FCJManager
FCJ-078 Plastic Super Models: aesthetics, architecture and the model of emergence
Pia Ednie-Brown RMIT University, Melbourne SuperModels What does physical eroticism signify if not violation of the very being of its practitioners? …The whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives. (George Bataille, 2001: 17) To become a supermodel is a dream of many young girls, longing for their own bodies to exemplify the image of desire and eroticism. Young women’s bodies provide a framework for the fashionable or, in other words, for the endlessly restless style of contemporary longing. In wanting to be, say, another Elle MacPherson or Christy Turlington, they long for the awkward unfoldings of early womanhood to blossom into the very shapes and forms that collective desires inhabit, or flow through. As they feel the stirrings of their own desire intensify, they want to feel the flow of collective desire turn back to pass through…
FCJ-077 Schizoanalysis as Metamodeling
Janell Watson Virginia Tech, USA Félix Guattari, writing both on his own and with philosopher Gilles Deleuze, developed the notion of schizoanalysis out of his frustration with what he saw as the shortcomings of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, namely the orientation toward neurosis, emphasis on language, and lack of socio-political engagement. Guattari was analyzed by Lacan, attended Lacan’s teaching seminars from the beginning, and remained a member of Lacan’s school until his death in 1992. His unorthodox uses of Lacanism grew out of his clinical work with psychotics and involvement in militant politics. Paradoxically, even as he later rebelled theoretically and practically against Lacan’s ‘mathemes of the unconscious’ and topology of knots, Guattari ceaselessly drew diagrams and models. Deleuze once said of Guattari that ‘His ideas are drawings, or even diagrams’ (Deleuze, 2006: 238). His single-authored books are filled with strange figures which borrow from fields as diverse as linguistics,…
Issue 12 – Metamodels
Models, Metamodels and Contemporary Media The Fibreculture Journal and Open Humanities Press Issue 12 of the Fibreculture Journal marks the exciting event of the journal joining with Open Humanities Press. OHP is a major initiative in online publishing in the humanities, ‘an international open access publishing collective in critical and cultural theory’. Those of us who have worked on the Fibreculture Journal from 2003 are very happy to be invited to join with OHP, and grateful to the organizers, especially Sigi Jöttkandt, Gary Hall, Paul Ashtonand David Ottina, for all their work bringing OHP into being. The Fibreculture Journal has always been fully committed to online and open access publishing, and to the best in critical and cultural theory. It has now published 84 articles on a range of critical issues in what was, when we began, internet and new media studies. In the period of 5 years since the…
FCJ-076 Continuous Materiality: Through a Hierarchy of Computational Codes
Kenneth J. Knoespe and Jichen Zhu Georgia Institute of Technology Introduction The legacy of Cartesian dualism inherent in linguistic theory deeply influences current views on the relation between natural language, computer code, and the physical world. However, the oversimplified distinction between mind and body falls short of capturing the complex interaction between the material and the immaterial. In this paper, we posit a hierarchy of codes to delineate a wide spectrum of continuous materiality. Our research suggests that diagrams in architecture provide a valuable analog for approaching computer code in emergent digital systems. After commenting on the ways that Cartesian dualism continues to haunt discussions of code, we turn our attention to diagrams and design morphology. Finally we notice the implications that a material understanding of code carries for further research on the relation between human cognition and digital code. Our discussion concludes by discussing several areas that we have…
FCJ-075 The Past as the Future? Nostalgia and Retrogaming in Digital Culture
Jaakko Suominen University of Turku, Finland Introduction Retro games. Simultaneously with the console and computer games becoming increasingly impressive both visually and in their dramatics, the old, simple Super Mario Bros, Pacmans and Donkey Kongs have become hits. In the rush hour buses, teenagers roll their Rubik’s cube – the one and only. Sanna Leskinen, ‘Mikä mahtaa olla in?’ (‘What would be in?’), Yhteishyvä 3/2006. At the end of the year 2005 the Finnish commercial TV channel MTV3 freshened their appearance. The owl logo of the company, which has been in use for a long time, bended again into new shapes. The owl lived on as a animated figure, who offers services and, particularly, as a stylized eye in the channel sign logos. The sign themes marking the beginnings and endings of commercial breaks place the owl eye into new, culturally recognizable situations, which try to achieve comedy and inventiveness….
