the university – as a formal, legal entity – and
its necessary tendencies towards centralisation, fatally constrains any
hope for a practice of solidarity with more horizontally structured or
distributed projects working outside it (e.g. by sharing syllabi,
materials, etc.). I will ask whether, before we even consider the political
import of the open access imperative, we must ask whether there is a de
facto incompatibility between the institutional form of the university and
those of the 'grassroots' and self-organised alternative with which some of
its scholars seek an alliance. My aim will not be to merely 'expose'
contradictions, however, rather to think proactively about the feasibility
and possible tactics of collaboration.

http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/13914/1/Unconditional%20Love.pdf


***
Pauline van Mourik Broekman
PhD, Fine Art, RCA
'The Network Optic: Vision, Authorship and Collectivity after Vertov'
Email: pauline.vmbroekman at network.rca.ac.uk
Mob: 07947157338

***
http://www.metamute.org
http://www.maydayrooms.org


On Fri, 27 Sep 2019 at 19:54, Craig Saper <cjsaper at gmail.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Pauline [and Josie, Simon, Alessandro, Nick and Simon],
>
> Thank you all for the conversation. Given the notion of "the carrot of the
> greater capacity ... integrally linked … to systematic looting of those
> resources we have to *produce and live otherwise,”* is this analogous to
> what you have said elsewhere the "contradictory tendencies at play as
> 'OA' fuses with the ascendant 'financialised university', asking whether
> there is such a thing as a politics of open access and, if so, if it is
> necessarily progressive”?
> On Sep 27, 2019, 2:20 PM -0400, Pauline van Mourik Broekman <
> pauline.vmbroekman at network.rca.ac.uk>, wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Dear all,
>
> Josie, Simon, Alessandro, Nick and Simon: you all put such interesting
> thoughts and questions forward that it's hard to know where to start in
> responding. But I think I should pick up on Nick's very smart flipping of
> Josie's "useful difficulty" into "un-useful ease", as the movement between
> these (and the differing place of sociality within them) offers a circular
> figure entirely indicative of the current trap in whose maw we seem to
> stand, hyper-vigilant yet confused.
>
> A couple of years back I had to do a short talk on the generic topic of
> 'platforms', and doing a bit of re-reading, I was sort of stunned at the
> enormity – technically seen – of what we went through with Web 2.0. Of
> course it was dismissed as marketing at the time, a clever re-brand or
> silly versioning that meant nothing in real terms... But we can approach it
> as an important rough juncture, if nothing else (at the time of the
> conference I found Wendy Chun's notion of *habit* helpful, in that it's
> precisely at the time of habituation and normalisation we should pay most
> attention, since we don't typically muster the same focus, speculative and
> critical energies that we do in the initial OMG! moment of technologies'
> introduction). In our own issue on the Web 2.0 theme
> <https://www.metamute.org/editorial/magazine/mute-vol-2-no.-4-%E2%88%92-web-2.0-mans-best-friendster> we
> featured Dmytri Kleiner and Brian Wyrick's memorable article InfoEnclosure
> 2.0 <https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/infoenclosure-2.0>,
> which carefully details the linkage between a ramping up of users'
> capacities, via new tools erstwhile only available to large centralised
> organisations, and the outsourcing of these productive capacities to users,
> "who were both creators and consumers". They said, "For the user, access to
> these applications empowers them to create and publish content that
> previously would have required them to purchase desktop software and
> possess a greater technological skill set." This reminds me of truisms
> like, "we have in our pockets equivalent capacity to that which first
> landed us on the moon" and so on, but, in that, I think speaks to the fatal
> power of "un-useful ease".
>
> For, the carrot of the greater capacity was integrally linked, seems to
> even have been contingent on, the high-speed, systematic looting of those
> resources we have to *produce and live otherwise* (at the moment it sure
> feels like we aren't allowed to have both at the same time, which is
> arguably the notion that earlier, optimistic digital cultures were built
> on...?). In fact, the sense that we needed and wanted the ease came more
> and more to be a direct by-product of the fact that our ground was being
> dug up beneath us (just like the insane proliferation of "convenience" food
> in places like London stands in direct correlation to people's
> temporal/energetic/material impoverishment during austerity). So there we
> are, with a rocket in our pocket, but no ground to stand on, house to live
> in, bed to sleep in, or free time to spend together pleasurably.
>
> It interests me in this context that a lot of the analyses of surveillance
> and computational capitalism make direct analogies between the move to
> algorithmic or data extractivism and colonialism (Zuboff uses this image of
> the Facebooks of this world placing a stake in the ground/territory of data
> as a colonialist 'rule by fiat'; Achille Mbembe provocatively describes our
> technological escalation, which turns humans into artefacts, as the
> "becoming-black-of-the-world"; Nick Couldry's and Ulises A Mejias' The
> Costs of Connection rests on the same conceptual principle). And the
> writing of people like Jason Moore shows how deeply relevant his critique
> of colonial capitalism's use and abuse of free inputs is to this new
> scenario.
>
> Just like Nick says about media, though, maybe we have to remember not to
> think in any kind of linear-developmental schema of 'before' and 'after',
> or 'new' and 'old', 'gained' and 'lost', rather temporal ecologies that we
> do have agency within (?). In this respect the connectedness of erstwhile
> separated social movements is really inspiring. In my PhD study of Vertov
> one of the articles I keep on returning to is Devin Fore's 'The Metabiotic
> State: Dziga Vertov's The Eleventh Year', where he speaks of the *sviaz*,
> or bonds, that Vertov's montages sought to make – including within the
> frame – as ones of solidarity across, not just space (as is well known),
> but also time, to make connections in labour with "the farthest ones". He
> argues that Vertov scholarship might be exploding in the manner that it is
> because the complexity of the time scales being dealt with in that society
> (where a multiplicity of systems of production, and thus experiences of
> time, coexisted), and how he tried to picture these, have obvious parallels
> with our own, and I'm inclined to agree. Empyre's prior and parallel
> threads on the Amazon and ageing (particularly those incredible posts by
> Margarete, Lucio and Dan (if I'm right?), about optics and coloniality)
> make me think, too, that this is now happening across individual and social
> scales, due to the ubiquity of our archives and memory technologies.
>
> And talking about archives, I'm so glad I learned of your one at Neural,
> Alessandro, that is SO great. I wish we could do that with the Mute books
> archive too...
>
> Thanks again for bringing us together Shu Lea, and to others for the great
> discussion.
>
> Best,
> Pauline.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ***
> Pauline van Mourik Broekman
> PhD, Fine Art, RCA
> 'The Network Optic: Vision, Authorship and Collectivity after Vertov'
> Email: pauline.vmbroekman at network.rca.ac.uk
> Mob: 07947157338
>
> ***
> http://www.metamute.org
> http://www.maydayrooms.org
>
>
> On Thu, 26 Sep 2019 at 11:58, Nicholas Thoburn <
> Nicholas.J.Thoburn at manchester.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> I hope you all don't mind me chipping in, but as a super-fan(!) of Mute I
> wanted to make a few comments about the specific qualities of independent
> or "unfinished" publishing (great phrase) and its relation with social
> media, picking up on Pauline's and Josie's reflections here.
