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, its — 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
The 'Publishing from the Archive' workshop will look at the practical steps of combining DIY archiving and collaborative bibliographies for the purpose of supporting and connecting radical publishers. In the workshop we will look at the work done by the Mute collective over the period of the residency. In discussion with participants look at how to refine the 'publishing from archives' workflows that are being trialed. Brief practical instruction will be available on smartphone DIY book scanning, GitHub file storage and Zotero-to-Web collaborative bibliography creation. Follow-up instructions will be available here https://github.com/Mute-Publishing/archive
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
 
Workshop, Friday 25, 2-6pm - 'Publishing from the Archive' RSVP

Questions @mutemagazine or simon@metamute.org