An ongoing, never ending editorial...
Welcome to Issue One of the West Space Journal. As mentioned in our About page, this is an experiment. This online space is intended to ebb and flow after its initial release, as content is added and expanded, and we’ve designed the structure of the site to be completely transformed at each quarterly issue.
Our first issue is broadly focused on the internet — the protocols and infrastructure that this journal exists on. What is the internet (currently)? How are artists and curators using it? Are we anticipating social change via new forms of connection, or playing a self-mythologising game of cultural catch-up? How does internet access converge with and cloud our offline perspectives? What are the tensions between the presented narratives and pragmatics of the online platform? We think that, globally, we’re at a type of breakpoint where many of these questions might have new answers, somewhere within the spectrum between Evgeny Morozov’s charge that “the internet” we believe in doesn’t exist (and won’t save us), and Ethan Zuckerman’s research into a digital cosmopolitanism that we’re yet to embrace.
Happy exploring!
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