e-flux publications

In 2009, e-flux began distributing the printed version of the journal as a PDF-to-print edition designed by Adam Florin that can be found at bookshops and art spaces around the world through a network of distributors.[1][2] The first issue of e-flux journal was published in December, 2008. Shortly after The Building, Berlin, presented the e-flux journal as exhibition as part of their public programming, producing issues 0, 1, 2 and 3 in the space over the course of the year. As the editorial collective explained, "(t)his first presentation of e-flux journal in Berlin (was) a prototype for what a small art space such as The Building can do with this system."

In 2014 Mark Sladen wrote "e-flux journal focuses primarily on long-form texts, with little effort to style the reading environment or to employ complex audiovisual elements. It could be argued that the journal's simplicity is its strength, as the publication's lack of formatting—and lack of large audiovisual files—means that it flows with greater ease across a multitude of devices. But it does this by making text its unchallenged king."[3]

Since 2010, e-flux journal has regularly produced thematic issues, often guest edited by writers and thinkers such as Irit Rogoff, Boris Groys, Anselm Franke and Carlos Motta.[4][5][6][7] These issues are often accompanied by symposia and events at e-flux on the same theme.[8]

In 2009 e-flux journal began publishing a series of paperback readers under a joint imprint with Sternberg Press.[9][10]

e-flux journal reader 2009: The selection of essays included in the e-flux journal reader 2009 sought to highlight ongoing topical threads that ran throughout the first eight issues of e-flux journal in order to give a sense of the varied concerns and urgencies engaged at the time of its publication. The compilation is edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, with essays by Boris Groys, Hito Steyerl, Liam Gillick, Monika Szewczyk, Luis Camnitzer, Raqs Media Collective, Sean Snyder, Tom Holert, Irit Rogoff, Dieter Roelstraete, Marion von Osten, Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza, Michael Baers.[11]

What Is Contemporary Art? (June 2010): This book began as a two-part issue of e-flux journal devoted to the question: What is contemporary art? Critics, curators, artists and writers were invited to contribute include: Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Boris Groys, Raqs Media Collective, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hu Fang, Jörg Heiser, Martha Rosler, Zdenka Badovinac, Carol Yinghua Lu, Dieter Roelstraete, and Jan Verwoert.[12]

Boris Groys' Going Public is the third in this ongoing series of books published by e-flux journal with Sternberg Press.[13] The text questions the role of art in a world where all things are understood to be sources of aesthetic experience.[13] Considering the position of the producer, rather than spectator, Groys upends stale aesthetic and sociological analysis of art instead posing the epistemological question of why art exists in the first place.[14]

Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art (June 2011): This publication is a collection of texts from e-flux's online and print journal edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle with contributions from Antke Engel, Hito Steyerl, Liam Gillick, Tom Holert, Irit Rogoff, Marion von Osten, Diedrich Diederichsen, Lars Bang Larsen, Keti Chukhrov, Franco Berardi, Precarious Workers Brigade.[15] As Eva Kenny explains in her review " Something that comes across strongly from these texts is the notion that capitalism, whiles very enthusiastic and hardworking, is perhaps not particularly imaginative. Can it think up its own forms of subjugation or does it rely heavily on someone else to do this? A theoretical but nonetheless dramatic standoff is one of the outcomes of this shortcoming: while capitalism in its current incarnation cuts arts funding and starves artists out of their old neighborhoods, watching them fight like gladiators the better to learn even more strategic and cut-throat ways of surviving hard times, art is at the same time pulling the wool over capitalism's eyes with its ridiculous and inexplicable approaches to absolutely everything."[16]

