Contemporary Art and Cultures (CAC) is a publishing enterprise that sees the collaboration of OCR, LEA – MIT Press, Leonardo / ISAST, the MediaLab, the LIST/MIT and Arts Administration @ Boston University. The scope of the partners is to develop an online platform via PubPub that would offer the opportunity for both open and blind review processes, ensuring that the work of the reviewers is properly acknowledged and historicized. CAC is also exploring means of immediate publication and visibility at a time in which peer reviewing processes within the contemporary fine arts and other fields more in general are unable to respond to the urgency of the topics and the immediacy of the debates. By working together with Travis Rich and Tarek the creators of PubPub, CAC and LEA (MIT Press) hope to pioneer a different approach to the humanities, exploring collaborative models and team working approaches which have been part of the scientific realm and have instead never been formalized or rendered visible in the humanities and the arts in particular within which the isolated studio practice has been a formalistic falsehood and representation of hidden collaborations and absconded relationships.
CAC and LEA will follow a strongly social and media engaged representation of artworks and themes which appear to be bound to represent the struggles and conflicts of the XXIst century.