CHARGE!
CHARGE is a big word. It’s a word we say every day when our phone battery is low. It is an injunction. It is something that has been entrusted to your care. It means to move swiftly and with purpose. It is a property of matter. It pervades something with a particular quality, feeling, or emotion. It is the sound that is yelled as an invading army takes the field. All of these have meaning for us in this space.
Charge Magazine is an independent publication that seeks to publish work that deals intimately, creatively, and rigorously with the ideas, questions and challenges that confront us as humans on this planet. Some of these questions are specific and new. Others are timeless, but all are part of a larger human conversation. Whatever deep-thinking people wrestle with in their most profound self, whatever of this they bring to their work, whatever the medium might be, Charge is the platform for these types of conversations.
In addition to publishing work, we at Charge, would like to deepen a reader’s engagement with this work by including alongside the published pieces, thoughts, comments, discussion questions and prompts from the creator to help spark conversation. If you are a writer, artist, musician, poet, filmmaker, animator, scientist, dancer, sculptor, philosopher, comedian, naturalist, long-distance kayaker… or any of a thousand other permutations of human, we would like to allow others not only to be exposed to your work, but to engage with it on a more rigorous and transformational level. Online discussions, local events, future projects and innovative platforms are some of the ways Charge seeks to develop, inform, and encourage the necessary act of community conversation in an emerging age.
If you’re having trouble grasping what all this means, perhaps it can be triangulated by thinking of a mixture of Moten & Harney’s Undercommons, Krista Tippet’s On Being Project, and the best class you ever had.
Charge is committed to:
Sustainability and the responsible interaction with resources
Fair and open conversation. If you need more detail, here are a few resources from Krista Tippet’s Civil Conversations Project. We value an attitude of open inquiry in ourselves, other creators, and in those who would engage with this material, and are excited about the emergence of what Gordon White has termed, The Dominant of Wider Inclusion.
Courage, Curiosity and Innovation. Change engenders change. We support agents with integrity whose work engages in experimentation, inquiry, ideas, questions, and pushing into the unknown.
Community. We are in a time where community is being radically redefined. Our local and global spaces are changing, as is our relationship to them. We believe in wild acts of profound community to help shape the path to come.