Indie Mags in the Digital Era: The Politics and Geographies of Environmental and Technological Change in Avant-Garde Magazines

In the context of a floundering mass-market of magazines, the indie press stands for a print revival in recent years. Despite its limited lifespan and precarious living conditions, independent magazine publishing pushes the boundaries of content, form, and design. Independent magazines do not focus on mass marketing, but highlight innovation, unorthodox thinking, and a reader-first mentality. They give space to different perspectives, diverse cultural knowledge, and make legible marginalized voices. Given their fresh approaches in diagnosing the societal, material, and technological transformations of hypermodern societies, my paper argues that indie mags are of vital political significance and indispensable for understanding innovation in print, in a world increasingly shaped by technological change and its algorithmic logic. Among the diverse indie publication projects that have been launched over the past years, the paper discusses independent magazines dedicated to raising awareness of technological progress and the geographies of environmental degradation. It focuses on collaborative magazine projects that explore the relationship between art, technology, and the environment in the form of a printed publication (e.g. NXS from Amsterdam and the London-based magazine It’s Freezing in LA). My paper analyzes how avant-garde magazines create a distinguished style and aesthetic space of cultural politics and audience participation. The paper examines how these magazines build a distinct visual identity and, in doing so, target specific communities of taste publicizing stories about groups of people and their state of the world.