"I expected a lot from this book and it delivers both as a visual record of some great designs and as a close-up history of a singular project observed by the people who were there at the time. Highly recommended."

MagCulture.com, July 2008

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Mute magazine was founded in London in 1994 to investigate issues relating to new media and art. It quickly became one of the UK’s cult art magazines. This new publication looks at its entire graphic output.

 

In the early 1990s, long before the internet became an integral part of life, a handful of pioneering magazines took it upon themselves to imagine the web into existence. Using fiction, interviews, speculative theory and experimental graphic design, these titles helped create a lexicon and iconography every bit as powerful as the architecture of the World Wide Web. London-based Mute occupied a central position here, wielding an influence vastly disproportionate to its size.

 

The product of a period of intense creative ferment, Mute engaged boldly with allcomers. The magazine offered a platform to authors Bruce Sterling, Arthur Kroker, Mark Dery, Geert Lovink, Hari Kunzru, James Flint and Lev Manovich, just as it did to artists Keith Tyson, VNS Matrix and the Bureau of Inverse Technology. As new technologies forced a collapse of disciplinary boundaries and the intermingling of communities, Mute became part of a dynamic London scene, featuring many of the artists, writers and photographers who came to epitomise London’s status as a creative hotbed.

 

The resulting collection of magazines defines an era, telling the fascinating tale of one publisher's relationship with the ‘digital revolution’ – the nineties’ very own Big Bang. This book presents a full overview of the magazine over a decade, showing its entire output – logos, covers and spreads. Using generous illustrations and in-depth captions, it details recurrent graphic themes and places Mute's evolution in perspective.. 

 

Authors

Adrian Shaughnessy is a graphic designer, writer and editor. He runs ShaughnessyWorks, a consultancy combining design and editorial direction, and is editor of Varoom. Shaughnessy has written and art-directed numerous books on design, including How to be a graphic designer, without losing your soul. 

 

Pauline van Mourik Broekman is the co-founder of Mute magazine and has written extensively on media arts. 

 

Simon Worthington is also a co-founder of Mute magazine. He studied art at the Slade School of Art, London and CalArts, Valencia, California. Simon currently heads OpenMute’s technology design team, leading a variety of web projects. 

 

Damian Jaques was the designer of Mute from 1998 to 2006.