Word on the street (or, my inbox) has it that Afterall co-publishers CalArts and Central St. Martin have elected to part ways (amicably); the split will be announced in the October issue. While Afterall will maintain its London H.Q., the CalArts team of Tom Lawson and Stacey Allan will launch a new publishing project, East of Borneo, in Spring 2010.
East of Borneo is a Web-only enterprise ambitiously billed as a “new publishing paradigm” in the form of a hybrid art journal-multimedia archive whose “non-hierarchical editorial approach” are meant to reflect the “sprawling, rhizomatic nature of Los Angeles and the broader, international art world.”
Bold claims here, indeed. I wonder if East of Borneo will assume the form of a Wiki (in part, at least)? I’m intrigued by the user-generated content model as a means of disrupting a publication’s identity. Relinquishing even a modicum of creative control in an open-source editorial environment constitutes a major shift in power—one that might be perceived in the hyper-competitive publishing industry as form of concession rather than intellectual largesse, but that could ultimately generate (or at the very least, gesture towards) so-called non-hierarchical creative relationships. Given CalArts’ position as an educational non-profit, Lawson et al. have an relative degree of freedom to push the boundaries of web publishing. Here’s to hoping that East of Borneo’s self-described “robust web architecture” comes to pass as something more than press copy.