>
> I'm really taken by Josie's point that the sociality of independent
> publishing projects is bound up with publishing's "useful difficulty" ("the
> useful difficulty (technical, economic and intellectual) of publishing in
> the past, which required the reflexivity of embodied thought, conversation,
> meeting, handling, touching, arguing, joking, reconsidering, distributing,
> knowing, seeing, etc etc."  At Mute, this "demanded crazy amounts of time
> and energy from us all, produced the social glue - the frustration and
> fun!"). It strikes me that as well as a feature of the sociality, its is
> also a feature of the *specific qualities and material forms* of
> independent publishing, where "useful difficulty" forces publishing
> (wittingly or otherwise) to be medium-reflexive. The materials, platforms,
> economic structures, aesthetic and literary values, distribution circuits,
> non-word-based aspects of publishing (as Pauline rightly stresses) that
> constrain unfinished publishing also give it its rare beauty, its singular
> quality, because its very existence arises from a battle with these
> constraints. (I say "wittingly or not" because what has been so glorious
> about Mute is that it very deliberately engaged with these conditions,
> hence all its mutations and the complexity of its various publishing forms,
> but there's some almost inevitably some medium-reflexivity to any
> publication that struggles with its conditions of existence.) It is this I
> think that we intuitively recognise, what appeals to us, when we encounter
> an artefact/project of independent publishing. It's a general condition I
> think, but it also takes numerous and particular forms in response to
> specific aspects of these constraints. I've tried to explore some of these
> in my book Anti-Book https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/anti-book: the
> pamphlet form as "communist object", anonymous authorship against the value
> form of the author, Mute as a "diagrammatic" magazine in its critical
> immanence to neoliberal capital, mythopoesis from the constraint or loss of
> the subject of labour.
>
> Re social media, the difference here clearly isn't that unfinished
> publishing is any less exhausting than publishing on corporate digital
> platforms, but that it's exhausting in a different way - a political way,
> psychically and emotionally complex, exploratory, solidarity-building, tied
> in with the wider challenge to social constraints rather than succumbing to
> them. The trouble is that in the past this was more or less the only route
> to political publishing, whereas the "un-useful ease" of social media (an
> ease that is also exhausting and socially and psychically depleting, and of
> course bound up with all the psycho-social tricks of "attention") sucks
> energies and into its vortex. My sense is that this is a struggle that
> isn't best thought of in terms of old and new media ecologies but as one
> between different *contemporary* media ecologies (so, social media is
> winning in that struggle - err, by some way! - rather than the inevitable
> successor in an old/new linearity), that this is the media environment for
> what Simon called here "future publishing". That might also be a way of
> thinking the contemporary relevance of past media forms and publishing
> projects, the value of archives like MayDay, the importance of maintaining
> the form-aware and distributed libraries that Alessandro is developing with
> Neural Archive.
>
> Whether words should be better avoided, in Pauline's super challenging
> point ("how words and bodies, writing and organising, seem to hurtle in
> opposite directions", "A recent article in the magazine, Memes with Force <
> https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/memes-force-%e2%80%93-lessons-yellow-vests>,
> spoke about these expressions of the body – and a rejection of words – in
> relation to the Gilets Jaunes protests in France, and was to my mind
> utterly compelling on that point")…  Something that we too rarely recognise
> is that textual communication doesn't naturally line up with resistance,
> with communism, but has always been integral to capitalism - to accounting,
> trade, work, marketing, and now data-accumulation: "speech and
> communication … [are] thoroughly permeated by money - and not by accident
> but by their very nature", as Deleuze had it. Or, for the Situationist
> International: "Words work on behalf of the dominant organization of life".
> "We live within language as within polluted air". I agree with Pauline,
> then: we need to struggle with and against words (with and against
> publishing) but also sometimes ditch them.
>
> Solidarity! Nick
>
>
>
> On 25 Sep 2019, at 14:28, Neural magazine <a.ludovico.neural at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> Dear Shu Lea thanks a lot for the invitation, and it is always a great
> pleasure to share the space of a conversation with the remarkable Mute crew.
>
> As Simon remarked in the past, Mute and Neural (and sometimes me and him)
> have kind of parallel lives. To quote Pauline:
>
> Somewhat incredibly, Mute is approaching its 25th anniversary (it was
> launched in London with a thin pilot issue on 30th November 1994).
>
> Neural celebrated 25 years of publishing just a few months ago (last
> November) with a special issue, where we included content (especially
> facts, photographs, books and records) that we ‘missed’ to cover year by
> year, since the beginning. A decision which now seems to happily join the
> concept of ‘unfinished’.
> In fact, even if the ‘validating power’ of a printed publication mostly
> relies in its finitude and unchangeability, if not properly tracked and
> detailed in a new ‘edition’, now its life is mostly made by its multiple
> digital manifestations. The samples, the quotes, the pictures, the
> endorsements, the reviews, the social media posts and likes, are all
> contributing to acknowledging and diffusing proofs of its sustainable
> existence as a cultural ‘product’.
> I’ve analysed some of this aspects in the book “Post-Digital Print, the
> mutation of publishing since 1894” and more recently in a new book
> (‘Tactical Publishing’, due next year) as the ecology of publishing is in a
> constant change of funding elements and perspectives (like almost
> everything else, I’m afraid).
>
> I’d like to briefly respond to Pauline, about how the net culture didn’t
> become the ‘bread and butter’ of education, which is of course an open
> questions, but quite nodal for the extensive and avant-garde production of
> the early internet. I’d say that partly it did, as many of us, now, found
> ourselves involved in the educational sector. Unfortunately, the
> unstoppable rising complexity of the systems we deal and are deeply
> involved into, and their induced sudden consequences in the real economy
> and in social relationships haven’t been deeply investigated by the same
> people, as the first wave of internet culture did with the rising networks
> (another ‘unfinished’ work?). On this side I often face a crucial issue
> with students who are not really aware of what have technologically
> happened beyond their own existence, or in the best scenario, the anecdotal
> tales of their relatives. For example: try asking them “who invented the
> internet?” and then have fun (or be desperate) with the answers. Here
> there’s probably a long standing failure in crystallising a discourse which
> would have informed a couple of generations, even if it might be still not
> too late. In this respect, soliciting this kind of awareness is usually
> rewarding, as interested discussions can be instigated, while cutting out
> nostalgia, of course.
> And here another key element can be raised: the creation and active use of
> archives, overcoming the institutional use of them as empty assets. Trying
> to express is in a very few words I think that thinking beyond Google’s
> first page of results is a cultural war that needs to be fought.
> We’re trying to contribute with our Neural Archive project (
> http://archive.neural.it <http://archive.neural.it/>) where we enlist
> media culture publications, which we preserve physically and whose basic
> data is searchable online. It is an effort to reinstate the existence of an
> extended critical media culture, through its ‘finished’ forms, but forever
> ‘unfinished’ in its scope. Furthermore the Temporary Libraries I’m
> organising since a while are along the same line, facilitating a free
> physical encounter (‘the words and the bodies’ to quote again Pauline)
> among people with shared interests and a curated selection of publications
> (trying to cope with Josie’s “my words travel without my face”).
