Radical Publishing: The Mute Archive

[residency and workshop by Mute]

A Mute residency at Anagram Books, Berlin, with Simon Worthington. 
Collaborative bibliographies on 'experimental writing' and 'financial 
crisis' - https://mute-publishing.github.io/archive - based on the Mute 
Magazine Print Archive - http://metamute.org/archive

18-27 Nov 2016, 2-8pm - exhibition: live archiving, DIY book scanning, 
collaborative bibliographies, reading room and workshop

Opening 18 Nov, 7pm, with talk by Simon Worthington co-founder of Mute 
on the mechanics of publishing, Mute’s history and strategies for 
growing radical publishing.

Location and RSVP. Anagram Books, Lausitzer Str.35, 10999 Berlin. 
Facebook RSVP https://www.facebook.com/events/187497858364325/

Workshop, Friday 25, 2-6pm - 'Publishing from the Archive - 
Collaborative Bibliographies' RSVP 
https://www.facebook.com/events/1224601290948696/

Contact/ questions [log in to unmask] @mutemagazine #mutearchive

As of September 2016 Mute made its magazine print archive available for 
sale for the first time as a complete set of print issues. Along with 
this archive release, work on exploring and further digitising the 
archive is taking place. The residency at Anagram Books will be an 
opportunity to make a record of Mute's publishing practice, it’s — 
phases, mechanics and rationale. Two themes in the mass of the 
magazine's published works have been chosen to see how they have 
progressed over time in Mute's publishing — 'experimental writing' and 
'financial crisis'. These themes will be explored in the making of an 
online/offline catalogue and collaborative bibliography of Mute articles 
over the period of the residency.

At its inception, in 1994, Mute was influenced by the context of 
existing radical publishing of the time — zine/mailart, punk and art 
magazines — such as: pre-Internet alternative media of zine directories 
like Factsheet Five (US), UK punk magazine Vague, Mediamatic from the 
Netherlands and the Canadian FILE magazine from the art group General 
Idea. Mute has published for twenty-two years, beginning in reaction to 
the start of the Web, which gave a new impetus and media landscape for 
Mute, different than that of our predecessors.

Initially Mute's focus was on culture, politics and art, with the 
emergence of the digital revolution. As the neoliberal doctrines of 
globalisation and financialisation rolled out over this twenty-year-plus 
period Mute has challenged the developing orthodoxies of neoliberalism; 
the creative economy, precarity, surveillance & info-war and the 
reliance on fin-tech & global financial capital, to name a few.

The residency is an opportunity to look back through Mute's archive of 
over six thousand articles to reflect on how its publishing work was 
done with an eye on how Mute and others can continue the work of radical 
publishing.

The catalogue of Mute's coverage of 'experimental writing' and 
'financial crisis' articles can be found online as a Zotero 
collaborative bibliography, which is open to submission and comment. 
See: (work in progress) https://mute-publishing.github.io/archive and 
https://www.zotero.org/groups/mute


Workshop: Publishing from the Archive - Collaborative Bibliographies
====================================================================

Friday 25.11.16, 2-6pm, Anagram, RSVP 
https://www.facebook.com/events/1224601290948696/

Learn how to do publication remixing with Zotero and take part in 
discussions about extra-institutional knowledge creation. No prior 
experience needed, bring a laptop if possible, but not essential.

The workshop will look at the practical steps of combining DIY archiving 
and collaborative bibliographies for the purpose of supporting and 
connecting radical publishers.
Mute is making a collaborative bibliography on ‘experimental writing' 
and 'financial crisis' over the period of the residency and we’ll 
explore the results of this experiment in the workshop. See: 
https://mute-publishing.github.io/archive

The idea is that ‘collaborative bibliographies’ is a way to step outside 
of normal publication production architectures, such as - idea, 
publisher, publication. Instead content packages and remixes are made, 
irrespective of their publication source, either pinpointed in its topic 
or open-ended.

Brief practical instruction will be available on smartphone DIY book 
scanning, IIIF, GitHub large-file storage, GitHub, gh-pages and 
Zotero-to-Web collaborative bibliography creation. Follow-up 
instructions will be available here 
https://github.com/Mute-Publishing/archive/blob/gh-pages/getting-started-guide.md

The objective is to pass over the ‘tech-stack’ outlined above, focus 
practically on ‘collaborative bibliographies’ and making things out of 
Zotero. Through discussion in the workshop we can shape ideas about 
interesting options for what steps the project should take next and how 
to refine the 'publishing from archives' workflows that are being 
prototyped and tested out.


*Note:*

Anagram Books is a new distribution company based between London and 
Berlin. Set up in London by Adeline Mannarini in 2012.

The Mute magazine print archive is available for sale as an original, 
limited edition set of all fifty-one issues of the print versions of the 
magazine, covering twenty years of publishing from 1994 to 2014. See 
http://metamute.org/archive



-- 
#Mute - we gladly feast on those who would subdue us