Wu Ming is a laboratory of literary design working on different media.
The Wu Ming trademark is administered by a collective of writers/activists who have constituted an independent business company providing 'tale-telling services'. This expression has the broadest meaning and describes all activities connecting literature and the new media.
The founders of Wu Ming are Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga, Luca Di Meo and Federico Guglielmi (formerly members of the Luther Blissett Project - from 1994 to 1999 - as well as authors of the novel Q) and Riccardo Pedrini (author of Libera Baku Ora and essays on Punk, skinhead culture and martial arts), however, names are of little importance.As a matter of fact wú-míng is mandarin for 'no name'. In China, this is often used as a signature for dissident writings.
The name itself is reliable evidence of our unwillingness to become VIP, appeased salon writers or trained literary prize monkeys. On the contrary, the new project thrives on the same features which made great the Luther Blissett Project: radical forms and contents, heteronyms and shifting identities, communication guerrilla tactics... All this is more focused on narrative design or, to put it less specifically, it is aimed at telling stories (no matter the medium: novels, screenplays, reports, concepts for videogames or board-games etc.) and/or taking care of stories designed by other people (editing, talent scouting, promotional advice, translations in and from different languages etc.)
As established in the months following the publication of Q, our conduct will be: 'show up but don't appear; be accessible to readers and opaque in the media'. Such behavior is not to be mistaken for Pynchon-like (or Salinger-like) pathological bashfulness:  Wu Ming will participate in the products' promotion (interviews, readings etc.) as long as it does not degenerate into the worn-out camera-propelled VIP-spotting game (photo sessions, TV appearances, gossiping etc.).  Wu Ming will turn down every such request and demand that the firm's official logo be published or broadcast instead of the writers' faces. The logo is composed of the two chinese ideograms making up the name.
The adoption of a chinese trade name is also due to our belief that the future of human communities depends on what is going to happen in the East. Nowadays, no social ecology, no practical critique of the unbalanced relationship between demographical growth and capitalist forays can prescind from throwing cultural bridges to the Far East, to mainland China in particular. That's where our destiny is at stake, as far as the global catastrophe and the pursuit of alternatives are concerned. That's where mankind's imaginary is moving to. 
Wu Ming 's approach to cultural production implies the constant derision of any idealistic/romantic prejudice about 'the genius', individual 'inspiration' and all that shit.  Wu Ming foster the crisis of the copyright logic. We do not believe in the private property of ideas. As happens in the Luther Blissett Project , every product bearing the  Wu Ming trademark - no matter the medium - will be free from copyright, each time with the specifications and limitations that  Wu Ming will deem necessary.
The fact that an enterprise of mental labor - i.e. the most typical subject of post-fordist capital - wants to supercede the myths, rituals and remnants of intellectual property is a fruitful paradox which brings the conflict into the inner depths of the market, beyond the praxis of such an informal subject as the Luther Blissett Project. If one can't help looking for affinities, Wu Ming is on the same battlefield as the programmers and entrepreneurs working on open source software, 'free software' and the likes.

Wu Ming is an autonomous political enterprise.
'Enterprise', for the brainworkers of the world must re-appropriate this form from the grassroots, with the clear intention of assaulting the 'heavens' of economy, against and beyond corporate parasites and state dinosaur andropause. Being free-lance is not enough, we have to acquire more strength, get control on the production process and the results of our creative labor.
'Autonomous', because Wu Ming will never apply for public funds: we make a bet on the self-valorization of mental labour, i.e. on our own entrepreneurial ability.  Wu Ming aim at relations on a parity basis, not subordinate partnerships with any local, regional, state or continental bureaucracy. 
'Political', for culture is long past the existence of 'the Intellectual' as a figure separated from the whole of production (and from politics, which has never had any autonomous status). Nowadays information is the most important productive force. The machine we used to call 'cultural industry' has a symbiotic relationship with the entire galaxy of commodities and services. Everything is multimedia, and there is no longer any distinction between 'humanistic' and 'technical' knowledge. What kind of privileged status can an 'author' claim, now that telling tales is just one of the many aspects of mental labour, of a greater social co-operation integrating software programming, industrial design, journalism, intelligence activities, social services, gender politics etc.?
As a consequence, we are past 'engagement' as a choice which 'artists' and 'authors' might make. Mental labor is completely within the production networks, indeed, it is their main driving force. 'Creative workers' are left with no choice, they simply cannot avoid intervention. To write is part of production, to narrate is politics. Now the distinction is between those who are aware and the legion of reactionaries, whether the latter are self-conscious or not.

What kind of tales and stories is Wu Ming interested in?
First of all, stories that have a beginning, an end and a plot in between. Experimentation is acceptable only and exclusively if it improves the story-telling. If experimentation is nothing other than an excuse for mediocre or bad narrators, then - as far as we're concerned - they can shove it up their ass.
Those we like are tales of conflicts, woven at the handlooms of epos and mythopoesis, adopting the mechanisms, styles and manners of genre fiction, biopics, militant reports or so-called micro-history. Novels that process raw materials found in the gloomy zones of history, real stories told like fiction and vice versa. Recuperation of forgotten events, at the core or at the margins of which our plots can unfold: 'Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight.' (James Ellroy, premise to American Tabloid ). The important thing is keeping light-years of distance between us and bourgeois fiction: the real protagonist of history is neither the Great Man nor the monadic individual; quite on the contrary, it is the nameless crowd of second and third leads and, behind them (or through them) the nameless and swarming multitude of events, destinies, movements and vicissitudes: 'In the fresco, I am one of the figures in the background. At the centre standthe Pope, the Emperor, the cardinals and the princes of Europe. On the margins the agents, discreet and invisible, peeping out from behind the crowns and tiaras, but in fact supporting the whole geometry of the painting, filling up its space and, without making themselves conspicuous, keeping those powerful heads at the centre of the composition.' (Q's diary, first sentence). We want to tell the constitution, emergence and movement of multitudo. Multitudo has nothing to do with the mass, which is a homogeneous block to be mobilized or, alternatively, a 'black hole' to be sounded by opinion polls. Multitudo is 'a horizon of overt corporeality and savage multiplicity. A world of interlacements and physical combinations, associations and dissociations, fluctuations and materializations which,according to a perfectly horizontal logic, actualizes the paradoxical cross between causality and fortuitousness, between tendency and possibility. This is the original dimension of multitudo. ' (Antonio Negri, Spinoza sovversivo).

To sum up, Wu Ming  intend to praise social cooperation both in the form and the substance of immaterial production: the power of collectivity is simultaneously the content and the expression of our stories.

Click here for further details on our anticopyright stance