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Issue 17 – Unnatural Ecologies
This issue is an exercise in media ecology that is paradoxically unnatural. Instead of assuming a natural connection to the established tradition of Media Ecology in the Toronto-school fashion of Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, and the work of scholars involved in the Media Ecology Association (https://www.media-ecology.org/media_ecology/), our issue stems from another direction; its theoretical orientation is more inspired by the work of Felix Guattari and engages with several overlapping ecologies that are aesthetico-political in their nature. It stems from a more politically oriented way of understanding the various scales and layers through which media are articulated together with politics, capitalism and nature, in which processes of media and technology cannot be detached from subjectivation. In this context, media ecology is itself a vibrant sphere of dynamics and turbulences including on its technical level. Technology is not only a passive surface for the inscription of meanings and signification, but a material…
CFP- Special Issue of the Fibreculture Journal: Exploring affect in interaction design, interaction-based art and digital art
Guest Editors: Thomas Markussen and Jonas Fritsch https://fibreculturejournal.org/ abstract deadline: February 27, 2011 (200-300 words) article deadline: June 30, 2011 publication aimed for: October, 2011 all contributors and editors must read the guidelines at https://fibreculturejournal.org/policy-and-style/ before working with the Fibreculture Journal email correspondence for this issue: Thomas dot Markussen at aarch dot dk/ jonas dot fritsch at gmail dot com The notion of affect does take many forms, and you’re right to begin by emphasizing that. To get anywhere with the concept, you have to retain the manyness of its forms. It’s not something that can be reduced to one thing. Mainly, because it’s not a thing. It’s an event, or a dimension of every event. What interests me in the concept is that if you approach it respecting its variety, you are presented with a field of questioning, a problematic field, where the customary divisions that questions about subjectivity,…
CFP- Special Issue for the Fibreculture Journal: Networked utopias and speculative futures
Editors: Susan Ballard, Zita Joyce and Lizzie Muller https://fibreculturejournal.org/ abstract deadline: February 20, 2011 article deadline: May 30, 2011 publication aimed for: November, 2011 all contributors and editors must read the guidelines at; https://fibreculturejournal.org/policy-and-style/ before working with the Fibreculture Journal email correspondence for this issue: Susan dot Ballard at op dot ac dot nz lizzie at lizziemuller dot com zita dot joyce at canterbury dot ac dot nz Since most of history’s giant trees have already been cut down, a new Ark will have to be constructed out of the materials that a desperate humanity finds at hand in insurgent communities, pirate technologies, bootlegged media, rebel science and forgotten utopias. Mike Davis “Who Will Build an Ark: The Utopian Imperative in an Age of Catastrophe” in Telepolis [Germany], 12/11/2008 For many centuries the dawn of the new millennium –the year 2000– epitomised the future to come. The twentieth century raced…
Issue 16 – Counterplay
The star player is one who modifies expected mechanisms of channeling field-potential. The star plays against the rules but not by breaking them (Massumi 2002: 77). Unruly innovation is an intrinsic dimension of gaming. To claim that play is not a passive or neutral activity is hardly a groundbreaking observation. However, we believe that the contingent and transformative dynamics unleashed by games demand careful analysis. The fact that play exists in excess of any rules or parameters inevitably leads to controversies and disputes, along with processes of economic valorisation and the extraction of value beyond the shifting boundaries of a game. All of this requires critical discussion and debate. In this special issue, therefore, we have invited responses to the concept of counterplay. Referring to ludic or playful vitality in its most transformative expressions, counterplay speaks directly to the disruptive creation of the new through the reiterations of gaming. Greig…
Journal News: Dec 2009
The Fibreculture Journal ends 2009 on a high note. The launch of FCJ-Issue 15: What Now? : The Imprecise and Disagreeable Aesthetics of Remix edited by Darren Tofts (Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne) and Christian McCrea (Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne) makes a fitting finale for the original Fibreculture Journal website. The Journal’s next issue will launch on this new publishing system on a new url: fibreculturejournal.org. Issue 15 is a dynamic issue requiring an attention to detail in terms of layout, and an ability to mix media, that would have provided a challenge in the most agile of content management systems. On that note FCJ owes Lisa Gye, the person responsible for nearly single-handedly ‘hand-coding’ the site and managing the Fibreculture Journal for so many years (not to mention contributing content), much more than the simple gratitude we have to offer. The epic task of transferring over a 100…
