FCJManager
FCJ-026 Postcard from the Edge: Autobiographical Musings on the Dis/organisations of the Multimedia Industry
Linda Leung This article is a critical reflection on the dot.com boom and the volatile industry, discipline and conditions of labour it has spawned. It offers an autobiographical insight into my past experiences as one of its labourers, as well as my current perspective as an academic responsible for cultivating these industry professionals. Autobiography offers an opportunity to impart my observations as a practitioner in the multimedia industry during its heyday, and lends to them an ‘experiential authority’ (Clifford, 1988: 35) which has been largely ignored in dot.com studies. According to Stanley (1997), autobiography offers a connection between the individual and the social, in this case, the individual new media worker and larger industry of which I was part. In addition, as an educator I am familiar with the importance of reflective practice in experiential learning (Boud and Miller, 1996: 3; Beaty, 1992: 13) and have access to the experiential…
FCJ-025 Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry
Julian Kücklich The digital games industry comprises a significant part of the creative industries, with revenues comparable to the box office intakes of the Hollywood film industry. A recent report published by British market research firm Informa Media values the global games market in 2003 at 33.2 billion US dollars (Thomas, 2004). Loren Shuster notes: ‘To put those figures into context, the size of the gaming industry is now approaching the music industry, which is worth around $38 billion, and has already surpassed the motion picture industry in terms of box office revenue. Moreover, gaming is growing, and may actually exceed the value of the music industry by the end of 2004′ (Shuster, 2003). This success has led to an industry-wide concentration process, in the course of which smaller developers and publishers have either been taken over by large corporations such as Electronic Arts and Ubisoft, or pushed out of…
FCJ-024 A Playful Multitude? Mobilising and Counter-Mobilising Immaterial Game Labour
Greig de Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford Putting Play to Work in Games of Empire This article is a preliminary portrait of work in the video and computer game development industry, a sector of creative, cognitive labour that exemplifies the allure of new media work. For millions of young men (and many aging ones, and some women) from Shanghai to Montréal, a job making virtual games seems employment nirvana – a promise of being paid to play. But just as game development studios typify the gloss of new media labour they also expose its dark side. Drawing on interviews we conducted with game developers in Canada, this article examines the conditions of digital game labour, this cultural industry’s “work as play” mantra, the pleasures and potentialities of game production, the blemishes that mar this attractive vista, and the new infractions these tensions provoke. In addition to looking at how game labour…
FCJ-023 On the Life and Deeds of San Precario, Patron Saint of Precarious Workers and Lives
Marcello Tarì and Ilaria Vanni Origins of San Precario Noi siamo la generazione post-socialista, la generazione del dopo guerra fredda, della fine delle burocrazie verticali e del controllo sull’informazione. Siamo un movimento globale e neuropeo, che porta avanti la rivoluzione democratica scaturita dal Sessantotto mondiale e lotta contro la distopia neoliberista oggi al culmine. Siamo ecoattivisti e mediattivisti, siamo i libertari della Rete e i metroradicali dello spazio urbano, siamo le mutazioni transgender del femminismo globale, siamo gli hacker del terribile reale. Siamo gli agitatori del precariato e gli insorti del cognitariato. Siamo anarcosindacalisti e postsocialisti. Siamo tutti migranti alla ricerca di una vita migliore. E non ci riconosciamo in voi, stratificazioni tetre e tetragone di ceti politici sconfitti già nel XX secolo. Non ci riconosciamo nella sinistra italyana. We are the post-socialist generation, the post-cold war generation, the end of vertical bureaucracies and of information control generation. We are…
FCJ-022 From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again: Labour, Life and Unstable Networks
Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter In Florian Schneider’s documentary Organizing the Unorganizables (2002), Raj Jayadev of the DE-BUG worker’s collective in Silicon Valley identifies the central problem of temporary labour as one of time. Jayadev recounts the story of ‘Edward’, a staff-writer for the Debug magazine: ‘My Mondays roll into my Tuesdays, and my Tuesdays roll into my Wednesdays without me knowing it. And I lose track of time and I lose hope with what tomorrow’s going to be’. Jayadev continues: ‘What concerns temp workers the most is not so much a $2 an hour pay raise or safer working conditions. Rather, they want the ability to create, to look forward to something new, and to reclaim the time of life’. How does this desire to create, all too easily associated with artistic production, intersect with the experiences of other workers who engage in precarious forms of labour? With the…
Issue 05 – Precarious Labour
