Mute magazine covers, pilot issue to issue 51
Since day one
Mute has published its articles free-to-read online and are still all available on the Metamute website
. But only since
August
2016 h
as
the entire print edition been brought together and made available
to purchase as the Mute magazine print archive
. Below is an outline and personal view on the archive.
Looking to the future
with the release of the back catalogue
a number of rounds to archive activation will take place; exhibitions offline and online, new contextual hybrid publications, a
s well as
research and collaborations. Mute has always been a combination of
editorial
inquiry and experimental publishing practice.
A
s
laid out
in one or our many
expository texts and info-graphics
from 2001, yet another roll-out of our never ending
'New Publishing Model
s
'
and
organisational
thinking is mapped out.
Mute magazine has used a number of straplines over its publishing life. Currently it stands as 'we gladly feast on those who would subdue us - sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc', adopted in 2011. Working in reverse chronology the strapline was updated from; 'Culture and Politics After the Net' in 2002, going back to 'CRITICAL/INFORMATION/SERVICES' 1997, and starting as 'DIGITALARTCRITIQUE' in 1994. A constant sub-sub-stapline has been 'Proud to be Flesh', part Donna Harraway influenced the figure of the cyborg from her essay the A Cyborg Manifesto from the book Simians, Cyborgs and Women and also as a rebuttal to Wired magazine and its cyber-utopian-post-corporate-capitalist-boosterismfrom. Its worth noting that later in 2006 Fred Turner gave a great breakdown of Wired magazine and its libertarian roots in his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, pointing to the publishing of the essay The California Ideology' by Barbrook and Cameron, which first appeared in Mute 1995.
Mute began life in 1994 at the start of the web, first appearing online and simultaneously as a broadsheet newspaper, printing on the Financial Times press, practicing open access publishing long before there was a mainstream scholarly open access movement. The Internet and its different generations of pioneers were Mute's inspiration for non-stop publishing experimentation and questioning of these technocratic infrastructures and their impacts.