On a walk with my friend Anabelle, I mentioned that it might be cool to start a magazine. Both of us were writing similar pieces about internet culture, or intersections between art and technology, and a number of our favorite outlets had recently gone under. It felt, often, like the only places left to pitch were small journals without a whole lot to offer; why shouldn’t we start a publication, and publish better things written by us and our friends?
We teamed up with our friend Chia, who did an incredible job creating all of our visual identity for the magazine (including building our site!):
Anabelle and I sourced and edited every single piece in the first issue. I can say decisively that putting out a magazine is far, far more labor intensive than I’d anticipated! For one, working with volunteers is extremely challenging—it’s nearly impossible to get people to stick to editing or draft deadlines, or to keep things on a reasonable schedule. It’s also just remarkably time-consuming to edit tons of pieces. I left extensive notes on all of our 18 pieces at minimum once, usually twice.
Here's the pieces we published/edited:
- Scroll as Textile: An Interview with Maya Man - Anabelle Johnston
- a poem: - Alicia Guo
- Monkey Bar Table - Aidan Leitch
- Brest Life - Jane Freiman
- From the Editors - Lucas Gelfond and Anabelle Johnston
- Prying Eyes - Iman Husain
- I'm Gonna Bury You - Corinne Leong
- Otto TV - Ryan Chuang
- George's Promenade - Justin Scheer
- Crush - Angela Qian
- Are You There God? It's Me, the Algorithm. - Will Allstetter
- You Never Render The Same River Twice - Lucia Kan-Sperling
- Landscapes - Chia Amisola
- Online Communities and Institution-Building: An Interview with Josh Citarella - Lucas Gelfond
- Gallery - Charlotte Silverman and Coco Kaleel
- Before the Current Captures You - Cici Osias
- 42ftw - Ben Brill and Sam Smith
- Cups, Bells - Lauren Lee
Nonetheless, the whole experience was unbelievably rewarding. I got to work with some incredibly talented writers and artists (not to mention Anabelle and Chia) and I'm really proud of our final result.
That said, we got to work with some incredibly talented people—many writers, and our designer Chia, who put the site together—and I’m really proud of our final project. I contributed an interview about online communities with Josh Citarella that you can read here, and you can read the whole issue online at http://syntaxmag.online.
The Brown Daily Herald also wrote a feature about our launch, which you can read here.
We threw a big launch party in New York to celebrate the issue, and it was awesome, photos below, courtesy of Skylar Kim:
