Edited by Josephine Berry Slater, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Michael Corris, Benedict Seymour, Anthony Iles and Simon Worthington

Chapter Titles:
1. Direct Democracy and its Demons:Web 1.0 to Web 2.0
2. Net Art to Conceptual Art and Back
3. I, Cyborg: Reinventing the Human
4. Of Commoners and Criminals
5. Organising Horizontally
6. Assuming the Position: Art and/Against Business
7. Under the Net – the City and the Camp
8. Reality Check: Class and Immaterial Labour
9. The Open Work

In late 1994, back in the days of dial-up modems and Netscape Navigator 1.0, Mute magazine announced its timely arrival. Dedicated to an analysis of culture and politics 'after the net', Mute has consistently challenged the grandiose claims of the communications revolution, debunking its utopian rhetoric and offering more critical perspectives.

Fifteen years on, Mute Publishing and Autonomedia are delighted to announce the publication of Proud to be Flesh: A Mute Magazine Anthology of Cultural Politics after the Net. The anthology selects representative articles from the magazine's hugely diverse content to reprise some of its recurring themes. This expansive collection charts the perilous journey from Web 1.0 to 2.0, contesting the democratisation this transition implied and laying bare our incorporeal expectations; it exposes the ways in which the logic of technology intersects with that of art and music and, in turn and inevitably, with the logic of business; it heralds the rise of neoliberalism and condemns the human cost; it amplifies the murmurs of dissent and revels in the first signs of collapse. The result situates key – but often little understood – concepts associated with the digital (e.g. the knowledge commons, immaterial labour and open source) in their proper context, producing an impressive overview of contemporary, networked culture in its broadest sense.

Proud to be Flesh features a bold mix of essays, interviews, satirical fiction, email polemics and reportage from an array of international contributors working in art, philosophy, technology, politics, cultural theory, radical geography and more. Accessible introductions, a chronological arrangement of chapters and three full-colour image sections grant special insight into the evolution of key themes over time.
In its refusal of specialisation, Proud to be Flesh is unique in its field. It offers a compelling view onto the messy but exciting moment that was the turn of the millennium as well as being an incomparable sourcebook for those seeking to push forward analysis of the global crisis that has since ensued.

Contributors and interviewees: Saul Albert / Irina Aristarkhova / The Artist Placement Group (APG) / Brian Ashton / Richard Barbrook / John Barker / Will Barnes / Caroline Bassett / Anustup Basu / Amita Baviskar / Franco Berardi (Bifo) / Josephine Berry Slater / Josephine Bosma / Marc Bousquet / James Boyle / The Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT) / Ted Byfield / Andy Cameron / Vuk Cosic / Gregor Claude / Eileen Condon / Michael Corris / Florian Cramer / Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) / Mark Crinson / Chris Darke / Anthony Davies / Mark Dery / Anna Dezeuze / Ricardo Dominguez / Economic Observatory at the University of Openess / María Fernández / Simon Ford / Matthew Fuller / Coco Fusco / David Garcia / Andrew Goffey / Paul Helliwell / Brian Holmes / Hydrarchist / Matthew Hyland / Anthony Iles / Kevin Kelly / Jamie King / Dmytri Kleiner / Kolinko / Arthur Kroker / Hari Kunzru / Peter Linebaugh / The London Particular / Geert Lovink / Suhail Malik / Melancholic Troglodytes / Flint Michigan / Jeff Mills / Angela Mitropoulos / Ewan Morrison / Neil Mulholland / David Panos / Luciana Parisi / Celia Pearce / Richard Pithouse / Simon Pope / Eddie Prévost / Louis Rossetto / Andreas Rüthi / Tim Savage / Pit Schultz / Benedict Seymour / Howard Slater / Keston Sutherland / Horacio Tarcus / Tiziana Terranova / Palle Torsson / Ben Watson / Stephen Willats / Steve Wright / Brian Wyrick / Soenke Zehle

Illustrations and artwork by: 50% Gray / Alexa Wright / Alexei Shulgin / Allen Tannenbaum / Amita Baviskar / Ammirati Puris Lintas / Andre Dipper / Angelo Rindone / Anja Kirschner / Ansuman Biswas / Benedict Seymour / Bureau of Inverse Tech / Carey Young / Catherine Story / Chiara Birattari Zoe Romano / Chris Wilcha / Coco Fusco / CORP Death Squad / Damien Jaques / Daniel Jackson / David Shrigley / Esiri Erherienne Esi / Etoy / FAT / Francis Upritchard / Gustav Metzger / Indymedia South Africa / Jakob Jakobsen / Jamie Robinson / John Latham / Jordan Crandall / Laura Bangert / Louise Oldfield / Lubna Hammond / Max Mlinaric / Merlin Carpenter / Nils Norman / Olia Lialina / Pauline van Mourik Broekman / Per Wizen / Pil and Galia Kollectiv / Pirat Byran / Quim Gil / Ricardo Dominguez / Simon Worthington / Sophie Rickett / Stephen Duncom / Stephen Willats / The Yes Men / Theo Michael / Vito Acconci / Vuk Cosic / William Shoebridge Richard Dawson / Zeigam Azizoff

"There are precious few arenas left in which contemporary art and culture are examined from a critical perspective that is willing to challenge both the clichés of academic art theory and the techno-topian disengagement of contemporary new media discourse. Proud to be Flesh provides an invaluable guide to the past fifteen years in the evolution of art; a period during which the boundaries between art, culture and technology have been eroded and re-consolidated in ways that are both troubling and promising. 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 H. Kester, Chair of Visual Arts at University of California, San Diego, and author of Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (2004)

John Farris’s "The Ass’s Tale" is a Rabelaisian story of a dog’s search for his identity. Told in the existential down-and-dirty vein of Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed and Chester Himes, this book (in manuscript form) circulated through New York City’s Lower East Side for years. John is a longtime denizen of the neighborhood; he still lives above the Bullet Space Gallery at 292 East Third Street.

