Mute Magazine Vol 2 9

Quarterly, critical and cheap, "Mute" is a jumble of all that's still grunting in the inter-finessing hyper-barrios of culture, politics, and technology 2.0.

Featuring; Falling for the Future - Iain Boal brings modernity's futuramas back down to earth. Citizens Banned? - Josephine Berry Slater and Anthony Iles review the AV media arts festival. Crisis in the Visual System - Paul Helliwell argues the art world's favourite philosopher, Jacques Ranci re, does have something to hide. Borders 2.0: Future, Tense - Bryan Finoki and Angela Mitropoulos present an incursion, in text and image, into the contemporary borderlands. Manufactured Scarcity - James Heartfield on Enron's pioneering of green capitalism through cutting production. Battle of All Mothers - Madame Tlank on welfare, surveillance and working class women. When Travesty Becomes Form - Alberto Duman contemplates the cyclical self-affirmation of the curator. Your Five a Day - Quarterly, critical and cheap, Mute is a concrete jumble of all that's still grunting in the inter-finessing hyper-barrios of culture, politics, and technology 2.0. As capitalism yawns toward apocalypse we match it issue by issue with a sustained critique of everything existing from eco prole-bashing and shanty chic to academic aut-onanist marxistry. An average portion of Mute contains all the cultural vitamins essential to a healthy (contempt for the) economy. http: //metamute.org

This issue features articles by Anthony Davies, Paul Helliwell, Howard Slater, and Peter Suchin, and a special section on climate change and capital with texts by Will Barnes, James Woudhuysen, Tim Forsyth and Zoe Young, Kate Rich, George Caffentzis, Anthony Iles, Chris Wright, and Samantha Alvarez.

As capitalism yawns towards apocalypse "Mute Magazine" matches it issue by issue with a sustained critique of everything existing.

This issue contains works by Thomas Campbell and Dmitry Vorobyev, John Cunningham, Harry Halpin, Stewart Martin, Benedict Seymour, and Simon Yuill, with commissioned artwork by Theo Michael, John Russell, and Plastique Fantastique.

Introduction by Adrian Shaughnessy. Text by Simon Worthington, Damian Jaques, Pauline van Mourik Broekman.

In recent years, many countries all over Europe have witnessed a demand for a more direct form of democracy, ranging from improved clarity of information to being directly involved in decision-making procedures. Increasingly, governments are putting citizen participation at the centre of their policy objectives, striving for more transparency, to engage and empower local individuals and communities to collaborate on public projects and to encourage self-organization. This book explores the role of participatory design in keeping these participatory processes public. It addresses four specific lines of enquiry: how can the use and/or development of technologies and social media help to diversify, to coproduce, to interrupt and to document democratic design experiments? Aimed at researchers and academics in the fields of urban planning and participatory design, this book includes contributions from a range of experts across Europe including the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Denmark, Austria, Spain, France, Romania, Hungary and Finland.

No, Anti-Book is not a book about books. Not exactly. And yet it is a must for anyone interested in the future of the book. Presenting what he terms “a communism of textual matter,” Nicholas Thoburn explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing, shifting the politics of text from an exclusive concern with content and meaning to the media forms and social relations by which text is produced and consumed. Taking a “post-digital” approach in considering a wide array of textual media forms, Thoburn invites us to challenge the commodity form of books—to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce. His critique is, instead, one immersed in the many materialities of text. Anti-Book engages with an array of writing and publishing projects, including Antonin Artaud’s paper gris-gris, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, Guy Debord’s sandpaper-bound Mémoires, the collective novelist Wu Ming, and the digital/print hybrid of Mute magazine. Empirically grounded, it is also a major achievement in expressing a political philosophy of writing and publishing, where the materiality of text is interlaced with conceptual production. Each chapter investigates a different form of textual media in concert with a particular concept: the small-press pamphlet as “communist object,” the magazine as “diagrammatic publishing,” political books in the modes of “root” and “rhizome,” the “multiple single” of anonymous authorship, and myth as “unidentified narrative object.” An absorbingly written contribution to contemporary media theory in all its manifestations, Anti-Book will enrich current debates about radical publishing, artists’ books and other new genre and media forms in alternative media, art publishing, media studies, cultural studies, critical theory, and social and political theory.