Proud to be Flesh: A Mute Magazine Anthology of Cultural Politics after the Net (2009)

“In late 1994, back in the days of dial-up modems and Netscape Navigator 1.0, Mute magazine announced its timely arrival. Dedicated to an analysis of culture and politics ‘after the net’, Mute has consistently challenged the grandiose claims of the communications revolution, debunking its utopian rhetoric and offering more critical perspectives.

Fifteen years on, this anthology selects representative articles from the magazine’s hugely diverse content to reprise some of its recurring themes. This expansive collection charts the perilous journey from Web 1.0 to 2.0, contesting the democratisation this transition implied and laying bare our incorporeal expectations; it exposes the ways in which the logic of technology intersects with that of art and music and, in turn and inevitably, with the logic of business; it heralds the rise of neoliberalism and condemns the human cost; it amplifies the murmurs of dissent and revels in the first signs of collapse. The result situates key – but often little understood – concepts associated with the digital (e.g. the knowledge commons, immaterial labour and open source) in their proper context, producing an impressive overview of contemporary, networked culture in its broadest sense.

Proud to be Flesh features a mix of essays, interviews, satirical fiction, email polemics and reportage from an array of international contributors working in art, philosophy, technology, politics, cultural theory, radical geography and more.”

Edited by Josephine Berry Slater and Pauline van Mourik Broekman, with Michael Corris, Anthony Iles, Benedict Seymour and Simon Worthington
Publisher Mute Publishing, London, with Autonomedia, New York, 2009
ISBN 9781906496289, 1906496285
572+48 pages

Reviews: Nicholas Thoburn (New Formations), Charlotte Frost (Rhizome), Julian Stallabrass (New Left Review).

Magazine
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (15 MB, updated on 2019-6-12)

monochrom, 11-23 (2000-2004) [German]

The mouthpiece of an international art-technology-philosophy collective founded in 1993, with its headquarters at Museumsquartier in Vienna.

“Das Fanzine monochrom ist ein im Telefonbuch-Format erscheinendes Zeitschriftenobjekt, das von der gleichnamigen Künstler_innengruppe aus Wien, Graz und Bamberg/Deutschland herausgegeben wird. monochrom ist ein Potpourri der digitalen und analogen Subversion, ein unnostalgisches Amalgam aus 125 Jahren abendländischer Gegenkultur, die Godzilla-Variante der gutbügerlichen Coffeetablebuch-Idee.”

Editor-in-chief: Johannes Grenzfurthner
Publisher monochrom, Vienna
ISSN 1024-6738

Publisher, (2)
monochrom on Wikipedia

PDF (No. 11-14: Ontologisches Sanierungsportfolio, 2000, 260 pp)
PDF (No. 15-23: Zweite Ordnung muss sein, 2004, 436 pp)

Previous issues

Tomislav Medak, Petar Milat (eds.): Idea of Radical Media (2013) [English/Croatian]

This is the “reader from the Idea of Radical Media conference, held June 7-8, 2013 in Zagreb, Croatia, and organized by the Multimedia Institute. The conference took place in the context of the exhibition Prospects of Arkzin and the media action Installing the Public, both revisiting the Arkzin phenomenon two decades later. Arkzin was a collective and a publication that emerged out of the Anti-War Campaign in the early 1990s and gave a theoretical and polemical voice to anti-nationalist positions. The publishing and activist practices of Arkzin anticipated and reflected the practices of tactical media that were crystallizing from a particular confluence of a political moment marked by the post-socialist transition, post-Yugoslav conflicts and alter-globalist contestations, and a technological moment of the rise of early Net.

However, the conference and the reader have a broader aim. On the one hand, we wanted to look back at the practical articulations and discursive re-articulations of radical media practices in arts, mass communication and political work and over the last two decades. On the other, to reasses the notion of radical media from a broader historical perspective and the critical perspective of the current political moment.” (from the Introduction)

With essays by Clemens Apprich, Eric Kluitenberg, Jodi Dean, Matteo Pasquinelli, Branka Ćurčić, Alessandro Ludovico, Anthony Iles, Joanne Richardson, Vera Tollmann, Katarina Peović Vuković and Ana Peraica.

Idea of Radical Media / Ideja radikalnih medija
Publisher Multimedia Institute, Zagreb, 2013
ISBN 9789537372101
256 pages

PDF
See also Prospects of Arkzin catalogue (48 pp, 2013)