Andreas Broeckmann

The story of Mag.net is the story of a networking effort by several European print magazines dealing with electronic culture. While this effort produced only mixed results and had to struggle hard for its successes, it was throughout characterised by a spirit of cooperation that had many positive effects and fostered lasting friendships among the participants.

This short history of Mag.net, as well as the book which it introduces, should however not be read as an obituary, but as a monument to the desire for sharing and working together. The magazines involved represent some of the most important media for the critical reflexion of culture and art in an age strongly influenced by digital technologies and their social repercussions. Their persistence - some of them are still going strong after over twelve years - testifies to the importance of print in a time that purports to be 'digital' while remaining intensely analogue in many aspects, for better and for worse.

Much can be learned from the heroic failure to turn Mag.net into a lively and powerful networking tool. Probably most of all, Mag.net did not succeed because of the precarious nature of independent publishing which often hinges on only a few people who keep their operations going on a shoe-string.The critical mass that it takes to make international cooperations viable - whether in the syndication of content, or joint maintenance of a website, or the coordination and advertising of joint subscriptions - could not really be reached, and it is one of the paradoxes of networking that those who most need the support from others, often invest the most work in order to strengthen the network.

Since I was involved in some of the activities that led to the formation of Mag.net, I have been asked to offer a brief account of the chonology. My part of the story starts in the autumn of 1998 when Matthew Fuller posted a couple of texts to the Nettime mailing list which had been written by the British theorist and culture critic Howard Slater for his own micro-publishing project 'Break/Flow'. Under titles like 'Post-Media Operators: "Sovereign & Vague"' and 'An Imaginary Address', these texts deal with a new type of media practice that was made possible by a technological development through which many people get access to media that offer an alternative to the regime of mass media. Slater defined these as 'post-media' practices or operations, a term that he borrows from Félix Guattari. Post-media practices are characterised by small, diverse, distributed networks of operators who make use of the new, digital means of production and distribution. Post-media practice grows out of the networked activities of passionate individuals and groups working in local and translocal contexts and using such media as magazines, record labels, websites, club events, mailing lists, etc. Differences in these networks are not eliminated but relished. Post-media practice is characterised by a critical attitude towards the media in use, acting in lateral rather than vertical configurations, and an acceptance of the processuality and continuous transformation of context and practice.

In 2000 I was invited to co-host, together with Hans Ulrich Reck from the Academy of Art and Media in Cologne, a workshop in the context of the Interface 5 - 'The Politics of the Machine' in Hamburg/Germany. Interface 5 included a series of six workshops which took place throughout September and October, dealing with different political and social aspects of (media) technologies.The title of our workshop, 'Minor Media Operations' (15 and 16 September 2000) took Slater's definition of the term 'post-media' and coupled it with the notion of becoming-minor as developed by Guattari and Deleuze: 'Whenever a marginality, a minority, becomes active, takes the word power (puissance de verbe), transforms itself into becoming, and not merely submitting to it, identical with its condition, but in active, processual becoming, it engenders a singular trajectory that is necessarily deterritorialising because, precisely, it's a minority that begins to subvert a majority, a consensus, a great aggregate.As long as a minority, a cloud, is on a border, a limit, an exteriority of a great whole, it's something that is, by definition, marginalised. But here, this point, this object, begins to proliferate [...], begins to amplify, to recompose something that is no longer a totality, but that makes a former totality shift, detotalises, deterritorialises an entity.' (Guattari 1985/1995)

Becoming minor is a strategy of turning major technologies into minor machines, of appropriating media, tools and discourses for the proliferation and articulation of heterogeneity. Through an afternoon of public presentations and a whole day of convivial 'dérive' through Hamburg's harbour area, the workshop sought to initiate a strategic and analytical debate about the economy, politics and culture of the current, 'postmedia' situation, and to generate ideas for using the potentials of agency that exist in this field in more productive ways. The participants were Florian Cramer (Berlin), Geert-Jan Hobijn (Staalplaat, Berlin/Amsterdam), Margarete Jahrmann (Zurich/Wien), Christian Hübler (Knowbotic Research, Zurich/Cologne), Pauline Mourik Broekman (Mute, London), Gordan Paunovic (B92, Belgrade), Siebe Thissen (Rotterdam). They represented practices ranging from sound and software culture, art and network activism - and slacking - as well as different forms of independent online and offline publishing.

From this experience came the decision to organise a small conference in the context of the transmediale.02 international media art festival in Berlin (10 February 2002). Under the title 'Paper Hype' we organised a meeting of editors of a number of different European magazines dealing with digital culture.The participants included Jan Rikus Hillmann (De:Bug, Berlin; who in fact did not show up for the panel because he had an accident that morning), Georg Schöllhammer (Springerin,Vienna), Jean-Yves Leloup (Crash, Paris),Alessandro Ludovico (Neural, Bari), and Pauline van Mourik Broekman (Mute, London).The session was moderated by David Hudson (Berlin) and discussed the conditions for publishing in the Internet era. 'What does it mean to produce a magazine, a paper publication about digital culture in an era of apparently total digitalisation? Mute calls it Proud to be Flesh!'