> And to quote Josie, again, I can’t agree more with her formulation of
> “publishing as intensifiers of meeting-up and thinking together”. My naive
> principle is that we are still able to create ’epicentres’ of ideas which
> can generate chain reactions. The main challenge is the scale, which has to
> be small to be manageable, and to preserve the true connection among the
> humans involved. Maybe we missed that we have to instigate smaller and
> effective, pleasurable networks in order to counterbalance the social media
> psychological enslavement?
>
> Alessandro
>
> On 25 Sep 2019, at 11:42, Josephine Berry <j.berry at gold.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Dear Pauline,
>
> Thanks for your laying out the terrain in such a generous way. Frankly, I
> didn't know where to begin with this question of publishing. Interesting
> though that we find ourselves discussing it here again, in an old skool
> cyber-barrio, with many old and beloved 'faces'. I was immediately drawn to
> the way you pose the problem as the disconnect between a proliferation of
> words, institutional speech and publishing, and degenerating lifeworlds,
> social infrastructures, embodied spaces, which bring with them the
> possibility of spontaneity, self-composition and self-articulation. You
> make this point in statements like these:
>
> 'symptom of an erasure of leftist popular education infrastructures, and
> the multi-pronged, decades-long attack on community resources, sociality
> and life?'
>
> 'we have veritable heaving virtual metropolises of conferences, panels,
> symposia, journals, books and blogs, without, really, anything like
> adequate life worlds for these to sit within'
>
> For me this is a really key point as well as an extremely confusing
> topology to live within. The scale of what Agamben calls the 'mass
> inscription of social knowledge' mounts up like Himalayan peaks, but our
> metabolic capacities to assimilate and, to some extent, act upon them seem
> to suffer in response. Something is happening, we are of course changing,
> becoming increasingly split between so many mediated forms of contact,
> expression, conviviality, atmosphere and representations on the one side,
> and, for want of a better term, our embodied experiences on the other which
> are, in turn, targeted and acted upon by the self-same
> mass-inscription-machine we serve by merely being alive, moving, consuming,
> 'liking'.
>
> In so many ways, and to invoke Agamben once more (sorry!), this splitting
> (and I do insist that it is, which is not quite the same division as the
> now disparaged one between real and virtual we used to talk about) can be
> thought of as a perfection of the body/mind, zoe/bios division that has
> organised and regulated life in the West for some two millennia. This is
> the apotheosis of a biopolitical regime of power you might say, that works
> by severing the reflexivity between thought and embodied experience.  My
> words travel without my face etc. In so many ways, this is just the latest
> stage in the perfection of the human capacity for mediation, but it is the
> scale and intensity of it that is world changing and the degree to which
> our mediatic extensions can be effortlessly congealed into value-producing
> processes which act as the perfect accompaniment to financial processes.
>
> Of course this relates to much more than just a 'mass inscription' of
> knowledge online. The process of capitalist biopolitical splitting extends
> in numerous directions; at one extreme, planetary life forms are being
> mass-inscribed as information (their DNA, which required a phenotype,
> becomes binary code) which can be extruded in multiple directions, most of
> which will relate to the value form (ants as the blue-print for driverless
> cars etc.). On the other hand, a self-splitting; we take into ourselves the
> exponential demand to become instruments of a productive system that cares
> not a fig whether we live or die. Our self-relation is also
> 'mass-inscribed' by the administrative and productive regime. This is what
> some people call antisocial reproduction. Adorno explains this as an effect
> of the growing proportion of capital's organic composition in relation to
> labour power: 'That which determines subjects as means of production and
> not as living purposes, increases with the proportion of machines to
> variable capital”
>
> But getting back to publishing 😉 I'm interested in something very close
> to what you were describing Pauline in relation what you witnessed at
> MayDay Rooms, through re-activating archives of struggle, (
> https://maydayrooms.org/archive_home/ <
> https://maydayrooms.org/archive_home/>) and which put Mute into some
> serious perspective, which was just how many efforts there have been to
> pool energies into the collective publishing over centuries, and across
> numerous political worlds. This tells us something about the useful
> difficulty (technical, economic and intellectual) of publishing in the
> past, which required the reflexivity of embodied thought, conversation,
> meeting, handling, touching, arguing, joking, reconsidering, distributing,
> knowing, seeing, etc etc. I think the fact that Mute started as a newspaper
> and demanded crazy amounts of time and energy from us all, produced the
> social glue - the frustration and fun! - that has kept us connected ever
> since. That and a whole lot of other preconditions (cheap space, at some
> point public subsidies, yours and Simon's huge generosity and personal
> sacrifices, greasy caf lunches).
>
> Back in my lifeworld here, my son is asking for help, and I'm running out
> of time. But I think the crux for me is how we work to use publishing as
> intensifiers of meeting-up and thinking together, refracting thought
> through feeling, fighting biopolitical splittings, using the (not just)
> human capacity for mediation and representation to connect as well as
> separate. And as you also say Pauline, in an economic and institutional
> regime that demands we convert general intellect into individual output all
> the time, this is becoming increasingly hard. Academics 'want' to bank
> research points rather than commit to making bio-diverse publishing
> ecologies. And all of us are tired at the end of the day, and settle for
> meeting our friends in the bio-secure vats that are social media platforms.
> How do we work on social, not antisocial, reproduction within these limited
> means?
>
> Josie x
>
>
>
> From: Pauline van Mourik Broekman <pauline.vmbroekman at network.rca.ac.uk <
> mailto:pauline.vmbroekman at network.rca.ac.uk
> <pauline.vmbroekman at network.rca.ac.uk>>>
> Sent: 24 September 2019 18:52
> To: Josephine Berry <j.berry at gold.ac.uk <mailto:j.berry at gold.ac.uk
> <j.berry at gold.ac.uk>>>
> Subject: Fwd: [-empyre-] UNFINISHED publishing - Mute/MetaMute and Neural/
> Neural.it <http://neural.it/>
>
> Xxxx
> HGV as of olde
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
> From: Pauline van Mourik Broekman <pauline.vmbroekman at network.rca.ac.uk <
> mailto:pauline.vmbroekman at network.rca.ac.uk
> <pauline.vmbroekman at network.rca.ac.uk>>>
> Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2019 at 16:55
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] UNFINISHED publishing - Mute/MetaMute and Neural/
> Neural.it <http://neural.it/>
> To: <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <
> mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>>>
>
>
> Dear all,
>
> Thanks so much to Shu Lea for inviting us here to discuss publishing as
> unfinished business :) The themes & discussions of prior weeks have also
> been fascinating...
>
> It's a curious time to be thinking about publishing when so much else
> momentous is going on: we've just had a ruling from the Supreme Court here
> in London that the government's prorogation of parliament was unlawful. The
> sense of social crisis fostered by years of austerity is palpable, and yet,
> what can sometimes seem even more so is the bedding-in of each new
> 'unbelievable' development as a so-called new normal. The calculatedness of
> power, one senses, that there is an energetics to resistance; and that the
> social systems that (are supposed to) support us can, over time, be relied
> to tip the balance in its direction – never ours.
