The older paradigm for photojournalists was to simply record events, with the hope—and frequently the expectation—that people and their governments would be moved to respond to the injustices pictured, as witnessed by the impact of certain images during the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War. Given evolving media and political climates, however, including the billions of images now available online from all kinds of sources, the purpose and effectiveness of media, in particular of visual journalism, has been called into question. Bending the Frame, by author and critic Fred Ritchin, addresses the new and emerging potentials for visual media ...

The MEDIUM issue was produced with Tate Liverpool’s fall 2014 season Making Things Public, where The Serving Library‘s collection of artifacts (http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/display/serving-library) was installed with two related exhibitions: Transmitting Andy Warhol and Gretchen Bender. In addition to our usual PDF and print formats, Bulletins are also available this time as VIDEO, funneled through the form of a speaking asterisk. The asterisk’s Scottish accent is provided by Isla Leaver Yap, assembled into software by Cereproc, Ltd., and coordinated by James Langdon. (You can read more about this at https://sinkhole-audio.net/your-host/.) VIDEOS are linked from each PDF download page, for example, http://www.servinglibrary.org/read.html?id=181250&watch=1. Bulletins arrive from ...

Air Raid Precautions, Handbook No.11 1939/2014   The majority of errors in the field of aesthetics spring from the eighteenth century’s false premise in the field of ethics. – Charles Baudelaire Camouflage of Large Installations is a rare World War II handbook created by the British Government as a guide for factory owners to implement the then new theories of camouflage in order to protect industrial assets.  The handbook is composed of three sections: instructional, advertising by corporations supplying camouflage services and full-page colour swatches.  The full-page colour swatches are particularly beautiful and when viewed aesthetically are interesting forerunners to the history of monochromes, specifically Yves Klein’s ...

“Today one may complain that life has been reduced to points in a matrix of relations—cities, territories, and historical narratives prematurely refined into categories of known and unknown, real and virtual, concrete and abstract space.” At the time, we could not have imagined the mass migration into abstract space that would soon follow. Today, living through the planetary pandemic, the imperative to navigate the world and our own lives through computational tools has been radicalized to the extreme. The last months of Skyping, Zoom conferencing, and collaborative Google Docs writing make us feel we have no choice but to exhaust ...

Meson press publishes research on digital cultures and networked media. Our open access publications challenge contemporary theories and advance key debates in the humanities of today. We combine a rigorous peer-review with hybrid formats and collaborative production methods. As a cooperative, meson press is organized in a participated setup. This allows scholars to take part in a publishing venture by academics for academics and for everyone else who is curious about theory. In the hybrid environment of today’s scholarly publishing, form follows function in a new manner. meson press books take pride in the haptic elegance of print and are ...

Photomediations: A Reader offers a radically different way of understanding photography. The concept of photomediations that unites the twenty scholarly and curatorial essays collected here cuts across the traditional classification of photography as suspended between art and social practice in order to capture the dynamism of the photographic medium today. It also explores photography’s kinship with other media – and with us, humans, as media. The term ‘photomediations’ brings together the hybrid ontology of ‘photomedia’ and the fluid dynamism of ‘mediation’. The framework of photomediations adopts a process- and time-based approach to images by tracing the technological, biological, cultural, social and political ...