“Hot dog! Dirty dog! If you ever wanted to know about invisible sex, check this out!” — Steve Cannon, author of "Groove, Bang, and Jive Around" and Director of Gathering of Tribes Gallery

“There is a hidden blessing in knowing John Farris… deeply hidden.” — David Hammons, Installation Artist

FAST FEMINISM is a new-old feminism grounded in politics, performance and philosophy. It is in close proximity to postfeminisms of the poststructuralist variety—third-wave feminism, queer feminism, cyberfeminism and feminism 3.0. While FAST FEMINISM operates in proximity to other feminisms, its ‘natural’ home is in queer theory. Queer gets its meaning and its politics from its oppositional relationship to hegemonic norms. To queer something is to disrupt it, to put it under scrutiny and to attempt to change it. FAST FEMINISM takes the hypermasculine speed of Paul Virilio and makes it feminist. FAST FEMINISM is the bastard offspring and the happy accident of speed theory.

FAST FEMINISM is a philo-porno-political practice—a pragmatic philosophy and politics—enacted by the pornographic sage who moves through the text as “FF.” Fast feminist event sites include female ejaculation, drag-kinging, an infamous child-pornography trial, Bataillean fucking at a women’s bathhouse, posthuman-humachine seduction and sex organ tissue-engineering.

FF is a post-gender provocateur, not so much a gender terrorist as a gender risk-taker going the distance with her body. FF’s philosophy is lived. Actions count. One resists with one’s body.

Critical Strategies in Art and Media
Perspectives on New Cultural Practices
Konrad Becker and Jim Fleming, eds.
With Ted Byfield, Steve Kurtz, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Claire Pentecost, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and others

* Beyond the obsolete models of artist or author as genius and their fetish objects, what collective and collaborative practices are inventing new terrains and flows?

* As information and communication technologies saturate our world, how is art giving way to new forms of cultural symbolic manipulation?

* Can we identify new models to replace the auteur and the artwork? If so, where do they come from and what might that say about the future of critical practices?

* What new kinds of “virtual” spaces are opening up for cultural practice in electronic media? As “old media” begin to collapse under the pressures of the virtual, what new media can we find?

* How are didactic illustration and channeled dissidence giving way to new forms of surprise and intensity?

* What strategies elude the creative industries’ seemingly infinite appetite for things radical? Are there any strategies that can elude being reduced to styles in the service of sales, or are critical practices doomed to play cat and mouse with the forces of consumerism?

In the fall of 2009, these radical critics and media theorists gathered to discuss these questions, and more.

Additional interventions from Franco (Bifo) Berardi, Marco Deseriis, Rene Gabri, Brian Holmes, McKenzie Wark, Felix Stalder, and others.

How can we follow the crucial development of recent design practices during the last decades of the 20th century, and their connections with artistic practices and critical discourses? Whether under socialism or capitalism, design is always in close and dynamic connection with the economic and productive bases of society and material culture. Although dealing with broader theoretical approaches, this anthology focuses on the former Yugoslavia, which tried to define the role of design in a (non)market socialist economy. Developing progressive, yet critical and contradictory positions, design was simultaneously presented as a symbol of post-war reconstruction of a country under the wing of industrialisation and the liberation of man from material privation. But as decades went by, it increasingly played a main role in building a socialist market society. Includes Jean Baudrillard, Igor Chubarov, Jerko Denegri, Branislav Dimitrijević, Hal Foster, Dejan Kršić, Nenad Malešević, Metahaven, Borislav Mikulić, Barbara Predan, Jacques Rancière, Feda Vukić, WHW collective. Co-published with Kuda.org. All texts in both English and Serbian. Hardbound, dustjacketed, marker ribbon.

Autonomedia's Jubilee Saints Calendar for 2010! Our 18th annual wall calendar, with artwork by James Koehnline, and text by the Autonomedia Collective.

Hundreds of radical cultural and political heroes are celebrated here, along with the animating ideas that continue to guide this project — a reprieve from the 500-year-long sentence to life-at-hard-labor that the European colonization of the "New World" and the ensuing devastations of the rest of the world has represented. It is increasingly clear — at the dawn of this new millennium — that the Planetary Work Machine will not rule forever!

Celebrate with this calendar on which every day is a holiday!

32 pages, 12 x 16 inches, saddlestitched

What was once the factory is now the university. We started off with this apparently straightforward affirmation, not in order to assume it but to question it; to open it, radically rethinking it, towards theoretical and political research. The Edu-factory project took off from here….Edu-factory is, above all, a partisan standpoint on the crisis of the university…. The state university is in ruins, the mass university is in ruins, and the university as a privileged place of national culture — just like the concept of national culture itself — is in ruins.

We’re not suffering from nostalgia. Quite the contrary, we vindicate the university’s destruction. In fact, the crisis of the university was determined by social movements in the first place. This is what makes us not merely immune to tears for the past but enemies of such a nostalgic disposition.

University corporatization and the rise of a global university…are not unilateral impositions or developments completely contained by capitalist rationality. Rather they are the result — absolutely temporary and thus reversible — of a formidable cycle of struggles. The problem is to transform the field of tension delineated by the processes analyzed in this book into specific forms of resistance and the organization of escape routes.

This is Edu-factory’s starting point and objective, its style and its method.