>
> Somewhat incredibly, Mute is approaching its 25th anniversary (it was
> launched in London with a thin pilot issue on 30th November 1994), and as
> it ages I have been thinking about this phenomenon of
> what-happens-as-time-passes in a number of contexts. Going back into higher
> education to do a PhD in Fine Art, for example, I was really quite shocked
> by how little had changed in what appeared to be students' sensibilities,
> aspirations and even work since I left art school in 1991. To be honest, I
> went about a lot of the time feeling that some of the failure to change
> things more was on us – our generation of media-aware writers, publishers,
> critics and artists, who were supposed to have rejected the art world, its
> spaces and values, in favour of, if not a wholly affirmative embrace of
> networked media, then at least intense hope around the alternative models
> of production they promised. We argued about their notionally innate power
> to upend the status-quo, route around gate-keepers, give voice, etc. in
> ways I imagine anyone involved thought would create some change. In keeping
> with much of European net culture, a magazine like Mute was never going to
> uncritically assert the democratising power of the internet – in fact its
> self-reflexive, flesh-pink corporeality intended always to insist that
> technology is socially and materially embedded – but, we likewise wouldn't
> have bothered launching a publication around the question these new media
> posed for art and society if we didn't believe something enormous was
> possible, and that this needed to be pushed for, engaged with.
>
> What I see more and more, though (including in my own thinking I have to
> add!), is the significant difficulty of actually performing that coupling
> we all attempted; meaning, of thinking media WITH the social conditions
> that spawn, surround, and sustain it. This can lead you to the kind of
> back-to-front conclusions that casts a university cohort you're in, or the
> work that it produces, as even vaguely neutral, rather than structured from
> top to bottom by neoliberal education policy, financialisation, and the
> recomposition of staff, support and syllabus that goes with that. Or, as is
> perfectly understandable but increasingly problematic, to witness the panic
> about the 'evil' of Cambridge Analytica, or the professionally 'unfit'
> character of Mark Zuckerberg, and the kinds of coercive digital and image
> culture created by their companies. To be sure, they are the product of a
> racist and sexist Silicon Valley tech capitalism, deregulation, Floridaean
> creative cities dogma, but isn't their dominance also a – by now indeed
> extreme – symptom of an erasure of leftist popular education
> infrastructures, and the multi-pronged, decades-long attack on community
> resources, sociality and life? (The decline in voting in the second half of
> the twentieth century anyway always makes me scratch my head at how we can
> use the vocabulary of democracy without a hundred permanent caveats.) Even
> for those schooled against any easy techno-determinism, the conjuncture of
> forces playing out in the present are hard to untangle. Sarah Schulman's
> Gentrification of the Mind is really interesting on the complex ways in
> which MFA culture and the evisceration of cities under gentrification
> intersect to bleed out certain basic DiY/creative attitudes and
> capabilities towards organising directly in neighbourhoods and I find
> myself thinking of that over and over...
>
> What do we do then when we, for example, witness a newly published author
> telling a full house of post-graduate students that her work is an attempt
> to address the dearth of critical analysis of 'prosumerism's' capture of
> free labour, as analysed by Tiziana Terranova and Trebor Scholz (here
> presumed to be unknown, and presented as recently (and individually)
> discovered). I obviously concur with the thesis on free labour, but what
> frankly upset me when I experienced this recently, nearly two decades after
> the publishing and production cultures that had been formative for me
> started engaging with these questions was that, somehow, the knowledge we
> all produced during that time hadn't become the bread-and-butter of
> pedagogic culture. (I do realise colleges can be unique in this respect,
> and that the UK very likely is worse than e.g. Europe and America, but
> still...).
>
> I remember when Mute first applied for subsidies to do its publishing
> circa 1995/6, we got some furious responses from older film, video and
> electronic-art practitioners, who disputed our claims to any novelty or
> originality. In founding MayDay Rooms, I also remember coming across no
> amount of incredible magazines I had been unaware of, and whose editorials
> made me realise Mute had just been doing the kind of thing groups in any
> generation do – i.e. make a critical media intervention, operate on the
> tacit assumption it's timely, historically significant and can exert
> agency, and try and sustain it as if it's needed in perpetuity. These
> experiences were very *relativising*, shall we say, of what we had done,
> and seemed to beg the question of how magazines and journals occupy time.
> Of course it is completely fine to just accept something as bounded and
> historically situated, even totally done and dusted (and in our case the
> end of our successive stages of funding in 2013 meant our publishing
> definitely decelerated – though as editors we're still actively in
> discussion and even have our publishing spikes now and then!). It's also
> not as if what I'm describing hasn't happened in time immemorial... or been
> unpicked at length in the classic genealogies of knowledge production. But
> still, if you're staying active for longer as we are, it's hard not to
> think about how what you've produced sits in a larger ecology of
> publishing, media, education, etc., and I find it a shame that – bar with
> honourable exceptions like the collaborative magazine networks that
> Alessandro and Simon put so much time into – there doesn't seem to be that
> much thought going into that... mostly because these self-same social
> conditions make it so hard for anyone to think beyond immediate survival,
> and of course to some extent because it will always feel much too damned
> unique, great and exciting when you're starting something new (!).
>
> What preoccupies me, then, especially in this age of 'agnotology' (the
> deliberate, and sometimes tactical, production/maintenance of ignorance) is
> how to work on this problem together – when in the background we have the
> Twittering Machine (as Richard Seymour's recent book describes the
> networked social) sucking so many of the best surplus energies from us.
> Also, though this is perhaps more tendentious, how words and bodies,
> writing and organising, seem to hurtle in opposite directions, such that we
> have veritable heaving virtual metropolises of conferences, panels,
> symposia, journals, books and blogs, without, really, anything like
> adequate life worlds for these to sit within, where also people whose
> specialisms aren't WORDS (but who anyone who's ever worked in a group knows
> are essential) are valorised as much as the scribes, influencers and
> intellectuals. A recent article in the magazine, Memes with Force <
> https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/memes-force-%e2%80%93-lessons-yellow-vests>,
> spoke about these expressions of the body – and a rejection of words – in
> relation to the Gilets Jaunes protests in France, and was to my mind
> utterly compelling on that point.
>
> Anyway, I've gone on too long. Thank you again Shu Lea and empyre for
> organising these discussions, I hope these thoughts might pique others, and
> here's to generalising the anniversary!
>
> Pauline
>
> ***
> Pauline van Mourik Broekman
> PhD, Fine Art, RCA
> 'The Network Optic: Vision, Authorship and Collectivity after Vertov'
> Email: pauline.vmbroekman at network.rca.ac.uk <
> mailto:pauline.vmbroekman at network.rca.ac.uk
> <pauline.vmbroekman at network.rca.ac.uk>>
> Mob: 07947157338
>
> ***
> http://www.metamute.org <http://www.metamute.org/>
> http://www.maydayrooms.org <http://www.maydayrooms.org/>
>
>
> On Tue, 24 Sep 2019 at 06:46, Shu Lea Cheang <shulea at earthlink.net <
> mailto:shulea at earthlink.net <shulea at earthlink.net>>> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> throw in here another thread while the wild fire of AMAZON IS BURNING
> cannot be contained.
