Proud to Be Flesh Launch
@ 6-9pm, Thursday 3rd December, 2009
Slade Research Centre (top floor)
Woburn Square London WC1H 0AB
Nearly five years in the making, Proud to be Flesh offers some of the finest articles to appear in Mute magazine organised around key contemporary themes. This expansive collection of texts charts the perilous journey from Web 1.0 to 2.0; exposes how the logic of technology intersects with that of art and music; heralds the rise of neoliberalism and condemns the human cost; amplifies the murmurs of dissent and revels in the first signs of collapse. In the midst of a global crisis, Proud to be Flesh is an invaluable sourcebook for anyone wondering how we found ourselves here.
On the fifteenth anniversary of Mute magazine, we go back in time to where it all began – the Slade School of Fine Art, where a student-initiated version of Mute was produced between 1989 and 1991 by Simon Worthington with Helen Arthur, Daniel Jackson and Steve Faulkner. Changing format with each issue, this proved an essential precursor to Mute when it was re-launched as an FT-style newspaper in 1994. For one night, the Slade's Research Centre will turn into Mute's way-back machine, reanimating editorial, manifestoes, artist projects, sound-art, websites and other Mute-flavoured ephemera from two decades of experimental publishing.
Edited by Josephine Berry Slater and Pauline van Mourik Broekman with Michael Corris, Anthony Iles, Benedict Seymour and Simon Worthington
'Mute's writers remind us that there are always real bodies, and consequences, behind the gleaming abstraction of "new" media. They have managed an almost impossible task: to remain both substantively critical and accessible to a wide readership.'
-Grant Kester
Chair of Visual Arts at University of California, San Diego; and author of Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art
Join us:
RSVP to
party@metamute.org
More details closer to the date, check
http://www.metamute.org for updates.
In the meantime, preview Proud to be Flesh at
http://www.metamute.org/ptbf
