From 1965 to 1971, a multimedia magazine of the arts was published by Phyllis Johnson. Dubbed Aspen, the magazine was to feature "culture along with play," was bundled and sent to subscribers in boxes and each issue designed by a different artist and editor and included multimedia - way before we were calling things multimedia (this meant inlcuding phonograph records and a reel of super-8 film.

This site is a web version of the magazine. There is a rich description of the original premise and includes issues 1 through 9. Guest artists and editors included Andy Warhol and David Dalton, Quenton Fiore, George Maciunas and Dan Graham. Contents of the magazine include the work of William Burroughs, Marshall Mcluhan, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and David Hockney among others.

In the website, each issue included a detailed explanation of the issue's contents, photos of the contents that were sent to the subscriber and links to the articles. There are audio files on the site of the phonograph records, quicktime videos from some of the films (by Hans Richter, Moholy Nagy, Rauschenberg and others) and lots of images of the actual pages as well. The film clips from Moholy-Nagy (1932) alone are worth the time to spend on this site.

There is a rich, robust index organized by Artist and Authors, Audio exhibits, Movie exhibits, Interactive exhibits and the Advertisements.

This is a fabulous archive about an interesting magazine (if you can really call it that.) Given the scope and complexity of the offering, I can see why it only lasted ten issues. It's experimental nature is such that it was destined to fail on a commercial level.

Comments

It would be interesting to see where the philosophies of this magazine could push design/publication/multimedia for this new generation...