>
> I am introducing here two stay unfinished media publications whose vision
> and persistence in producing ideas, introducing emergent genres, engaging
> in critical dialogue, networking the spheres, are remarkable.
>
> "Mute magazine was founded in 1994 to discuss the interrelationship of art
> and new technologies when the World Wide Web was newborn....... While Mute
> was born out of a culture that celebrated the democratising potential of
> new media, it becomes ever more apparent that we need to critically engage
> with the ways in which new media also reproduce and extend capitalist
> social relations. "-
> http://www.metamute.org/about-us <http://www.metamute.org/about-us>
>
> "Neural is a printed magazine established in 1993 dealing with new media
> art, electronic music and hacktivism. It was founded by Alessandro Ludovico
> and Minus Habens Records label owner Ivan Iusco in Bari (Italy). The
> magazine’s mission was to be a magazine of ideas, becoming a node in a
> larger network of digital culture publishers". In 1997 the first Neural
> website was established, and it was updated daily from September 2000." -
> http://neural.it/about/ <http://neural.it/about/>
>
> It is a great honor for me to introduce the Mute Team together here
> online, Josephine Berry, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Simon Worthington and
> from Neural, Alessandro Ludovico.
>
> They 'publish'....
> sl
>
>
> Josephine Berry has been part of the editorial collective of Mute
> magazine, from intern to Editor and now board member, from 1995 til today.
> She was a passionate believer in DIY media during the 1990s, and in a much
> less euphoric way to this day. She wrote the first dissertation on net.art
> in the late 90s. From this time her attention has shifted to a more
> specific investigation of art and creativity’s relationship to late
> capitalism and the abstraction, mimesis and norming of creative life in
> both.   Her monograph, 'Art and (Bare) Life', (Sternberg Press, 2018),
> brings the biopolitical theory initiated by Michel Foucault to bear on
> aesthetic theories of autonomous art in order to consider how the
> avant-garde 'blurring of art and life' intersects with the modern state's
> orientation to 'life itself'. This project grew out of an earlier book
> project, co-authored with Anthony Iles, titled 'No Room to Move: Radical
> Art and the Regenerate City' (Mute Books, 2010), which considered the use
> of contemporary art within neoliberal urban regeneration.   Josephine
> lectures on culture industry at Goldsmiths, University of London.
>
> Pauline van Mourik Broekman is the co-founder and co-publisher, with Simon
> Worthington, of Mute magazine, for which she also served as co-editor and
> contributing editor. Published in print and online between 1994 and 2013,
> Mute also ran many media projects, including Fallout Radio (with Kate
> Rich), and OpenMute, a software and platform development project for
> independent producers. From 2011-2013 it also shared in coordination of the
> Post-Media Lab at Leuphana University, Germany. Mute has since that time
> continued as a voluntarily run online journal – with all editors working
> together as a collective. In 2011 Pauline co-founded MayDay Rooms, which
> seeks to activate historical material in political struggles, and broadly
> to socialise practices of historical research and archival work. Its
> commitment to anti-copyright practices, commoning and free education was
> also a feature in work done with Coventry University’s Centre for
> Disruptive Media and Ted Byfield, which concluded in Open Education: A
> Study in Disruption, co-authored with Gary Hall (Roman and Littlefield
> International, 2014). Since 2014, she has been doing a practice-based PhD
> at the Royal College of Art, London, titled: The Network Optic: Vision,
> Authorship and Collectivity after Vertov.
>
> Simon Worthington is a researcher in future publishing — free and open
> source systems, economic models, and the politics of Open Science. Author
> of ‘The Book Liberation Manifesto’ supporting the FOSS community to make
> research available to all through platform independent, interoperable
> publications. He is the Editor-in-Chief at Generation Research an editorial
> platform for open scholarship for the Leibniz Association Research Alliance
> Open Science and is based in R&D at the Open Science Lab, TIB – German
> National Library of Science and Technology. As of 2019 he is a Board Member
> of FORCE11 an organisation for the future of scholarly communication. He
> has worked as a research author for the Akademienunion at the
> Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften on ‘AGATE’ a research
> publication for scoping the technical data connection of all of Europe’s
> Academies of Arts and Science digital repositories. From 2012/15 he led the
> research unit ‘Publishing Consortium’ as part of the Hybrid Publishing Lab
> at Leuphana University, Germany. In 1994 he co-founded and published Mute
> magazine a culture and technology publication, the European counter to
> Wiredmagazine, and continues as a member of the editorial collective and as
> publisher. He originally studied media art at the Slade School, UCL (UK)
> and CalArts (USA).  ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8579-9717 <
> http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8579-9717> @mrchristian99
> simon.worthington at tib.eu <mailto:simon.worthington at tib.eu
> <simon.worthington at tib.eu>> Generation Research https://genr.eu/ <
> https://genr.eu/> The Book Liberation Manifesto http://linkme2.net/1gs<
> http://linkme2.net/1gs>
>
> Alessandro Ludovico is a researcher, artist and chief editor of Neural
> magazine since 1993. He received his Ph.D. degree in English and Media from
> Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge (UK). He is Associate Professor at
> the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, where he joined
> the AMT (Archeology of Media and technology) research group. He has
> published and edited several books, among them “Post-Digital Print: The
> Mutation of Publishing since 1894", and has lectured worldwide. He also
> served as an advisor for the Documenta 12's Magazine Project. He is one of
> the authors of the award-winning Hacking Monopolism trilogy of artworks
> (Google Will Eat Itself, Amazon Noir, Face to Facebook).
> http://neural.it <http://neural.it/>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <
> mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>>
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu <http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/>--
>
>
> ***
> Pauline van Mourik Broekman
> PhD, Fine Art, RCA
> 'The Network Optic: Vision, Authorship and Collectivity after Vertov'
> Email: pauline.vmbroekman at network.rca.ac.uk <
> mailto:pauline.vmbroekman at network.rca.ac.uk
> <pauline.vmbroekman at network.rca.ac.uk>>
> Mob: 07947157338
>
> ***
> http://www.metamute.org <http://www.metamute.org/>
> http://www.maydayrooms.org <http://www.maydayrooms.org/>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <
> mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>>
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu <http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/>
>
> Dear Shu Lea thanks a lot for the invitation, and it is always a great
> pleasure to share the space of a conversation with the remarkable Mute crew.
>
> As Simon remarked in the past, Mute and Neural (and sometimes me and him)
> have kind of parallel lives. To quote Pauline:
>
> Somewhat incredibly, Mute is approaching its 25th anniversary (it was
> launched in London with a thin pilot issue on 30th November 1994).
>
> Neural celebrated 25 years of publishing just a few months ago (last
> November) with a special issue, where we included content (especially
> facts, photographs, books and records) that we ‘missed’ to cover year by
> year, since the beginning. A decision which now seems to happily join the
> concept of ‘unfinished’.
> In fact, even if the ‘validating power’ of a printed publication mostly
> relies in its finitude and unchangeability, if not properly tracked and
> detailed in a new ‘edition’, now its life is mostly made by its multiple
> digital manifestations. The samples, the quotes, the pictures, the
> endorsements, the reviews, the social media posts and likes, are all
> contributing to acknowledging and diffusing proofs of its sustainable
> existence as a cultural ‘product’.
