limn

What is Limn?

Limn is an experiment in outlining.

It combines the collaborative focus of a special issue of a journal with the spontaneity and interactivity of new media. Limn focuses on reconstruction and recomposition of concepts in contemporary culture. Limn is modeled on the convivial and critical features of a studio in art, architecture or design. Each episode differs from the last–different curators bring different problems and approaches to the basic concepts and tools developed in and through the process.

What are we looking for?

Limn focuses on contemporary issues and problems that can provoke conceptual innovation through the short, strategic contributions from a network of actively engaged scholars. Our focus is on process, timeliness and recomposition.

Process is key to developing episodes. We must awake from the bad dream of the Internet, in which a blog or a wiki promises to magically constitute thought, community or collaboration. Process means backgrounding these tools; it means concrete design or doable problems. Examples of process for various issues are explored in a separate page.

Timeliness is a response to the awkward silences and long pauses produced by the current model of scholarly publication, in which articles take years to publish, then disappear into the maws of toll-access publishers, never to be read. Timeliness urges a quicker pace of call and response, more attuned to the normal course of developing research questions and tackling complex problems. We mean it: our timelines are 1 to 3 months, less if we can do it.

Recomposition means exploring the possibilities for circulation, archiving, response and re-use. The online version of studio is a first attempt at organizing and juxtaposing writing, conceptual work, archival materials. All this material can, but is not required to, take a conventional print form, one that might privilege design as a component of thought.

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Limn is unfinished.

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