Issue No.2.3 'the floating world issue'Contents
Calling all idealists. Fourth Door Review continues. Hyacinth House, the imprint of the Fourth Door Research Unit publishes Fourth Door Review 2.3 ("the floating world issue"). This is the second edition following the critically acclaimed, interdisciplinary magazine launched independently in 1996. Fourth Door Review is a new interdisciplinary magazine building bridges between many fields not immediately thought to be connected. It dissolves differences which separate ecology and technology, music and media, craft and computerisation - and how these are being affected by ongoing developments in new media and other technologies.
The second issue extends a broad and nondenominational Green cultural focus by developing aspects of the magazine, and increasing the size and variety of its contents. This includes new 'multimedia', 'earth-art' and 'ecodesign' sections, as well as developing the contents from issue one. It builds on issue one's high standard of graphics and design, continuing to cultivate new artist's, designer's, photographer's and writers making it independently placed for being a, if not the leading edge green cultural review.
Future facing, it's non-traditional in many ways. In this issue the music segment (Margins of Music) focuses on the relation between women musicians and their work on the frontiers of technologically inspired music. Moon and the Melodies through the Techno-Gauze features interviews with Midi-Violinist Kaffe Matthews, and avant indie bands Pram and Laika. These explore how female energy engages contemporary Ambient music and current musical technological change.
Sections:
Digitalis
'Digitalis', the new media technology section aims to bring a new perspective to the dizzy frenzy of Techno writing. Not so much a Wired clone, rather an attempt to explore where technology is genuinely liberating and where its' promise is lost in dizzy hype. To this end Screenprint will look to the deeper social and ecological implications, possibilities, and consequences of what some call our Post-Biological Future. In this first exploration, there is an interview with Algorithmic artist William Latham, consideration of green educational Multimedia, and where digitalisation may take the art of the still image - photography. 'Architexts' breaks new ground in the exploration of contemporary Architecture. It includes a piece on the greening of the recording studio and another by dream- tree-house architect Steve Johnson on his radical 'Forest House' concept.Middleground
There are also shorter articles within the 'Middleground section; 'World Dress', Art Kites, a 'make-do' piece on how to make your own African Balafon, another lovely recipe and other regulars as well as a picturepost visual invite and interview with leading land artist Chris Drury, and much else besides.
Wordwatch
At the tailend of Fourth Door Review is the book review section, 'Wordwatch' which features reviews of books which are often passed over and ignored by the literary mainstream media, but that we feel deserve coverage and exposure. This issue includes recent books on the interface between Post-Modernism and Ecology, Richard Lannoy on a quarter of a century of 'The Speaking Tree' and explorations of the Anthropology of Time.
Together this unique brew furthers Fourth Door Review intention of 'crossing boundaries and tangling categories', multi-disciplinary and integrative, all within the broader context of the dreams of Ecotopian Futures. In short, we feel there isn't anything else like this review magazine out there.
As the contents explore a new web of links, so the design of the Review sets out to remake what and how magazines can be and could do. From a backdrop of green visual mediums, Fourth Door Review is working towards a new alignment of the visual with the textual, committed to the best in each, as well as a new relationship between the creative energies of hi-tech new media, and the integration of the low-tech traditions of pen and parchment. It remains true to all these, from the written word to the visual image so as to provide a tentative new halfway point, a clearing, between the chaptered book and the short, magazine length article, the trace of ink and the virtual cool.
Designed with care and bristling with this new heady mix, Fourth Door Review 2 is presently available.