> I’ve analysed some of this aspects in the book “Post-Digital Print, the
> mutation of publishing since 1894” and more recently in a new book
> (‘Tactical Publishing’, due next year) as the ecology of publishing is in a
> constant change of funding elements and perspectives (like almost
> everything else, I’m afraid).
>
> I’d like to briefly respond to Pauline, about how the net culture didn’t
> become the ‘bread and butter’ of education, which is of course an open
> questions, but quite nodal for the extensive and avant-garde production of
> the early internet. I’d say that partly it did, as many of us, now, found
> ourselves involved in the educational sector. Unfortunately, the
> unstoppable rising complexity of the systems we deal and are deeply
> involved into, and their induced sudden consequences in the real economy
> and in social relationships haven’t been deeply investigated by the same
> people, as the first wave of internet culture did with the rising networks
> (another ‘unfinished’ work?). On this side I often face a crucial issue
> with students who are not really aware of what have technologically
> happened beyond their own existence, or in the best scenario, the anecdotal
> tales of their relatives. For example: try asking them “who invented the
> internet?” and then have fun (or be desperate) with the answers. Here
> there’s probably a long standing failure in crystallising a discourse which
> would have informed a couple of generations, even if it might be still not
> too late. In this respect, soliciting this kind of awareness is usually
> rewarding, as interested discussions can be instigated, while cutting out
> nostalgia, of course.
> And here another key element can be raised: the creation and active use of
> archives, overcoming the institutional use of them as empty assets. Trying
> to express is in a very few words I think that thinking beyond Google’s
> first page of results is a cultural war that needs to be fought.
> We’re trying to contribute with our Neural Archive project (
> http://archive.neural.it) where we enlist media culture publications,
> which we preserve physically and whose basic data is searchable online. It
> is an effort to reinstate the existence of an extended critical media
> culture, through its ‘finished’ forms, but forever ‘unfinished’ in its
> scope. Furthermore the Temporary Libraries I’m organising since a while are
> along the same line, facilitating a free physical encounter (‘the words and
> the bodies’ to quote again Pauline) among people with shared interests and
> a curated selection of publications (trying to cope with Josie’s “my words
> travel without my face”).
> And to quote Josie, again, I can’t agree more with her formulation of
> “publishing as intensifiers of meeting-up and thinking together”. My naive
> principle is that we are still able to create ’epicentres’ of ideas which
> can generate chain reactions. The main challenge is the scale, which has to
> be small to be manageable, and to preserve the true connection among the
> humans involved. Maybe we missed that we have to instigate smaller and
> effective, pleasurable networks in order to counterbalance the social media
> psychological enslavement?
>
> Alessandro
>
> On 25 Sep 2019, at 11:42, Josephine Berry <j.berry at gold.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Dear Pauline,
>
> Thanks for your laying out the terrain in such a generous way. Frankly, I
> didn't know where to begin with this question of publishing. Interesting
> though that we find ourselves discussing it here again, in an old skool
> cyber-barrio, with many old and beloved 'faces'. I was immediately drawn to
> the way you pose the problem as the disconnect between a proliferation of
> words, institutional speech and publishing, and degenerating lifeworlds,
> social infrastructures, embodied spaces, which bring with them the
> possibility of spontaneity, self-composition and self-articulation. You
> make this point in statements like these:
>
> 'symptom of an erasure of leftist popular education infrastructures, and
> the multi-pronged, decades-long attack on community resources, sociality
> and life?'
>
> 'we have veritable heaving virtual metropolises of conferences, panels,
> symposia, journals, books and blogs, without, really, anything like
> adequate life worlds for these to sit within'
>
> For me this is a really key point as well as an extremely confusing
> topology to live within. The scale of what Agamben calls the 'mass
> inscription of social knowledge' mounts up like Himalayan peaks, but our
> metabolic capacities to assimilate and, to some extent, act upon them seem
> to suffer in response. Something is happening, we are of course changing,
> becoming increasingly split between so many mediated forms of contact,
> expression, conviviality, atmosphere and representations on the one side,
> and, for want of a better term, our embodied experiences on the other which
> are, in turn, targeted and acted upon by the self-same
> mass-inscription-machine we serve by merely being alive, moving, consuming,
> 'liking'.
>
> In so many ways, and to invoke Agamben once more (sorry!), this splitting
> (and I do insist that it is, which is not quite the same division as the
> now disparaged one between real and virtual we used to talk about) can be
> thought of as a perfection of the body/mind, zoe/bios division that has
> organised and regulated life in the West for some two millennia. This is
> the apotheosis of a biopolitical regime of power you might say, that works
> by severing the *reflexivity* between thought and embodied experience.
> My words travel without my face etc. In so many ways, this is just the
> latest stage in the perfection of the human capacity for mediation, but it
> is the scale and intensity of it that is world changing and the degree to
> which our mediatic extensions can be effortlessly congealed into
> value-producing processes which act as the perfect accompaniment to
> financial processes.
>
> Of course this relates to much more than just a 'mass inscription' of
> knowledge online. The process of capitalist biopolitical splitting extends
> in numerous directions; at one extreme, planetary life forms are being
> mass-inscribed as information (their DNA, which required a phenotype,
> becomes binary code) which can be extruded in multiple directions, most of
> which will relate to the value form (ants as the blue-print for driverless
> cars etc.). On the other hand, a self-splitting; we take into ourselves the
> exponential demand to become instruments of a productive system that cares
> not a fig whether we live or die. Our self-relation is also
> 'mass-inscribed' by the administrative and productive regime. This is
> what some people call antisocial reproduction. Adorno explains this as an
> effect of the growing proportion of capital's organic composition in
> relation to labour power: 'That which determines subjects as means of
> production and not as living purposes, increases with the proportion of
> machines to variable capital”
>
> But getting back to publishing 😉 I'm interested in something very close
> to what you were describing Pauline in relation what you witnessed at
> MayDay Rooms, through re-activating archives of struggle, (
> https://maydayrooms.org/archive_home/) and which put Mute into some
> serious perspective, which was just how many efforts there have been to
> pool energies into the collective publishing over centuries, and across
> numerous political worlds. This tells us something about the useful
> difficulty (technical, economic and intellectual) of publishing in the
> past, which required the r*eflexivity of embodied thought*, conversation,
> meeting, handling, touching, arguing, joking, reconsidering, distributing,
> knowing, seeing, etc etc. I think the fact that Mute started as a newspaper
> and demanded crazy amounts of time and energy from us all, produced the
> social glue - the frustration and fun! - that has kept us connected ever
> since. That and a whole lot of other preconditions (cheap space, at some
> point public subsidies, yours and Simon's huge generosity and personal
> sacrifices, greasy caf lunches).
>
> Back in my lifeworld here, my son is asking for help, and I'm running out
> of time. But I think the crux for me is how we work to use publishing as
> intensifiers of meeting-up and thinking together, refracting thought
> through feeling, fighting biopolitical splittings, using the (not just)
> human capacity for mediation and representation to connect as well as
> separate. And as you also say Pauline, in an economic and institutional
> regime that demands we convert general intellect into individual output all
> the time, this is becoming increasingly hard. Academics 'want' to bank
> research points rather than commit to making bio-diverse publishing
> ecologies. And all of us are tired at the end of the day, and settle for
> meeting our friends in the bio-secure vats that are social media platforms.