Moscow Symposium: Conceptualism Revisited (May 2012): This publication is based on the conference 'Revisiting Conceptual Art: the Russian Case in an International Context,' which took place at the Central House of Writers in Moscow in April 2011, organized by Boris Groys and the Stella Art Foundation in advance of the 54th Venice Biennale to address the interest of Conceptual Art of the 1960s and 70s in the international and Russian art scenes.[17][18] Beyond the view that multiple, globally dispersed conceptual art practices provide a heterogeneity of cultural references, Andrei Monastyrski and Collective Actions propose much more: other dimensions altogether, other spatiotemporal politics, other timescales, other understandings of matter, other forms of life–not only as works, but as a basic condition for being able to perceive artworks in the first place.[18]

Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen (September 2012): In Hito Steyerl's writing we begin to see how, even if the hopes and desires for coherent collective political projects have been displaced onto images and screens, it is precisely here that we must look frankly at the technology that seals them in.[19]The Wretched of the Screen collects a number of Steyerl's landmark essays from recent years in which she has steadily developed her very own politics of the image.[19] According to critic Tony Wood Steyerl's writing explains how "the link between political and cultural representation, never straightforward, has become profoundly unstable in the image-saturated neoliberal era; we live in 'an age of unrepresentable people and an overpopulation of images', in which 'a growing number of unmoored and floating images corresponds to a growing number of disenfranchised, invisible or even disappeared or missing people'."[20]

Martha Rosler, Culture Class (September 2013): This collection of essays written between 2010 and 2012 presents Martha Rosler's most extensive update to her consideration of the role of artists in world culture and in urban gentrification since her landmark 1989 project If You Lived Here ... [21][22] "Writing in direct response to Richard Florida's book The Rise of the Creative Class," Abbe Schriber states that "Rosler problematizes Florida's definition of creative workers as driving urban economic success, exploring the notion that artistic labor "cannot be conflated with neoliberal urban political regimes," as sociologist Ann Markusen has put it."[23]

Jalal Toufic: Forthcoming (2014): The second edition of Forthcoming, a book by the Beirut-based writer Jalal Toufic, published by Atelos press in Berkeley, California in 2001.[24][25]

The Internet Does Not Exist: Launched at Friends with Books: Art Book Fair Berlin the texts included in this reader address the paradox of our immaterial social fabric in the post-Internet age.[26] This reader is edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle includes texts from: Hito Steyerl, Keller Easterling, Bruno Latour, Ursula K. Heise, Gean Moreno, Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Diedrich Diederichsen, Rasmus Fleischer, Jon Rich, Geert Lovink, Brian Kuan Wood and Joana Hadjithomas / Khalil Joreige, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Julian Assange, Metahaven, Benjamin Bratton, and Patricia MacCormack.[27]

e-flux journal began participating in the NY Art Book Fair(NYABF) in 2009. Since then the journal has exhibited and organized events in the 2010, 2011 and 2014 fairs.

The e-flux journal reader series logo was designed by Liam Gillick in 2009 for the first publication of the series, e-flux journal reader 2009. Gillick says that the three parallel lines that constitute the logo refer to his 2009 text Maybe it would be better if we worked in groups of three? Part 1 of 2: The Discursive, The text addresses how discursive practices "play[s] with social models and present[s] speculative constructs both within and beyond traditional gallery spaces." Gilick goes on to assert that "(t)he site of production today often exists within the text alone."[35]

Issues 0, 1, 2 and 3 of the e-flux journal were designed by Francesca Grassi and Jeff Ramsey after which the e-flux journal Layout Generator was developed by Adam Florin, an "automated system to turn blog-like, long-scrolling-column HTML into rich, print-ready PDFs with more a varied visual depth and flow" was developed in dialog with Jeff Ramsey who has stayed on as the designer for the e-flux journal.[36]

The following artists, researchers, curators, historians, and others have contributed writing or images to e-flux journal:

• Mary Walling Blackburn
• Hito Steyerl
• Liam Gillick
• Boris Groys
• Paul B. Preciado
• McKenzie Wark

• e-flux
• SUPERCOMMUNITY
• Accelerationism
• Julieta Aranda
• Anton Vidokle