Inscriptions 5, n1, is out
Posted on 17 Jan 2022.
Inscriptions 5, n1, is out with ten original essays on Being and event. With this issue we inaugurate our initiative for Creative criticism, while modifying our publication practices for visual arts. Read an excerpt from the Editorial here.
It is with trepidation and joy we begin to circulate this fifth volume of Inscriptions. What started as a small project, well hidden in the more obscure corners of contemporary thought, has grown to something quite different: as our readership is growing, so are our demands of ourselves and the journal we make, which in turn generates interest from a widening circle of thinkers, writers, and scholars. This issue is special; it is devoted to Being and Event, the topic of a conference hosted by Ereignis Center for Philosophy and the Arts in June last year. Many essays in this issue are reworked versions of papers presented there, and have benefited from scholarly dialogue initiated at that event. In all cases essays published by Inscriptions are subject to double-blind review by two external peers.
We stand by our founding principles, continuing to insist on scholastic rigour and quality in everything we publish. Nevertheless, those who undertake a project such as ours, partly experimental and wholly entertained outside institutional and corporate sedimented structures, will encounter situations that strongly compel them to modify their path. The observant reader will already have noticed that this issue does not include a section on arts. Our decision not to include artworks in a separate section is due to two considerations. First, while we have been delighted with the artworks we had published thus far we have come to recognise that our format severely restricts the kinds of art we can disseminate and the quality by which we are able to reproduce them. At this time Inscriptions is limited to PDFs: images we publish must therefore have fixed size and fit within the A4 format. This really is a technologically superfluous requirement. As we have continued to publish the artworks from Inscriptions in galleries at our sister site ereignis.no/ we have come to recognise the advantages of online galleries: they enable a wider range of formats (videos, audio files, GIFs, etc.), and they can be maintained with greater ease, and in a way that is much more conducive to a proper display of artworks than a scholarly journal can ever do.
Our second consideration has been a desire to pool our resources to enable us to make the best scholarly journal possible. While this led to some soul-searching we decided to concentrate our efforts on scholarship, albeit with our own particular angle: beginning with this issue we include creative criticism as a new category of scholarly articles, and while these texts will be submitted to the same rigorous double-blind review as other texts we encourage authors to submit articles that challenge the traditional scholastic format: we look for texts that explicitly reflect on methods and practices, including lyrical and personal reflections. While we will continue to pursue our interest in the arts, and also to publish artworks in this journal when appropriate, as well as in the galleries at ereignis.no/, we believe that our reformulated editorial policies will prepare the ground for a better, stronger, and more focussed effort in an emerging area of scholarly open access publishing.
Read the entire editorial at inscriptions.tankebanen.no/.