In 2013 The Fibreculture Journal celebrated its 10th year in operation. It was, for the most part, a year of self-assessment, rebuilding and rejuvenation as we welcomed a new editorial team and dealt with a number of outstanding legal and organisational hurdles – all of which, I am glad to report, we have almost cleared. We have also worked hard to bring you a new issue FCJ: Issue 22 Trolls and the Negative Space of the Internet which has (as all issues do) presented a new set of challenges and asked important questions regarding the act of online publishing, criticism and analysis, and the dynamic of online discourse. We collectively thank the issue editors, reviewers and contributors for their patience as we worked through a lengthy period of review and development.

Upload of that issue has been temporarily delayed as we await for one final legal clearance but it should be online soon.

The FCJ Editorial Committee and Management Group welcomes Su Ballard (University of Wollongong) and Glen Fuller (University of Canberra) to the role of editor, joining our founding editor Andrew Murphie (University of New South Wales). The addition of Su and Glen marks a significant shift in the editorial dynamic and of the organisation of the Journal and we have spent some time as a team working out exactly where our collective passions lie and where we imagine taking the journal over its next decade of publication. Expect to see new and newly extended areas and modes of academic inquiry and a more focused activist engagement with online scholarly projects and publications.

Susan (Su) Ballard is a media art historian and curator from New Zealand. Her research focuses on the histories of networks, accidents, noise, objects, materiality and machines in the art gallery. She edited The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader in 2008 and the “Networked Utopias and Speculative Futures” issue of Fibreculture in 2012. In 2013 she curated Among The Machines a major exhibition for the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. She is a senior lecturer in Art History and Contemporary Art at the University of Wollongong, Australia.

Glen Fuller is Assistant Professor of Communication and Journalism at the University of Canberra. His research focuses on the relation between media and enthusiasm, histories of specialist magazines, contemporary developments in media technologies and media philosophies. He has written widely on enthusiasm, media philosophies, moral panics, complexity and social relations, and car culture. He is also interested in genealogical accounts of the relation between popular specialist or niche media and the enthusiast markets and scenes that they service.

2014 will see us further develop our partnership with Senselab of Concordia University and their Immediations project with a particular focus on developing projects with and across other partner journals Inflexions and Transversal. Our partnership with Open Humanities Press continues, including the development and publication of the Fibreculture book series. In the next few months expect to see a number of new issue announcements and accompanying calls.

Thanks for bearing with us over this period and we hope you’ll enjoy the fruits of our labours of the coming year and beyond.

Mat Wall-Smith.
The Fibreculture Journal.