FCJManager
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…
FCJ-100 Cultural Modulation and The Zero Originality Clause of Remix Culture in Australian Contemporary Art
Ross Rudesch Harley Professor of Media Arts, University of New South Wales Screenshot: ‘Astro Black: A History of Hip-Hop (Episodes 0-2)’ (2007-08) Soda_Jerk Pop Art’s ability to mash highbrow and lowbrow culture paved the way for Pop Tronic’s essentially mono-brow outlook… Pop Art strayed from Pop Tronics by whoring itself to generative creative arts such as painting. This violates the Zero Originality Clause of Pop Tronic which states “Under no circumstances must the Pop Tronicist stray from the sanctioned triad of operations: Copy, Cut and Collage.” (Soda_Jerk, 2009) 1. In this article I want to reflect briefly on a number of themes to do with the cultural modulation of post-digital remix culture in the context of Australian contemporary art. In particular, I focus on some key figures who have contributed to a particular aesthetics and politics of audio-visual remix. In linking these artistic precursors to current forms of remix, I…
FCJ-099 The Renewable Tradition (Extended Play Remix)
Mark Amerika Professor of Art and Art History, University of Colorado Quoting from his own short story ‘Death of the Novel’ Obviously there’s no progress in art. Progress toward what? The avant-garde is a convenient propaganda device, but when it wins the war everything is avant-garde, which leaves us just about where we were before. The only thing that’s sure is that we move, and as we move we leave things behind–the way we felt yesterday, the way we talked about it. Form is your footprints in the sand when you look back. (Sukenick, 1981: 35) The quote comes from ‘Death of the Novel’ a fictional short story by Ronald Sukenick to introduce his artist essay ‘The New Tradition’ which is collected in the groundbreaking anthology of artist poetics entitled Surfiction The New Tradition (Sukenick used to tell me) is the one we’re always on the cusp of inventing by…
Issue 15 – Remix
At first I had considered him to be as singular as the phoenix of rhetorical praise; after frequenting his pages a bit, I came to think I could recognize his voice, or his practices, in texts from diverse literatures and periods. I shall record a few of these here. Borges, ‘Kafka and His Precursors’ Many happy returns It became a minor phenomenon during 2007. By September 2009 it was a virus out of control. Described in Wired as a ‘popular internet meme’ (Wortham, 2008), the obsessive serial mash-up of a key sequence from Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2004 film of the last days of Adolf Hitler, Der Untergang (The Downfall), is suggestive of the cultural logic of the contemporary formation known as remix. Remix culture is comprised of what could loosely be termed amateurs and professionals engaged in the practice of creatively re-using found material. The distinction is useful in identifying the…
Call for Abstracts/Papers: “Trans” – Transversals, Transduction, Transmateriality.
Issue Editors: Adrian Mackenzie, Andrew Murphie (fibreculturejournal@gmail.com: for editorial inquiries) and Mitchell Whitelaw Abstracts due: March 31 Full Submissions Due: May 31 Publication: Aimed for late November 2010 Articles must be submitted in full Fibreculture Journal house style. You can also access information about house style at https://fibreculturejournal.org/policy-and-style/. You must first read the Guidelines for Submission at https://fibreculturejournal.org/policy-and-style/. [Please note, submissions not in house style will automatically be returned to authors for formatting. That is, you will not be able to have your paper considered for publication unless you have formatted it correctly. The journal is peer reviewed and authors are expected to take readers reports into consideration when finalising their articles for publication. Negotiation with the editors over potential changes is usual practice.] Digital, networked and informational media are extremely dynamic, and constantly diversifying in form and function at a dizzying rate. They fuse with social (and “natural”) worlds…
Future Issues and Archives
Connections
- ARCDigital
- C-Theory
- Cntr History & New Media
- CoDE
- Computational Culture
- Cosmos and History
- Ctrl-Z
- Culture Machine
- Digital Culture and Ed…
- Digital Humanities Alliance
- Digital Studies
- Eludamos
- Film-Philosophy
- First Monday
- Future of the Book
- Hyperrhiz
- Inflexions
- Institute of Net Cultures
- Jrnal Digital Information
- Junctures
- nmediac
- Noema
- Open Humanities Alliance
- Open Humanities Press
- Parrhesia
- Public Library of Science
- Sarai
- Transformations
- Vague Terrain