FCJ-074 A Game of One’s Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Digital Space
Tracy Fullerton, USC School of Cinematic Arts, Los Angeles Jacquelyn Ford Morie, USC Institute for Creative Technologies Celia Pearce, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta Introduction Je suis l’espace où je suis I am the space where I am. -Noël Arnaud, L’Etat d’ebauche In the opening pages of her classic essay, A Room of Ones Own, Virginia Woolf describes being blocked from entering the “turf” of the University in Oxbridge by an administrative gate-keeper. Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me. … His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help, he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me’ (Woolf, 1929). This scene invokes the ways in which women have been systematically barred from the digital playground, both as players and as…
FCJ-073 Technology transfer present and futures in the electronic arts
Brian Degger, transitlab.org Newcastle upon Tyne, UK Introduction The intersection of art and technology is not new, yet the context and history of this interchange have largely been ignored, though it extends back hundreds, even thousands of years. For most of that time the arts exerted a strong influence on technological and scientific invention and discovery; it is only recently that the arts have depended quite so heavily on technology to lead the way (Goldberg, 2001). Art and science are both cultural activities (Wilson, 2003). The push for a new interplay between them has come both from artists trying to access new technologies and researchers desiring additional creative insights into modern innovation. Access to sciences techniques or technology, in order to critique or use them aesthetically, is restricted in many ways. It is not as simple as buying ‘off the shelf’ paints as used by the traditional arts. There are…
FCJ-072 Experience and abstraction: the arts and the logic of machines
Simon Penny University of California Irvine Introduction Much of my writing has grappled with issues which I find fundamental to the formation of art-practices which exploit the capabilities of emerging technologies (often but not always, involving real time digital computation) (Penny, 1995; 1997).[1] These theoretical inquiries arise out of pragmatic attempts to apply these technologies to artistic practice. I have been developing custom electronic and digital technologies for cultural practices for twenty-five years. Throughout that time, I have felt an abiding disquiet regarding implicit disjunctions between technological and cultural practices, at a fundamental level. This paper is an attempt to make explicit a set of issues which I feel are fundamental to the contemporary socio-technological context, and crucially relevant to questions interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary digital arts practices, and to the question of the role of the arts on campuses and in the world at large.[2] The presence of arts practices on…
FCJ-071 Dada Redux: Elements of Dadaist Practice in Contemporary Electronic Literature
Scott Rettberg The University of Bergen Introduction Too often the discourse surrounding contemporary digital art and electronic literature treats these artifacts as if the most compelling aspects about them are their novelty, their very newness. One need look no further than the theme of the 2007 Digital Arts and Culture Conference, ‘The Future of Digital Media Culture’, to see this. Because our orientation is always forward towards the future, we are inclined toward a kind of myopia, and reluctance to look at the new through the lens of the past. With this orientation, there is furthermore a danger of placing too high a value on novelty at the expense of other aesthetic and ideological criteria. We see this in new media art discourse again and again. Turf wars regularly take place over ‘firstness’ – which designer was the first to use this technique, who was the first to integrate this…
FCJ-070 Art and (Second) Life: Over the hills and far away?
Caroline McCaw Otago Polytechnic, Dunedin, New Zealand Introduction I must admit a general unease yet compulsive fascination towards the emerging social environments in Second Life. Partly I am wary of the time commitment associated with learning and developing the necessary skills for a full community participation in Second Life. By this I am referring to both time to develop both the technical proficiencies as well as the time to develop and maintain friendships and community connections that combine to actualize a socially participatory experience appropriate to a resident rather than a tourist or visitor. Here time becomes a currency, and while every artist and researcher must invest time, it is the consideration of extra time at a networked computer that must have as its consequence less time in the grounded experiences at ‘home’, with my immediate and very physically located friends and family. In this sense I confess that my…
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