Counter-Signals is a bi-annual journal addressing, in variable iterations, different aspects of the intersection of design, media, and politics. The first issue—"Militant Print / A Form Oriented to Its Own Circulation"—documents and theorizes forms of militant aesthetics in the history of self-organized print publishing, among other things. The issue includes contributions from Mladen Dolar, Katharina Stadler, Thomas Fisher, Emma Holmes, Danielle Aubert, Mary Ikoniadou, T’ai Smith, Lucy Mulroney, Eirik Steinhoff, Nasrin Himada and Denise Ferreira da Silva, Léo Favier, Nicolás Pradilla, Alan Smart, Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi, Josh MacPhee, and Lewis Mumford.
Counter-Signals seizes on a double program: to track and document like-minded forms of militant publishing — incomplete and contradictory — in all their historical and technical mediation, and to reflexively elicit its own formal and editorial mutations, abridgments, and excursions in the present tense. While the contents of this first issue have been commissioned without an initiating theme — eschewing the prevailing tendency of contemporary art and design journals — an implicit and after-the-fact interest has emerged, reflexively doubled: the historical militancy of left-oriented publishing, and the inherently militant aesthetic of the medium of print, as it becomes obsolescently figured by a present in which electronic forms of communication have been increasingly overcome by the “total power of capital.”
Counter-Signals #2 is also available here.
