History
At a glance
SCALE is a publisher of books, journals, and records about culture and technology—knowledge for a world of limited resources. The name once stood for a monthly journal of aesthetics and computation at the University of California, San Diego; it later named a weekly editorial program, book-scale anthologies, and the imprint that now collects and restores them.
In 2004, Jonathan Phillips and Patrick W. Deegan co-founded SCALE at UCSD Visual Arts. Nine issue numbers appeared that year in print and PDF, with guest editors, open calls for participation, and work that ranged from software studies and sound art to the CVS Book experiment on collaborative writing. The journal registered ISSN 1551-3483 (print) and 1551-3475 (online).
After a long quiet period in the public record, SCALE returned in 2019 as a weekly program: Chinese word-of-the-week prompts, curated link rivers, and Friday PDFs tied to the Qi Hardware community—an open-computer lineage from OpenMoko through hardware news, Telegram readers, and the scale.qihardware.org host. 2020 brought Cryptology in Shenzhen: a two-day workshop and public exhibition on energy, nature, and technology at Qi Hardware’s ten-year mark, with work including Matt Hope’s Miner Arch; Qi Hardware soon rebranded as Qiware. 2021 brought book-scale publishing again—an anthology on Wuhan, the SCALE Multiplier collection with limited digital keys, and experiments in putting PDFs on chain. 2022 added New Tools for Organizing the Sensorium, an edited volume on perception and tools. In 2024, Qi Hardware and Qiware moved to Phi; SCALE Publishing remained with the Fabricatorz Foundation, which now hosts this site.
Today, SCALE Publishing maintains this catalog: restored 2004 and 2019 archives, open PDFs, per-issue and per-book catalog pages, and new releases under the same tagline. The timeline below is not a separate index—it is the spine the longer sections follow.
The full story
Origins (2001–2004)
Jonathan Phillips completed a BFA in photo, video, and new media at the Kansas City Art Institute in 2001, then an MFA in Visual Arts (New Media) at UC San Diego in 2004. His teachers there included Lev Manovich, Sheldon Brown, Miller Puckette, Geoff Bowker, and Joseph Goguen—a line from software studies and experimental systems into publication practice. Publication was never a side project; the journal was one of the primary outputs of that graduate work.
With Patrick W. Deegan, Phillips co-founded SCALE in 2004 at UCSD. Contemporary descriptions called it a monthly “local” publication about aesthetics and computation, distributed in print and PDF from scale.ucsd.edu. The first volume ran through 2004 with nine issue numbers (some combined as double issues). Contributors spanned UCSD, networked art scenes, and invited guests; issues touched MESH.FM, the CVS Book, C5’s Big Data collaboration, apocalypse-themed closings, and Deegan’s essay on SCALE’s own founding in issue five.
The journal entered the public bibliographic record that year: ISSN 1551-3483 (print) and 1551-3475 (online). Seven combined PDF editions from volume one survive in the mirror restored here; cover art, announcement posts, and per-issue tables of contents are rebuilt from those files and from Wayback captures where needed.
Hiatus (2005–2018)
Little of SCALE’s material between the founding volume and the 2019 program survives in the public mirror this site ingested. That gap is not a claim that nothing happened—only that the editorial trail is thin for researchers working from open files alone. Correspondence, print runs, and hosts from those years may still exist in private archives or on services not yet mined.
Weekly season (2019)
In 2019, SCALE became a weekly edition. Each week carried a Chinese word-of-the-week prompt, essays when editors or guests supplied them, long curated link rivers (hardware, software, crypto, politics, art), and a Friday PDF for offline reading. The program shipped from scale.qihardware.org and gathered readers on Telegram through the Qi Hardware community—a thread that connects open-hardware culture, later Phi and Fabricatorz work, and the publishing experiments that followed.
The surviving editorial mirror holds weeks 5 through 21 (roughly May–June 2019). Weeks 1–4 are missing from that mirror. The season sits on a crowded world timeline: Hong Kong protests, family milestones, and the runway toward COVID-19 and border closures—context that later SCALE books, including the Wuhan anthology, would echo. Present-day editors Clément Renaud and Christopher Adams entered SCALE’s story in the book era; Phillips carried the thread from UCSD through Qi Hardware into Fabricatorz and Phi.