FCJ-105 Materiality of a Simulation: Scratch “Reading” Machine, 1931
Craig Saper Professor of Texts and Technology, University of Central Florida ‘Take any text speed it up slow it down run it backwards inch it and you will hear words that were not in the original recording new words made by the machine different people will scan out different words of course but some of the words are quite clearly there and anyone can hear them words which were not in the original tape but which are in many cases relevant to the original text as if the words themselves had been interrogated and forced to reveal their hidden meanings.’ William S. Burroughs, The Invisible Generation People got their opinions Where do they come from? Each day seems like a natural fact And what we think changes how we act. Gang of Four, ‘Why Theory’ In the epigram above, the post-punk band, Gang of Four, explains why we need theory…
FCJ-104 Materialities of Law: Celebrity Production and the Public Domain
Esther Milne Media & Communications, Swinburne University of Technology The brand’s image and its customer’s self-image will be refracted through the ‘prism’ of a star’s persona and produce a new set of perceptions … the reason it is tricky is that celebrities are unusual brands in that they talk back and they may also change their behaviour, their views and their perceived personality quite quickly, literally making them not the person they used to be and certainly not the individual with whom the brand originally partnered. — Pringle, Celebrity Sells Saddam Hussein wants to keep advertisers from using his picture in unflattering contexts. Clint Eastwood doesn’t want tabloids to write about him. Rudolf Valentino’s heirs want to control his film biography. The Girl Scouts don’t want their image soiled by association with certain activities. George Lucas wants to keep Strategic Defense Initiative fans from calling it “Star Wars.” … Uri Geller…
FCJ-103 James Brown, Sample Culture and the Permanent Distance of Glory
Steve Jones University of Sussex But here I am, the man Who started it all, and I’m glad, ‘Cause I’m number one, original, I know I’m bad ‘I’m Real’, James Brown Perhaps unsurprisingly, the James Brown song ‘I’m Real’ (1988) features the man himself lending a vocal turn (or two) to the track. The song contains numerous lyrics regaled from James Brown’s earlier hits (including ‘Make it Funky’ (1971)) and also James Brown vocal samples from ‘Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine’ (1970) and ‘Get on the Good Foot’ (1972). This chronologic duality is the starting point of the problem that concerns us here. Funkalicious. The question is simple (even if the answer is not). Why sample James Brown’s voice when the man himself was in the studio recording a vocal? What purpose could it serve, especially when he was already replicating moments from previous hits? During…
FCJ-102 Sputnik Baby
Ian Haig School of Art, RMIT University Psycho maniac interblend, shoot it up! Ever since punks were spotted walking through the rain soaked dystopic future streets in Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner(1981), a certain image of punk has been associated with ‘the future’; a kind of futuristic punk chic that also clearly owes something to the future agro of Alex in A Clockwork Orange (1971) and the Class of 1984 (1982), where punks ruled the roost in a high school teen movie set in the year of Orwell’s famous novel. We also recognise the post apocalyptic mohawked road warriors of Mad Max 2 (1981) and not to mention countless other mid-eighties sci-fi video fare, where the futuristic punk with heavy eyeliner and day glow hair has made an appearance. The images of this punk-inspired look from an already exhausted dystopic future must have activated the imagination of Tony James, the guitarist from UK punk band Generation…
FCJ-101 How can you be found when no-one knows that you are missing?
Lisa Gye Media and Communicatons, Swinburne University ‘What the reader sees will not be what he hears’ James Joyce may have said this of Finnegans Wake ‘Since we have already said everything, the reader must bear with us if we continue on a while. If we extend ourselves by force of play. If we then write a bit…’ Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, 1981:65 Script Don’t get me wrong. Australians make a lot of very fine and worthy films. In the torrid vernacular of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia The Movie, Crickey, you’d have to be a drongo not to know that Aussies make a shitload of bloody ripper flicks – strewth, they’re bonza mate, they’re really fair dinkum yarns with the best scenery and actors and stories that this bloody great big brown land has to offer. They’re absobloodyfuckinlutely faaaaannnntastic. Mate. Cobber. The only problem is nobody actually seems to want to see…
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