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The current issue of Afterall is the first to be
produced under the auspices of a new partnership. From now on, the
journal will incorporate the quarterly visual culture journal
AS, a magazine formerly published by MuHKA, the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Antwerp.
Andere Sinema (later abbreviated to AS) was
founded in 1978 by a loose grouping of critically minded film
amateurs with strong political ideas and an unshakeable belief in
the ability of the cinematic experience to transform both the
viewer's life and his or her world. The magazine's publishing body,
an association called De Andere Film that was later to become the
Center for Visual Culture, had strong roots in both 1970s film
culture - think auteur and apparatus theory - and the
political utopianism that propelled so many of that decade's
experiments in adult education. Strongly cinephiliac in its early
years, Andere Sinema gradually broadened its critical
scope to include reflections on a variety of aspects and effects of
the 1980s explosion of visual technologies, in the process becoming
a forum for broad discussions of early video and computer art, and
for a balanced critique of televisual culture. In the 1990s, the
magazine was among the first to seize upon the importance of the
burgeoning Internet as a cultural force and realm of artistic and
political possibilities, thus closing the circle of what had in the
meantime become a veritable academic cottage industry of the first
order - 'visual culture'. Finally, in 2003 the magazine
and its publishing parent the Center for Visual Culture were
incorporated into MuHKA - a move which had been prepared by the
journal's gradual distancing