Multitudes, Creative Organisation and the Precarious Condition of New Media Labour Broadly speaking, this issue of Fibreculture Journal is interested in the problem of political organisation as it relates to the overlapping spheres of labour and life within post-Fordist, networked settings. It’s becoming increasingly clear that multiple forms of exclusion and exploitation within the media and cultural industries run along the lines of gender, ethnicity, age, and geography. New forms of class division are emerging whose locus of tension can be attributed to the ownership and control of information. The mobile capacity of information corresponds, in many instances, with the flexible nature of work across many sectors of the media and cultural industries. And it is precisely the informatisation of social relations that makes political organisation such a difficult – even undesireable – undertaking for many. Without recourse to traditional institutions such as the union, new technics of organisation are…
FCJ-021 Rhythmic Parasites: A Virological Analysis of Sound and Dance
Stamatia Portanova East London University Introduction This paper sets out a conceptual analysis of rhythm as a force of disruption and of re-organisation. By disentangling rhythm from human corporeality, habits and purposes (rhythm as a prerogative of human movement), we will propose its re-qualification as an attribute of matter itself: rhythm as a galvanising current flowing in and between all human, animal and technological, animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic bodies, simultaneously dissolving their solid organisations and re-modelling their fluid exchanges. Being supported by an ontological dichotomy, most philosophical or musicological theories have perpetuated the difference between rhythm as a mechanical and broken repetition of units subject to physical laws (as in Plato’s essentialist theory of rhythm), and rhythm as an organic, uncontrolled and continuously flowing expression of the natural world (coinciding with phenomenological notions such as Henri Bergson’s ‘duration’). [1] In order to escape this philosophical impasse, the aim…
FCJ-020 Marginal Networks: The Virus between Complexity and Suppression
Roberta Buiani York University, Canada ‘What is a Margin ?’ I asked a friend recently. You know what a margin is” she replied “It’s outside the body of the text. It’s what holds the page together. Also,” she added, “It’s where you write your notes.’ (Berland, 1997) Introduction [print_link] In a recent article, Sampson suggested that the metaphoric relocation of the contagious properties of biological viruses into viral technologies has produced the assumption that computer viruses are ‘imbued with an alien otherness’ (Sampson, 2004). However, it is arguable that such alterity can be ascribed to all viruses, as long as they are analysed as cultural notions or as discursive forms instead of being forced within clearly defined disciplinary boundaries, and being classified as separate and incompatible entities, organisms, or mere strings of code. Suspended between life and death, myth and reality, abstract and concrete, viruses are perfect candidate for the…
FCJ-020 Marginal Networks: The Virus between Complexity and Suppression
Roberta Buiani York University, Canada ‘What is a Margin ?’ I asked a friend recently. You know what a margin is” she replied “It’s outside the body of the text. It’s what holds the page together. Also,” she added, “It’s where you write your notes.’ (Berland, 1997) Introduction In a recent article, Sampson suggested that the metaphoric relocation of the contagious properties of biological viruses into viral technologies has produced the assumption that computer viruses are ‘imbued with an alien otherness’ (Sampson, 2004). However, it is arguable that such alterity can be ascribed to all viruses, as long as they are analysed as cultural notions or as discursive forms instead of being forced within clearly defined disciplinary boundaries, and being classified as separate and incompatible entities, organisms, or mere strings of code. Suspended between life and death, myth and reality, abstract and concrete, viruses are perfect candidate for the champions…
FCJ-020 Marginal Networks: The Virus between Complexity and Suppression
Roberta Buiani York University, Canada ‘What is a Margin ?’ I asked a friend recently. You know what a margin is” she replied “It’s outside the body of the text. It’s what holds the page together. Also,” she added, “It’s where you write your notes.’ (Berland, 1997) Introduction In a recent article, Sampson suggested that the metaphoric relocation of the contagious properties of biological viruses into viral technologies has produced the assumption that computer viruses are ‘imbued with an alien otherness’ (Sampson, 2004). However, it is arguable that such alterity can be ascribed to all viruses, as long as they are analysed as cultural notions or as discursive forms instead of being forced within clearly defined disciplinary boundaries, and being classified as separate and incompatible entities, organisms, or mere strings of code. Suspended between life and death, myth and reality, abstract and concrete, viruses are perfect candidate for the champions…
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
