It is now perhaps a commonplace that digital, networked and informational media are extremely transient. They diversify in form and function at a dizzying rate. At the same time, they transit and fuse “social” and “natural” differences in a manner which reconfigures all the worlds involved. It is also perhaps a commonplace to suggest that some established powers have found it difficult to come to grips with this (although this is perhaps beginning to change). For many, from seriously challenged newspaper proprietors to established media disciplines, it might be time to pause for breath, if only for a moment—to regroup and adapt established practices and ideas, to count the survivors from among the old media worlds of just a few years ago.
While occasionally sympathetic, issue 18 of the Fibreculture Journal questions this approach. If we pause for breath, it is to take in the new air. This issue draws on the accelerated evolutions of media forms and processes, the microrevolutions in the social (and even the natural sciences) that dynamic media foster, even the way in which “new” media lead us to reconsider the diversity of “old” media species. Summed up simply here under the sign/event of the “trans,” this issue catalyzes new concepts, accounts of and suggestions for new practices for working with all these processes.
The issue was edited by Andrew Murphie, Adrian Mackenzie and Mitchell Whitelaw. Articles include Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders’ ‘Other Ways Of Knowing: Embodied Investigations of the Unstable, Slippery and Incomplete’, John Tinnell’s ‘Transversalising the Ecological Turn: Four Components of Felix Guattari’s Ecosophical Perspective’, Vince Dziekan’s ‘Anxious Atmospheres, and the Transdisciplinary Practice of United Visual Artists’, Kristoffer Gansing’s ‘The Transversal Generic: Media-Archaeology and Network Culture’, Christoph Brunner and Jonas Fritsch’s ‘Interactive Technologies as Fields of Transduction’, Troy Rhoades’ ‘From Representation to Sensation: The Transduction of Images in John F. Simon Jr.’s Every Icon’, Michael Dieter’s ‘The Becoming Environmental of Power: Tactical Media After Control’, Simon Mills’ ‘Concrete Software: Simondon’s mechanology and the techno-social’ and Fenwick McKelvey’s ‘A Programmable Platform? Drupal, Modularity, and the Future of the Web’.
We have four issues in process at the moment. The Ubiquity issue will come out in November. In the first half of 2012 we will publish an issue on Affect in Interaction Design, and two issues concerning Networked Utopias and Speculative Futures. 2012 will again be a year in which we plan to further take up the many opportunities made available to us by contemporary publishing. We also plan to have a new CFP or two by early 2012. Many thanks to all our authors and readers (and of course our many referees!) for supported the Fibreculture Journal. As always, many thanks from us all to Mat Wall-Smith, our journal editor.