> How do we work on social, not antisocial, reproduction within these limited
> means?
>
> Josie x
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Pauline van Mourik Broekman <pauline.vmbroekman at network.rca.ac.uk>
> *Sent:* 24 September 2019 18:52
> *To:* Josephine Berry <j.berry at gold.ac.uk>
> *Subject:* Fwd: [-empyre-] UNFINISHED publishing - Mute/MetaMute and
> Neural/Neural.it <http://neural.it/>
>
> Xxxx
> HGV as of olde
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
> From: *Pauline van Mourik Broekman* <pauline.vmbroekman at network.rca.ac.uk>
> Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2019 at 16:55
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] UNFINISHED publishing - Mute/MetaMute and Neural/
> Neural.it <http://neural.it/>
> To: <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
>
>
> Dear all,
>
> Thanks so much to Shu Lea for inviting us here to discuss publishing as
> unfinished business :) The themes & discussions of prior weeks have also
> been fascinating...
>
> It's a curious time to be thinking about publishing when so much else
> momentous is going on: we've just had a ruling from the Supreme Court here
> in London that the government's prorogation of parliament was unlawful. The
> sense of social crisis fostered by years of austerity is palpable, and yet,
> what can sometimes seem even more so is the bedding-in of each new
> 'unbelievable' development as a so-called new normal. The calculatedness of
> power, one senses, that there is an energetics to resistance; and that the
> social systems that (are supposed to) support us can, over time, be relied
> to tip the balance in its direction – never ours.
>
> Somewhat incredibly, Mute is approaching its 25th anniversary (it was
> launched in London with a thin pilot issue on 30th November 1994), and as
> it ages I have been thinking about this phenomenon of
> what-happens-as-time-passes in a number of contexts. Going back into higher
> education to do a PhD in Fine Art, for example, I was really quite shocked
> by how little had changed in what appeared to be students' sensibilities,
> aspirations and even work since I left art school in 1991. To be honest, I
> went about a lot of the time feeling that some of the failure to change
> things more was on us – our generation of media-aware writers, publishers,
> critics and artists, who were supposed to have rejected the art world, its
> spaces and values, in favour of, if not a wholly affirmative embrace of
> networked media, then at least intense hope around the alternative models
> of production they promised. We argued about their notionally innate power
> to upend the status-quo, route around gate-keepers, give voice, etc. in
> ways I imagine anyone involved thought would create some change. In keeping
> with much of European net culture, a magazine like Mute was never going to
> uncritically assert the democratising power of the internet – in fact its
> self-reflexive, flesh-pink corporeality intended always to insist that
> technology is socially and materially embedded – but, we likewise wouldn't
> have bothered launching a publication around the question these new media
> posed for art and society if we didn't believe something enormous was
> possible, and that this needed to be pushed for, engaged with.
>
> What I see more and more, though (including in my own thinking I have to
> add!), is the significant difficulty of actually performing that coupling
> we all attempted; meaning, of thinking media WITH the social conditions
> that spawn, surround, and sustain it. This can lead you to the kind of
> back-to-front conclusions that casts a university cohort you're in, or the
> work that it produces, as even vaguely neutral, rather than structured from
> top to bottom by neoliberal education policy, financialisation, and the
> recomposition of staff, support and syllabus that goes with that. Or, as is
> perfectly understandable but increasingly problematic, to witness the panic
> about the 'evil' of Cambridge Analytica, or the professionally 'unfit'
> character of Mark Zuckerberg, and the kinds of coercive digital and image
> culture created by their companies. To be sure, they are the product of a
> racist and sexist Silicon Valley tech capitalism, deregulation, Floridaean
> creative cities dogma, but isn't their dominance also a – by now indeed
> extreme – symptom of an erasure of leftist popular education
> infrastructures, and the multi-pronged, decades-long attack on community
> resources, sociality and life? (The decline in voting in the second half of
> the twentieth century anyway always makes me scratch my head at how we can
> use the vocabulary of democracy without a hundred permanent caveats.) Even
> for those schooled against any easy techno-determinism, the conjuncture of
> forces playing out in the present are hard to untangle. Sarah Schulman's
> Gentrification of the Mind is really interesting on the complex ways in
> which MFA culture and the evisceration of cities under gentrification
> intersect to bleed out certain basic DiY/creative attitudes and
> capabilities towards organising directly in neighbourhoods and I find
> myself thinking of that over and over...
>
> What do we do then when we, for example, witness a newly published author
> telling a full house of post-graduate students that her work is an attempt
> to address the dearth of critical analysis of 'prosumerism's' capture of
> free labour, as analysed by Tiziana Terranova and Trebor Scholz (here
> presumed to be unknown, and presented as recently (and individually)
> discovered). I obviously concur with the thesis on free labour, but what
> frankly upset me when I experienced this recently, nearly two decades after
> the publishing and production cultures that had been formative for me
> started engaging with these questions was that, somehow, the knowledge we
> all produced during that time hadn't become the bread-and-butter of
> pedagogic culture. (I do realise colleges can be unique in this respect,
> and that the UK very likely is worse than e.g. Europe and America, but
> still...).
>
> I remember when Mute first applied for subsidies to do its publishing
> circa 1995/6, we got some furious responses from older film, video and
> electronic-art practitioners, who disputed our claims to any novelty or
> originality. In founding MayDay Rooms, I also remember coming across no
> amount of incredible magazines I had been unaware of, and whose editorials
> made me realise Mute had just been doing the kind of thing groups in any
> generation do – i.e. make a critical media intervention, operate on the
> tacit assumption it's timely, historically significant and can exert
> agency, and try and sustain it as if it's needed in perpetuity. These
> experiences were very *relativising*, shall we say, of what we had done,
> and seemed to beg the question of how magazines and journals occupy time.
> Of course it is completely fine to just accept something as bounded and
> historically situated, even totally done and dusted (and in our case the
> end of our successive stages of funding in 2013 meant our publishing
> definitely decelerated – though as editors we're still actively in
> discussion and even have our publishing spikes now and then!). It's also
> not as if what I'm describing hasn't happened in time immemorial... or been
> unpicked at length in the classic genealogies of knowledge production. But
> still, if you're staying active for longer as we are, it's hard not to
> think about how what you've produced sits in a larger ecology of
> publishing, media, education, etc., and I find it a shame that – bar with
> honourable exceptions like the collaborative magazine networks that
> Alessandro and Simon put so much time into – there doesn't seem to be that
> much thought going into that... mostly because these self-same social
> conditions make it so hard for anyone to think beyond immediate survival,
> and of course to some extent because it will always feel much too damned
> unique, great and exciting when you're starting something new (!).
>
> What preoccupies me, then, especially in this age of 'agnotology' (the
> deliberate, and sometimes tactical, production/maintenance of ignorance) is
> how to work on this problem together – when in the background we have the
> Twittering Machine (as Richard Seymour's recent book describes the
> networked social) sucking so many of the best surplus energies from us.
