The original founders were UNC graduate students : musician John Ribó (Kapow! Music and member of the Buhanan recording cooperative which also includes artists such as David Karsten Daniels), experimental poet Eduardo Ramos, pen name of Joaquin Bueno, and Brazilian-American concrete poet Marco de Oliveira.
The magazine began as a collaboration amongst aspiring doctoral students who found an impetus for creation amongst what they viewed as an ethical wasteland. Motivated especially by events such as a the United States presidential election, 2004 and a growing anti-intellectual sentiment of post-911, post-postmodern America, the movement to create a magazine could be viewed as more than an ambitious creative start-up, perhaps as an example of grass-roots utlization of emerging Web 2.0 tendencies and the democratization of information.
Eventually, the _volutions project received collaboration from artists and university intellectuals in various schools and in various countries, especially from a number of poets and literary critics associated with the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, the undergraduate institution attended by Eduardo Ramos. Currently, the majority of _volutions collaborators are geographically centered in both Charlottesville and the Chapel Hill and Carrboro area in North Carolina. Ironically, the magazine discarded the initial democratized concept of open submissions, opting for an invitation-only format.
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