Version is a new online journal for short-form writing and media work. It presents scenes, incidents, encounters, and sensory experiences drawn from everyday life, in which concepts are not only elaborated but enacted. Version works in close-up, cultivating moods, atmospheres, and various forms of bodily apprehension and awareness. It aims for a quality of intimacy, presence, and affective charge: a material openness to unexpected forms of encounter. At the same time, it works laterally, conducting transversal operations across object-boundaries, attuned to the rhythms, flows, and layered ecologies that constitute the phenomenal world.

Thus reads a release by Jordan Crandall circulated on nettime earlier this week. Version is a new microjournal out of UCSD Department of Visual Arts that is characterized by posts constrained to "500 words, 5 images, or 50 seconds". This emphasis on "short-form" content hints at the possibility of an experimental middle ground between microblogging and the scholarly production associated with academic journals. Furthermore, the design (by Caleb Waldorf and John W. Pattenden-Fail) definitely resonates with the visual consumption ingrained in design blogs like NOTCOT where content is not so much read, but browsed. Version features a stellar cast of contributors operating under the editorial watch of Crandall and Waldorf and it will be interesting to see how this platform evolves.

Given Ceci Moss and John Michael Boling's recent survey of arts-related tumblelogs perhaps we will soon need a similar hotlist of theory and cultural studies focused microblogs. Kazys Varnelis recently augmented his blog output with related microcontent - twitter presence aside, who else is publishing in this manner? Version may provide some clues as to what can emerge from a steady stream of curated multimedia microcontent as produced in an academic context.

I'm excited by this project but I do have one criticism - why can't I read entire posts in my RSS reader? As it stands, I can only preview one sentence teasers. Why should I have to jump through to the site proper to determine my interest in content? If this blog really is about "material openness" it should embrace the diffusion and fragmentation associated with online publishing.