[ Accelerator, Random Journal, nos. 1/1994, 2/1995 and 3/1996, Novi Sad - Belgrade ]

During the years 1992 and 1993 war and the financial collapse brought about the extinction of most uncommercial periodicals that used to appear in the former Yugoslav republic of Serbia. Later, almost as a rule, their publishing was not resumed, so that new journals and magazines, differing greatly as regards profile, calibre and continuity, filled in what was now free space. Some of these publications simply took advantage of the interregnum and contented themselves with merely filling up the empty space which had presented itself in the media world. Yet, there were others for which these, in many respects extraordinary, circumstances had every sign of an almost ideal (albeit imposed) framework for questioning and introducing changes at many levels and in many aspects of editorial work. Thus, a number of periodicals emerged, based on a markedly conceptual approach and quite nonstandard for this milieu. Of these, Accelerator, a journal produced by a group of young architects from Belgrade and Novi Sad, is probably the most striking example. What follows here is an outline of the features that account for its theoretically very intriguing (and rather consistently realized) conception:

1. The journal as an integral work of art is the basis on which Accelerator is theoretically organized. This in itself is, of course, nothing new. It was precisely periodicals that were the paradigm of a work of art in the historical avant-gardes on the Belgrade-Zagreb route in the 20s and 30s. Zenit, Dada-Jok, Dada-Tank, and Hipnos, to mention just a few, were far from merely providing space for the promotion of the most eminent artistic achievements of the time: in our midst, they themselves were the greatest artistic achievements of their time. The facts that these periodicals with their remarkable orthographic and conceptual-semantic structures were not recognized as works that could equal the novels of Krleza or Crnjanski, or the sculptures of Ivan Mestrovic for that matter, and that at the time there existed no transfer from the so-called high art to the broader area of culture, do not essentially change the point. In all events, the model was conveyed historically, and every now and then (especially at the beginning of the 70s) publications appeared that followed it to some extent. Obviously, Accelerator moves along these lines, yet without the pathos so peculiar to the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde notion of art. Such a notion is here replaced by a total distrust of any pretense at projecting or predicting (this being best expressed in the "random tables" published in each issue where units are substituted by an Rnd sign in the already recognized tables, mapps and systematizations, like Jencks’s diagram of the development of architecture in the first, Mendeleyev’s periodic table of elements in the second, or the map of the world in the third issue); of anything collectivist (creating noncollectivist unity within the journal is exactly a part of the concept); of the accustomed language of architecture and theory in general (the quest for a different, more expressive and at the same time more operative language is evident); and even of one’s own competence to publish a journal.

2. Acceleration is here a method of achieving a sort of provisional unity. By accelerating and compressing the elements of various projects, occurrences, concepts, lines of thinking and space planning, an interesting dynamic organization that gives the impression of a whole is accomplished even though coincidences, chance and differences are not effaced, but, on the contrary, stressed. In a visual sense, this means that within a closed series of seven proposed issues, through the addition of basic elements and through their progressively more intensive dynamization and mingling, a transition is made from a completely "pure", minimalist design, wholly functional and practically imperceptible, to fully compact chaos.

3. Reliance on the "butterfly effect" supplants the avant-gardist striving for immediate social impact. Namely, articles in Accelerator do not start off from some general stories, they do not discuss global developments in architecture, society and theory. Instead, their foundation upon private, subjective and personal attitudes creates a separate sphere within the public one, a new knot whose formation alone is sufficient to initiate ever greater changes along the lines of the net it belongs to.

4. Emphasizing the role of interface, nexus, has taken the place of the insistence on facade, on ideal form, and on the architect as creator. Just as this journal is but an interface bringing together various and heterogeneous elements, ideas and people, thereby losing nothing of its integrity and authenticity, the method of work set as a model here is the organizing, linking and harmonizing of the already given elements and of the rhythm in which they change, without subjecting those changes to control of dictate.

5. Paraarchitecturality in terms of not being rooted in the language of conventional architecture is also obvious. The very term "paraarchitecture" features on the pages of the first issue of Accelerator, in the translation of a chapter from Anthony Vidler’s The Architectural Uncanny where it is a corelative with David Carroll’s term "paraaesthetics" and Rosalind Krauss’s "paraliterature". This chapter is here seen as being parallel to the attempts of this journal’s contributors to present their drafts without any details, simply as ideas, while not restricting the text to the language of the trade, but laying it open for all sorts of metaphor and interdisciplinary textual intervention, as well as reducing it to a very short form.

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