Ceci n’est pas un magazine: The politics of hybrid media in Mute magazine

Abstract

What are the possibilities for a political magazine in the new media environment? This article addresses that question through a study of the London-based art and politics magazine Mute, an experimental publishing venture that currently exists as a ‘hybrid’ of Web and print platforms. The politics in question resides not only in the magazine’s content, but throughout its media form. For Mute’s coverage of the evolving political and aesthetic capacities of new media has intersected with an insistent self-critique and remodelling of its magazine form, a reflexive orientation it set out in its ‘hybrid publishing’ manifesto, ‘Ceci n’est pas un magazine’. Drawing on an interview with the magazine’s editor and directors and employing concepts of ‘media ecology’ and ‘embodied text’, the article explores Mute’s hybrid media form through its publishing platforms, participatory mechanisms, aesthetic styles, commissioning practices, temporal modes, and commercial structures.