Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex, 1-2 (1914-1915)

Issue 1, 20 June 1914

Issue 2, July 1915

“Blast was a modernist magazine founded by Wyndham Lewis with the assistance of Ezra Pound. It ran for just two issues, published in 1914 and 1915. The First World War killed it—along with some of its key contributors. Blast’s purpose was to promote a new movement in literature and visual art, christened “Vorticism” by Pound and Lewis. Unlike its immediate predecessors and rivals, Vorticism was English, rather than French or Italian, but its dogmas emerged from Imagism in literature and Cubism plus Futurism in the visual arts. The first issue of Blast includes artwork by Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, and others, along with a manifesto for Vorticism and lists of blasts, blesses, and curses of a whole range of people, concepts, and movements. It also includes a play by Lewis and fiction by Ford Madox Hueffer and Rebecca West. The second issue includes a notice of Gaudier-Brzeska’s death in France. Despite its short life, Blast was a powerful influence in the shaping and promoting of modernism.” (Source)

Edited by Wyndham Lewis
Publisher John Lane, the Bodley Head, London
via Modernist Journals Project

Issue 1
Issue 2

I Read Where I Am: Exploring New Information Cultures (2011)

“”I Read Where I Am” contains visionary texts about the future of reading and the status of the word. We read at any time and anywhere. We read from screens, we read out on the streets, we read in the office but we spend less and less time reading a book at home on the couch. We are, or are becoming, a different type of reader. Reading is becoming a different experience. Different from what it once was.

We have access to almost all information at any given time. We carry complete libraries in our pockets. Books have become part of the multi-media world, the can be shared between platforms.

Do all these extra possibilities add value or are they a mere distraction? We read the text as much as we read the interface. With similar ease, we read newspaper articles as well as search engines, databases, and navigational structures. Texts and images become interchangeable, creating new forms of information. Differences in content and between readers require different shapes and experiences. The question remains: which shape will it take and what experience does one want?

To answer to all these (and other) questions, we have asked people from different backgrounds, to think about these issues in the light of these changes. “I Read Where I Am” is a varied collection of 82 observations, inspirations, and critical notes by journalists, designers, researchers, politicians, philosophers, and many others.” (from book launch announcement)

Concept: Graphic Design Museum/Institute of Network Cultures
Editors: Mieke Gerritzen, Geert Lovink, Minke Kampman
Editorial assistance: Morgan Currie
Translation Dutch-English: Jonathan Ellis
Design: LUST
Production: Valiz
Publisher: Valiz with Graphic Design Museum, May 2011
ISBN 978-90-78088-55-4

authors
via The Unbound Book conference

PDF (EPUB; added on 2012-7-17)
View online (HTML)

Roundhouse Journal: Reimagining the University (2011)

“The University’s future is uncertain; uncertain because we – editors, contributors, readers – intend to change its structure, practices and relationship to society. Left to the government, market, bureaucracy and hopeless academics, its future is certain: fueling the free market – a slave shoveling coal aboard a Titanic no government can steer. Our call to re-imagine the university was not an invitation to rearrange the deck furniture or write the score for the string-quartet as the ship sinks. Rather, it was a call to loot the vessel and abandon ship to whichever destinations contributors thought best or, for now, reachable.

There is a thematic narrative to the structure of this journal: Situation – where we are, Source – why we are here, Strategy – where we could go. Contributions were diverse: from personal anecdotes to poetry to practicable plans for parallel institutions and practices. Reassuringly some of these projects are already being implemented.” (from Editorial)

Editors: Evan Harris, Tom Jeffries, Dora Meade, Henry Palmer, Andrew Walker
Concept from The Really Open University
Published in May 2011
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license
76 pages

Authors
via Thomas Gokey

PDF (updated on 2017-4-20)
Scribd