Editor's Letter

The word "reboot" is a fascinating one. It marks both an end and a beginning. It's the alpha and the omega of a given process. After two years and 20 issues, Ototmc Magazine has just gone through its first reboot. And the concept of the magazine has broadened significantly:

• Ototmc's content is no longer made up entirely of questionnaires à la Proust, even though they remain a cornerstone of the publication. Each issue now has a topic, which acts as a common thread running through the different sections of the magazine.

• Ototmc now contains sections such as "The Conversation", where guests discuss a given subject related to the issue's topic, "Three things", where guests talk about three cultural items that changed their lives, and "The Portfolio", where guests’ art work is published and discussed.

• The magazine is no longer published 10 times a year. Instead, one bigger issue is published every six months (once in June and once in December).

• Instead of releasing only complete issues, Ototmc is becoming a place to experiment, and the work in progress is exhibited through the present editor's letter (which in a way becomes the magazine's blog).

• The content of each issue is available on Github as an invitation to collaborate.

And those are just a few of the modifications that have emerged from the magazine's reboot. One of the most important changes is that the magazine has untied itself from Wordpress (and any other publishing platform, for that matter). While Wordpress—and Tumblr, Blogger etc.—are very nice tools, they implicitly "impose" a certain way of publishing content on the Internet, which has become, I believe, a silent constraint on publishers’ and designers’ creativity. Ototmc aims at becoming a place where it's possible to try different things. Rebooting is about making new things out of old ones. Rebooting is about restarting, and reinventing.

Let's do that.

@alexduloz

P.S.: Leaving Wordpress for a custom CMS (or the lack thereof, since this issue is simply one big HTML document) can be the cause of some commotion: the first 20 issues of the magazine will unfortunately be unavailable for a while. They will reappear, however, in the coming weeks.