issue 0. medium

editor's note

IN a world saturated with content and roiling with uncertainty, whom do you trust? We increasingly search for interpreters for our bombarded present, soothsayers divining untamed futures. The medium through which information is conveyed, now, as ever, is imbued with these sacred characteristics. It can help you tell right from wrong. It is a stamp of authenticity, or else a libelous scourge. Except if it’s your grandma. Remember, she’s always right.

We know that the medium has never been a passive portal. It has always had the power, in itself, to influence the reception of what’s imparted. But today, new mediums emerge and proliferate faster. Twitter accounts issuing on-the-ground dispatches from Syria and Iraq blossom, mutate, and conflict at an intense rate. It becomes difficult to keep up. We are as inundated with new knowledge bearers as we are with the very knowledge they were created to fathom.

As Issue 0, MEDIUM grapples with the age-old infiltration of elite interests into a range of conventional and less conventional mediums: Turkish television series, Turkish print newspapers, narratives underlying Israel’s settlement building, Syrian war coverage, and an Iraqi militia’s global branding techniques. At the same time, it showcases artwork, poetry and a play, from Libya, Lebanon, Armenia, and much more. These works are self-conscious of their forms, using unorthodox structures to sketch granules of the MENA region.

Khabar Keslan’s first issue unearths the symbiosis of MENA-originated critique and art. If you have to trust anything, trust in this.