> Also, though this is perhaps more tendentious, how words and bodies,
> writing and organising, seem to hurtle in opposite directions, such that we
> have veritable heaving virtual metropolises of conferences, panels,
> symposia, journals, books and blogs, without, really, anything like
> adequate life worlds for these to sit within, where also people whose
> specialisms aren't WORDS (but who anyone who's ever worked in a group knows
> are essential) are valorised as much as the scribes, influencers and
> intellectuals. A recent article in the magazine, Memes with Force
> <https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/memes-force-%e2%80%93-lessons-yellow-vests>,
> spoke about these expressions of the body – and a rejection of words – in
> relation to the Gilets Jaunes protests in France, and was to my mind
> utterly compelling on that point.
>
> Anyway, I've gone on too long. Thank you again Shu Lea and empyre for
> organising these discussions, I hope these thoughts might pique others, and
> here's to generalising the anniversary!
>
> Pauline
>
> ***
> Pauline van Mourik Broekman
> PhD, Fine Art, RCA
> 'The Network Optic: Vision, Authorship and Collectivity after Vertov'
> Email: pauline.vmbroekman at network.rca.ac.uk
> Mob: 07947157338
>
> ***
> http://www.metamute.org
> http://www.maydayrooms.org
>
>
> On Tue, 24 Sep 2019 at 06:46, Shu Lea Cheang <shulea at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> throw in here another thread while the wild fire of AMAZON IS BURNING
> cannot be contained.
>
> I am introducing here two stay unfinished media publications whose vision
> and persistence in producing ideas, introducing emergent genres, engaging
> in critical dialogue, networking the spheres, are remarkable.
>
> *"Mute *magazine was founded in 1994 to discuss the interrelationship of
> art and new technologies when the World Wide Web was newborn....... While
> *Mute *was born out of a culture that celebrated the democratising
> potential of new media, it becomes ever more apparent that we need to
> critically engage with the ways in which new media also reproduce and
> extend capitalist social relations. "-
> http://www.metamute.org/about-us
>
> "Neural is a printed magazine established in 1993 dealing with new media
> art, electronic music and hacktivism. It was founded by Alessandro Ludovico
> and Minus Habens Records label owner Ivan Iusco in Bari (Italy). The
> magazine’s mission was to be a magazine of ideas, becoming a node in a
> larger network of digital culture publishers". In 1997 the first Neural
> website was established, and it was updated daily from September 2000." -
> http://neural.it/about/
>
> It is a great honor for me to introduce the Mute Team together here online,
>  Josephine Berry, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Simon Worthington and from
> Neural, Alessandro Ludovico.
>
> They 'publish'....
> sl
>
>
> Josephine Berry has been part of the editorial collective of Mute
> magazine, from intern to Editor and now board member, from 1995 til today.
> She was a passionate believer in DIY media during the 1990s, and in a much
> less euphoric way to this day. She wrote the first dissertation on net.art
> in the late 90s. From this time her attention has shifted to a more
> specific investigation of art and creativity’s relationship to late
> capitalism and the abstraction, mimesis and norming of creative life in
> both.   Her monograph, 'Art and (Bare) Life', (Sternberg Press, 2018),
> brings the biopolitical theory initiated by Michel Foucault to bear on
> aesthetic theories of autonomous art in order to consider how the
> avant-garde 'blurring of art and life' intersects with the modern state's
> orientation to 'life itself'. This project grew out of an earlier book
> project, co-authored with Anthony Iles, titled 'No Room to Move: Radical
> Art and the Regenerate City' (Mute Books, 2010), which considered the use
> of contemporary art within neoliberal urban regeneration.   Josephine
> lectures on culture industry at Goldsmiths, University of London.
>
> Pauline van Mourik Broekman is the co-founder and co-publisher, with Simon
> Worthington, of Mute magazine, for which she also served as co-editor and
> contributing editor. Published in print and online between 1994 and 2013,
> Mute also ran many media projects, including Fallout Radio (with Kate
> Rich), and OpenMute, a software and platform development project for
> independent producers. From 2011-2013 it also shared in coordination of the
> Post-Media Lab at Leuphana University, Germany. Mute has since that time
> continued as a voluntarily run online journal – with all editors working
> together as a collective. In 2011 Pauline co-founded MayDay Rooms, which
> seeks to activate historical material in political struggles, and broadly
> to socialise practices of historical research and archival work. Its
> commitment to anti-copyright practices, commoning and free education was
> also a feature in work done with Coventry University’s Centre for
> Disruptive Media and Ted Byfield, which concluded in Open Education: A
> Study in Disruption, co-authored with Gary Hall (Roman and Littlefield
> International, 2014). Since 2014, she has been doing a practice-based PhD
> at the Royal College of Art, London, titled: The Network Optic: Vision,
> Authorship and Collectivity after Vertov.
>
>
> Simon Worthington is a researcher in future publishing — free and open
> source systems, economic models, and the politics of Open Science. Author
> of ‘The Book Liberation Manifesto’ supporting the FOSS community to make
> research available to all through platform independent, interoperable
> publications. He is the Editor-in-Chief at *Generation Research* an
> editorial platform for open scholarship for the Leibniz Association
> Research Alliance Open Science and is based in R&D at the Open Science Lab,
> TIB – German National Library of Science and Technology. As of 2019 he is a
> Board Member of FORCE11 an organisation for the future of scholarly
> communication. He has worked as a research author for the Akademienunion at
> the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften on ‘AGATE’ a
> research publication for scoping the technical data connection of all of
> Europe’s Academies of Arts and Science digital repositories. From 2012/15
> he led the research unit ‘Publishing Consortium’ as part of the Hybrid
> Publishing Lab at Leuphana University, Germany. In 1994 he co-founded and
> published *Mute* magazine a culture and technology publication, the
> European counter to *Wired*magazine, and continues as a member of the
> editorial collective and as publisher. He originally studied media art at
> the Slade School, UCL (UK) and CalArts (USA).  ORCID
> http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8579-9717 @mrchristian99
> simon.worthington at tib.eu *Generation Research*https://genr.eu/ The Book
> Liberation Manifesto http://linkme2.net/1gs
>
> Alessandro Ludovico is a researcher, artist and chief editor of Neural
> magazine since 1993. He received his Ph.D. degree in English and Media from
> Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge (UK). He is Associate Professor at
> the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, where he joined
> the AMT (Archeology of Media and technology) research group. He has
> published and edited several books, among them “Post-Digital Print: The
> Mutation of Publishing since 1894", and has lectured worldwide. He also
> served as an advisor for the Documenta 12's Magazine Project. He is one of
> the authors of the award-winning Hacking Monopolism trilogy of artworks
> (Google Will Eat Itself, Amazon Noir, Face to Facebook).
> http://neural.it
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
> --
>
>
> ***
> Pauline van Mourik Broekman
> PhD, Fine Art, RCA
> 'The Network Optic: Vision, Authorship and Collectivity after Vertov'
> Email: pauline.vmbroekman at network.rca.ac.uk
> Mob: 07947157338
>
> ***
> http://www.metamute.org
> http://www.maydayrooms.org
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
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