playback, playforward

is a newspaper publication concerned with projects and practices that work in arts, activist, and educational contexts. It brings together texts, methodology outlines and interviews, aiming to offer a modest but detailed topology of people and strategies that work upon the dialogic, questions around social and political change, open source and collaboration. Playback, Playforward is framed by the future archive project and in part funded by corresponding grants.

Edited by Manuela Zechner
Unna/ Graz, September 2007

With contributions by: Anja Kanngieser, Rozalinda Borcila, Valie Djordjevic, Grim Svingen, Neil Cummings, BLW, Critical Practice, Everybodys, Collide/Collabo, Paz Rojo, and Manuela Zechner.

All open content, available for download, printing and distribution at http://www.archive.org/details/PlaybackPlayforward_pdf
To request a print newspaper copy, get in touch with Manuela

 

Editorial:

IT WAS TODAY

One day, some of the futures of today will have been presents (and then pasts). Others won’t. This is hardly news. But what kind of apparatus is “future”? It carries many things; promise, determination, hope, imagination, anticipation – or a present. Many a newspaper
holds many of those together. This here looks a bit like a newspaper. An analogue device that can be useful to play forward, play back or pause some ideas.

This is a publication that aims to draw together some questions, methods and projects addressing organizational, learning and semantic practices as of 2007. In an attempt to remember certain of our ambitions of the time, this newspaper aims to draw out some of their problems, possibilities and consequences- it has been edited by Manuela Zechner and refers to persons and undertakings that can be said to connect in the first place with the contexts of art, open source, activism and education.

In this extensive playing field, there are many projects that have struck me as interesting and which I hope to open out and interrogate in different formats here: Self-organized and open collaborative assemblies, temporary self- inaugurated gatherings in educational, arts and activist contexts.
At the same time, this publication will have offered an opportunity to look closer at individual practices (as of 2007) and the strategies, wishes and ideas invested in them, their states of discourse and
visibility- this happens via texts, transcripts of interview from the future archive project (which holds as a frame for this newspaper), as well as via presentations of methodologies.

My intention here, as with the future archive, is to draw together and open out a topology of divergent practices in relation to their political stakes, the ideas for change and movement that people invest in them, through looking at the language, organizational forms and contexts they operate with(in).
Apologies if much of this seems outdated, admittedly most of the content of this newspaper is from 2007. This was however a conscious selection made by the editor- to suggest possibilities for back projection as well as for leaning forward perhaps. However while giving
points of approach, this publication is not made to tell or determine what the old days were or became, but perhaps to look at some ways of using this “future” apparatus. The views expressed here are impartial and stem from experience as much as research and discussion: any resemblance between places or characters dead or living could be fictional.

MZ