Announcing FCJ30: Incalculable Experience

The Fibreculture Journal returns, after a brief hiatus, with FCJ30: Incalculable Experience. Incalculable Experience is edited by Lone Bertelsen. Articles by Erin Manning, Maria Hynes, Andrew Goodman, Susan Ballard and Glen Fuller, on minor social life, executive function and fugitivity, design thinking, the anarchic share of listening, violence and objects, the limits of the contemporary university, and, more specifically, the research literature review. Many thanks to Lone Bertelsen, to the authors, and to Mat Wall-Smith for help along the way. And of course, many thanks to our ongoing readership.

Announcing FCJ28 : Creative Robotics – Rethinking Human Machine Configurations

We are happy to announce the publication of FCJ28: Creative Robotics — Rethinking Human Machine Configurations. This is our second issue for 2016. Computing the City, edited by Armin Beverungen, Florian Sprenger and Su Ballard, will follow later in 2017.

Announcing FCJ26: Entanglements – Activism and Technology

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new Special Issue FCJ26: Entanglements – Activism and Technology edited by Pip Shea, Tanya Notley and Jean Burgess with Fibreculture Journal Editor Su Ballard. There is an extraordinary amount of work here and i’d like to thank everyone involved. This is the largest issue in FCJ history and includes an additional section dedicated to reports from practitioners -‘on the ground’ Issue 26 features: FCJ-188 Disability’s Digital Frictions: Activism, Technology, and Politics Katie Ellis, Gerard Goggin and Mike Kent FCJ-189 Reimagining Work: Entanglements and Frictions around Future of Work Narratives Laura Forlano and Megan Halpern FCJ-190 Building a Better Twitter: A Study of the Twitter Alternatives GNU social, Quitter, rstat.us, and Twister Robert W. Gehl FCJ-191 Mirroring the Videos of Anonymous: Cloud Activism, Living Networks, and Political Mimesis Adam Fish FCJ-192 Sand in the Information Society Machine: How Digital Technologies Change and…

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Announcing FCJ Issue 25: Apps and Affect

We at the Fibreculture Journal are very happy to announce a new issue: Apps and Affect. FCJ25 Apps and Affect edited by Svitlana Matviyenko, Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Alison Hearn, and Andrew Murphie. Issue 25 features; FCJ-179 On Governance, Blackboxing, Measure, Body, Affect and Apps: A conversation with Patricia Ticineto Clough and Alexander R. Galloway Svitlana Matviyenko, Patricia Ticineto Clough & Alexander R Galloway FCJ-180 ‘Spotify Has Added an Event to Your Past’: (Re)writing the Self through Facebook’s Autoposting Apps Tanya Kant FCJ-181 There’s a History for That: Apps and Mundane Software as Commodity Jeremy Wade Morris and Evan Elkins FCJ-182 Middlebroware Frédérik Lesage FCJ-183 iHootenanny: A Folk Archeology of Social Media Henry Adam Svec FCJ-184 Interpassive User: Complicity and the Returns of Cybernetics Svitlana Matviyenko FCJ-185 An Algorithmic Agartha: Post-App Approaches to Synarchic Regulation Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy FCJ-186 Hack for good: Speculative labour, app development and the…

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Issue 25: Apps and Affect

Introduction [1] In William Gibson’s recent futurist novel The Peripheral, the planet has been devastated by a massive eco-techno-political catastrophe (‘the jackpot’) but remaining inhabitants are still able to enjoy the luxury of activating digital devices simply by tapping their tongues on the roof of their mouths. This touch is sufficient to set into play systems that communicate across space and time – enabling the establishment of connections back in time, for example, to people closer to our own present-day, for whom mobiles are still (somewhat) separate from the body. Thirty years ago, in his first novel Neuromancer, Gibson immortalised cyberspace with the account of what now sounds like an amazingly clunky process whereby the hero ‘jacks-in’ to virtual reality. But in The Peripheral the process of translation and transition into networks is streamlined – occluded, internal, intimate and implanted – right at the tip of the tongue. This issue…

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Announcing FCJ24: 2015 Images and Assemblages

We at the Fibreculture Journal are very happy to announce the second of three in a series of issues that developed out of a general call at the end of last year. FCJ24 Images and Assemblages edited by Su Ballard (University of Wollongong) is now live. Issue 24 features contributions from Torsten Andreasen, William Brown, Justin Clemens,  David H. Fleming, Troy Innocent, Adam Nash, Teresa Rizzo, Audrey Samson and Winnie Soon.

New Issue – FCJ-23

I’m pleased to announce the launch of Issue 23 of The Fibreculture Journal edited by Andrew Murphie and including papers from: Ted Mitew: FCJ-168 Do objects dream of an internet of things? Stephen Monteiro: FCJ-169 Mapping Moving-Image Culture: Topographical Interface and YouTube Benjamin Abraham: FCJ-170 Challenging Hate Speech With Facebook Flarf: The Role of User Practices in Regulating Hate Speech on Facebook Craig Norris: FCJ-171 Expectations denied: Fan and industry conflict around the localisation of the Japanese video game Yakuza 3 and a converastion with N. Katherine Hayles by Holger Pötzsch : FCJ-172 Posthumanism, Technogenesis, and Digital Technologies: A Conversation with N. Katherine Hayes In other news we have been very busy behind the scenes this year. Issue 23 is one of three General Issues that were put together in response to our Contemporary Issues and Events CFP from earlier this year. The second two issues in this series will be…

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New Issue: Issue 22 Trolls and the Negative Space of the Internet

We have a habit (becoming a running quip), in the FCJ management group, of proclaiming that we feel we’ve turned a corner with the launch of each new issue. Speaking personally, I think I’m finally coming to terms with the fact that each issue presents a unexpected series of corners and that the act of negotiating them continually makes and remakes the journal. Each time we think we have the circuit well mapped out, documented and with all contingency accounted for, some unexpected challenge emerges. As we progress through the production of coming issues I will remind myself that in the end, the remarkable distributed effort that goes into publishing, all of it volunteered, inevitably results in a substantial contribution in the theory and analysis of media and technical cultures. Moreover, I will remind myself that, in the determination to make that contribution, and in the drive to realise it,…

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A Quiet Period and a Vital Future

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…

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Where to Next?

We’re very happy to be publishing FCJ 20, the Network Utopias issue. It’s a fine issue. With a great deal of subtlety and force, it pulls apart the notion of network utopia, while leaving a great deal of room for what it is that networks truly give us. There’s been an enormous amount of work done by guest editors Su Ballard, Zita Joyce and Lizzie Muller—careful and demanding work. The CFP received a huge response, and Su, Zita and Lizzie have done a wonderful job crafting the issue that we now publish. FCJ wants to warmly thank everyone who submitted abstracts and articles during this process. Of course, we could not publish all the articles we received, and this has often been a cause for genuine sadness at times, but hope the ideas that didn’t make it through the long and complex process of editing this issue find a home…

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