Cryptology and Qiware (2020)
In January 2020, on the eve of the pandemic, Cryptology gathered builders and artists in Shenzhen for a private workshop and public exhibition framed around energy, nature, and open hardware—not a conference, but a recharge. Matt Hope’s Miner Arch, assembled from used Bitcoin miners, became a signature work of that week. Hong Kong’s 2019 fatigue and the emerging COVID-19 border regime shadowed the event; participants would read the next two years with uncomfortable accuracy. Qi Hardware rebranded as Qiware, and SCALE’s editorial program prepared to shift from weekly PDFs to book-scale volumes.
Books and cultural technology (2020–2022)
February 2020 — An open call circulated for original writing and art about Wuhan and Hubei as the city locked down; co-editors Clément Renaud and Dino Ge Zhang assembled fifteen contributions from inside and outside the quarantine.
April 2021 — (UN)LOCKED: Memories of Wuhan: an anthology on Wuhan before and during early COVID-19, designed by Christopher Adams and released under open license, among early experiments in minting PDF editions with the Hic et Nunc community.
June 2021 — Announcement of the SCALE Multiplier NFT airdrop: a model where limited digital keys unlocked full text.
December 2021 — SCALE Multiplier: nine essays on scales of writing; eighty-eight limited collectible keys released full text under CC0+.
November 2022 — New Tools for Organizing the Sensorium: an edited volume on perception, tools, and intelligence.
Across these years SCALE shifted from department-scale journal to book-scale imprint, still treating open web editions, PDFs, and selective digital collectibles as part of one practice rather than separate businesses.
Fabricatorz Foundation (2024–)
The Fabricatorz Foundation—“decentralizing culture”—supports open hardware, experimental art and technology, cultural preservation, and neural-health work alongside long-running open-culture projects (Open Clip Art, Libre Graphics Meeting since 2006, digital archives such as Artifaq and ArtCrimes). In June 2024 the Foundation documented a generational handoff: Qi Hardware and Qiware granted to Phi, while SCALE Publishing stayed under Fabricatorz as the book and journal imprint. That split keeps hardware and software culture at Phi and keeps the publishing shelf—ISSNs, PDFs, restoration, new releases—here at scalepublishing.com.
Restoration (2026)
In 2026, SCALE Publishing rebuilt scalepublishing.com as a static catalog and archive: Git LFS PDFs, backdated release posts, 2004 issue pages with expanded contributor metadata, 2019 week pages with restored link indexes, and books/journals/records taxonomy. Tezos wallet UI from an earlier stack was removed; collectible history remains in the content. The work is ongoing—OCR for image-only PDF pages, sharper release dates, and deeper cross-links between restoration notes and catalog entries.
What's Missing?
The restored catalog is honest about what it does not yet hold. SCALE was founded as a monthly journal in 2004, became a weekly program in 2019, and has since published at book scale—but the public mirror is full of holes. Filling those holes, month by month and week by week, until the line reaches the present month, is the next editorial project.
The big gaps
2005–2018 — fourteen years. After volume one closed in 2004, SCALE did not disappear from memory, but almost nothing from this stretch survives in the open files this site ingested. That is roughly 168 missing monthly issues if the original cadence had held—guest editors never logged, link rivers never indexed, PDFs not yet recovered from private drives, defunct hosts, or Wayback captures still unmined.
2019 — weeks 1–4 and everything after week 21. The weekly season restored here runs from week 5 through week 21 (roughly May–June 2019). The opening weeks are absent from the mirror. So is the rest of the calendar year: weeks 22 through 52, the back half of a program that was explicitly built around Friday PDFs and a accumulating world timeline.
2020–2021 — the runway without a weekly. Between the June 2019 season and the April 2021 Wuhan anthology lies nearly two years with no restored SCALE weekly or monthly edition on this site—only the books and posts that punctuate the gap. COVID-19, border closures, Hong Kong, hardware supply chains, and the reshaping of the internet are exactly the kind of material SCALE once curated; the editions that would have carried that context are missing.
