Mission and History

Impulse[b:] expresses a diverseness firmly contained within its mandate for encouraging the bold and for testing visual and literary boundaries. We are an independent print and digital press who, since 2013, has responded to the vision of writers and artists, while also maintaining a distinct nature of Impulse.

With a clearly articulately specific aesthetic value, we publish contemporary art and artist’s stories, to provoke debate or inspiration. We stand by a product that is in flux with the times, without allowing the global market as a barrier to production and aesthetic value. Our designers and editors are imaginative in their approach, resulting in open and inventive artist book publishing.

Also, through our numerous public events, Impulseb aims to serve the literary and visual community by recognizing established and emerging writers and artists and by mobilizing them in discussion and debate, to advance knowledge, encourage integrated interdisciplinary understandings and address issues that are critical to today’s global communities.

From 1971 to 1990, Impulse magazine was an important Toronto-based cultural magazine. It was remarkably global in perspective. The magazine was distributed and read internationally, publishing some of the most significant practitioners and thinkers of the time. The visual arts were understood and presented as being interconnected with philosophical inquiry, graphic arts, design, global cultures and interdisciplinary arts.

Impulse[b:] sees itself as the conceptual continuation of the innovation established by Impulse magazine, where its focus today is more social, politically engaged, and published artists writing in books on poetry, literary prose, fiction, and performance that reference topics towards conceptual photography, art, architecture, health, queer theory, environment, and music, in original narratives that invoke artists experiences in writing creation and exploration.

Click here to read an interview published in Artforum magazine from 2019 on the legacies of Impulse Magazine.