The informal meeting of the participants before the panel quickly made it clear that there were many practical concerns that the represented magazines shared but that would not be interesting for a general audience.The idea to organise a workshop meeting to deal with such specialised questions could be realised because there was a standing invitation from the Barcelona-based curator Nuria Enguita to host such an event in Sevilla/Spain at the Universidad Internacional de Andalucia (UNIA) as part of the programme Arte y Pensamiento.The original proposal for the workshop 'Post-Media Publishing. Print-publishing and networks for electronic culture' (22-25 May 2002) had already been made in May 2001, prior to the 'Paper Hype' panel, but the real planning only took off after the Berlin meeting, early in 2002.

The Sevilla workshop was the birthplace proper of the Mag.net project. It was from the start geared not only at public presentation for the students of UNIA, but also as a working meeting for the participating editors. It sought to facilitate a discussion and co-operation process among the different journals around practical questions such as design, digital publishing and content management, financing and distribution, the syndication of content and the relationship between online and offline publishing.The preparatory research brought up many new contacts to small publishing initiatives all over Europe. Eventually, the list of participants included: Josephine Berry (who in the end could not come because of pregnancy) and Simon Worthington (both Mute, London), Mercedes Bunz and Sascha Kösch (both De:Bug, Berlin), Fran Ilich (Undo, Mexico), Alessandro Ludovico (Neural, Bari), Georg Schöllhammer (Springerin, Vienna), Ieva Auzina (RIXC and Acoustic Space, Riga), Slavo Krekovic (3/4 Revue, Bratislava), Kristian Lukic (KUDA Media Center, Novi Sad),Vladan Sir (Umelec, Prague), Joanne Richardson (Subsol and Balkon, Romania), Carme Ortiz and Mar Villaespesa (Think Publishing, Spain), Miren Eraso (Zehar, San Sebastian, and Think Publishing), Claudia Castelo (Flirt, Lisbon), Malcolm Dickson (Streetlevel and Variant, Glasgow/UK), Pedro Jimenez (Cafeína, Sevilla), Julian Ruesga (Parabólica, Sevilla). Among the represented projects, it soon became clear that 'collaboration is better than competition'.The first mailing list was set up while the Sevilla meeting was still in progress (repurposing a.medium on the ljudmila.org server), and a few weeks later the name 'MAG.NET "electronic culture publishers"' was agreed upon. Half a year later, a website was set up on metamute.org and upgraded to a Twiki-based site on magnet-ecp.org in August 2003.

Seville, 2002, discussing the magazine network (Mag.net), pictures by Sasha Kösch and Mercedes Bunz

What followed was a series of real-life meetings and times of intense e-mail contact about different joint projects, interrupted by at times lengthy periods during which the communication within the network all but ceased. The discussions about possibilities for joint funding applications with different international foundations were engaged, yet turned out to fruitless, as was an application to present Mag.net at the ISEA 2004 in Helsinki. Renewed efforts to build a dynamic and representative website got stalled due to distributed responsibilities and a lack of time resources.

A small meeting took place at transmediale.03 (February 2003). For the public presentation of the Mag.net network hosted by the Ars Electronica Festival (2 September 2003), a Mag.net flyer was printed and the logo presented for the first time. A short text about Mag.net was printed in the festival catalogue.The following year was to see the ten-year anniversaries of Springerin, Mute, and Neural, as well as the five-year anniversary of 3/4 Revue. The reception organised on this occasion during transmediale.04 (31 January 2004) was a slightly scattered event and demonstrated the instability of Mag.net initiative. On the occasion of the opening of Manifesta 5 (June 2004), a meeting was organised in San Sebastian that also included a public presentation and an encounter with the organisers of the related 'Tester' project.The ensuing efforts to set up a structure for offering people the opportunity to subscribe to several Mag.net publication through a single payment took up a lot of energy and had only very limited success, resulting in less than a hand-full of subscriptions.

On the occasion of the presentation at the Ars in September 2003, the network members produced a succinct description of their shared effort: 'Mag.net (or Magazine Network of Electronic Cultural Publishers) is a network that links up independent print periodicals and e-zines covering the field of electronic culture. Its mission is to set up infrastructuresand networks connecting publications being published in traditional fashion and Internet magazines.The objective is to define electronic culture and to elaborate on its current state.' Followed by the credo, coined by Alessandro Ludovico, of the Mag.net hardcopy publishers: 'In the era of "unstable media", paper is the most "stable" medium in the complex and fast-changing mediascape.'

In December 2005 it was time to face the facts. Alessandro Ludovico expressed what everybody was thinking: 'Let's face it: magnet is dead.' He also proposed to produce the current publication as a testament and credit to the collective effort, and to present it at an event in the middle of April in Glasgow. (If you read this text on paper, you will know that this effort of the Mag.net network has succeeded. Feel it!)

No doubt, the cooperation between the Mag.net members will continue. The most active current members include 'Neural' from Italy, 'Springerin' from Austria, '3/4 Revue' from Slovakia, 'Mute' from Britain/England, 'Zehar' from Spain/Basque Country.They share content, offer each other advice on topics and authors, and will of course make plans for future activities. The organisers of Documenta 12 in Kassel are working on a major networking project that will tie up to 70 international art magazines from around the world into a joint discourse and publication effort. The Mag.net experience is feeding into this project and its member magazines will make sure that electronic culture plays a significant role in this global art debate.The story continues.We'll see you in print!