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From its beginning in 1990, Blast has set out to explore contemporary texts and images and their accompanying practices of reading, viewing, and authoring. Blast has conducted these explorations in terms of a publication, investigating the changing procedures, systems, and positions of this medium as it intertwines with emerging communications networks. Situating itself at the interstices, it embraces content that is both material and digital, online and offline, recorded and live. It endeavors to make this content partial and contingent, foregrounding the networks of relations in which it is embedded. Displacing direct, predetermined links between viewer and image, reader and author, representation and object, it seeks to develop potent complications that uncover and reflect alternate relationships in the reading-viewing experience.

As this formerly private space of reading and viewing opens out into complex mixture of public and private space, Blast abandons any conception of its role as a publication and instead positions itself entirely within the globalized sphere of communications. The spaces of Blast are now the vast urban networks of representations, technologies, and embodied agents that codetermine each other in complex patterns and modalities. Its space has therefore become politicized: embroiled in various struggles, that which was the "page" is now the site of enormous conflicts. The new agenda for Blast is to articulate and embody the agents and forms of this struggle, developing new formats, strategies, procedures, and encounters. It seeks to stage confrontations and open critical spaces, toward the formulation of a progressive practice.