2023–2025 — recent silence. After New Tools for Organizing the Sensorium in November 2022, the public record goes quiet again until the 2026 restoration. Three more years without a numbered journal issue or weekly PDF in the catalog.
Today — the open end. Even with 2004 and 2019 partially restored, SCALE does not yet read as a continuous publication from founding through June 2026. The ISSNs are live. The tagline is live. The line on the shelf is not.
How new AI tools might help
The goal is not to invent a fake history. It is to reconstruct missing editions from real history in those years—the same way SCALE always worked: aesthetics and computation, local community, global events, curated links, guest voices, PDFs you can hold offline.
At the scale of the gaps above, AI is the only practical way we can make advances—not to replace editors or invent past issues whole cloth, but to mine archives, structure research, and keep a monthly and weekly cadence human teams could not sustain alone across twenty-two years of missing shelf space.
New advances in AI change what restoration can mean:
- Archive mining — OCR and layout models can extract tables of contents, contributor lists, and body text from image-only PDFs and Wayback snapshots faster than manual transcription alone.
- Context reconstruction — large language models can help editors draft annotated link rivers and chronologies grounded in documented events (protests, pandemic waves, chip shortages, platform shifts), with human review before anything ships under the SCALE name.
- Gap-fill editions — for months where no original PDF exists, editorial policy could publish reconstructed issues: clearly labeled, sourced from contemporaneous news, mailing-list fragments, and recovered correspondence, in the spirit of the 2004 journal and 2019 weeklies rather than as anonymous pastiche.
- Cadence at scale — the monthly and weekly formats are repeatable templates. AI assists research and assembly; editors retain authorship, attribution, and the decision to publish.
Recovered originals always take precedence. Reconstructed editions fill the shelf only where the mirror is empty—and carry a note saying so.
The ambition
Imagine SCALE running forward from 2004 without a break: volume one, the hiatus years rebuilt from archival research, the full 2019 week table, book-era releases in their slots, and new monthlies from restoration through the present. One catalog. One timeline. Open PDFs where files exist; honest reconstruction where they do not.
Can we fill SCALE out all the way until the present month?
Yes we can.
Records, and feeding the house
Progress also depends on Records—the catalog layer that holds ISSN registration, release history, archive indexes, recovered correspondence, and the documentary trail that lets one edition cite the next. Every PDF recovered, every backdated post, every metadata field filled in is a Record we can reuse to keep building this publishing house out: journals, books, and the paper trail between them.
More content is coming soon. The restoration you see here is the foundation, not the finished shelf.
Join us. If you hold files from the 2005–2018 gap, fragments of the 2019 weeklies, or material that belongs in the SCALE line, send it to up@scalepublishing.com. We can feed this publishing house together—contributors, archivists, and readers supplying the Records, editors and tools assembling the editions, until SCALE runs continuous from founding through the present month.
TODAY
SCALE Publishing is the imprint that collects releases, documents restoration, and ships open archives. The site is hosted by the Fabricatorz Foundation and edited by a core team whose work spans UCSD (2004), Qi Hardware (2019–2020), the Wuhan and NFT book seasons (2021–2022), and present restoration. Browse journals (SCALE 2004, SCALE 2019), books (Wuhan, Multiplier, Sensorium), and records (ISSN registration, release history, editors). Each restored edition has a catalog page, downloadable PDF where the file exists in the mirror, and news posts dated to original release when those dates are known.
Editors Jonathan Phillips, Clément Renaud, and Christopher Adams maintain independent sites; their SCALE-facing bios live on the editors page. Contributors still span the 2004 UCSD circle, the 2019 weekly community, and the book-era network in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Europe. More content is coming soon—if you hold Records or files for the gaps, write up@scalepublishing.com; we can feed this publishing house together.
The tagline remains unchanged: knowledge for a world of limited resources. SCALE still treats aesthetics and computation as one conversation—local in the sense of a particular community and moment, global in the sense that PDFs, mirrors, and open licenses let that conversation travel without pretending scarcity of ideas is the same as scarcity of paper.