[csaa-forum] Transformations Issue 14 'Accidental Environments' now out

[Warwick Mules]

Transformations announces the publication of Issue 14 -  March 2007


ACCIDENTAL ENVIRONMENTS


³The Accident is not an exception or a sickness of our apolitical regimes;
nor it is a correctable defect of our civilization: it is the natural
consequence of our science, our politics, and our morality.²
‹ Octavio Paz, Conjunctions and Disjunctions.


Our lives are filled with accidents, from the mundanity of spilled milk and
a slip of the tongue, to large-scale, mediated and mediatized accidents;
here we sit, glued to the screens, as increasing numbers of unruly cyclones
smash into tropical coasts, as Black-Hawk helicopters fall out of Iraqi and
Afghani skies, as friendly-fire death reports issue from the war-zones of
the Middle-East, as narcotized teenagers suicide on the side-effects of
their over-prescribed anti-depressants. Representations of the accident span
the highs and lows of culture; there is a popular culture of the accident
and the disaster ­ remember when The Coast was Toast!? ­ and an avant-garde
culture of chance and aleatoric production. There is a discourse and an
aesthetic of the accident, a mode of concerned and shocked reportage and a
standard plot-line by which to invite the accident in, to excite, abreact
and entertain. Accidents are events, and they produce events, they are
constituted within spectacular milieux.

Accidents are generally understood to happen by chance. They are seen as the
mark of a failure to maintain control of an environment, or as the
unexpected outcome of ³natural² environmental occurrences. But perhaps
accidents can be seen in another way, as productive, in the sense that
seemingly incongruous things and events coincide or collide and together
create possibilities and release potentials. Or maybe, as Octavio Paz
suggests, they¹re not accidents at all! In a world that is increasingly
reliant on technological means of knowing and doing, accidents come thick
and fast, and the accidentality of the accident is brought soundly into
question.


ARTICLES:

Cruel Weather: Natural Disasters and Structural Violence
Dennis Soron

Machine Breaths: Assembling the Mechanical Ventilator Body
Bjorn Nansen

Toxic Shock: Gendered Environments and Embodied Knowledge in Don DeLillo¹s
White Noise and Todd Haynes¹s [Safe]
Rachel Carroll

Calculated Uncertainty: Computers, Chance Encounters, and "Community" in the
Work of Cedric Price'
Rowan Wilken

The Accidental Topology of Digital Culture: How the Network Becomes Viral
Tony Sampson

Accidental Participation in Control, in the Small of Society
Don Winiecki

Access at

http://transformations.cqu.edu.au

The Editors
Regards

Warwick

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Dr. Warwick Mules
General Editor, Transformations     http://transformations.cqu.edu.au
Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies
Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Education
Central Queensland University
Bundaberg Campus
Bundaberg Queensland 4670
Australia

Adjunct Senior Lecturer
School of English, Media and Art History
University of Queensland
Australia

Phone: 07 41507142
Fax: 07 41507090
Mobile: 0412292541
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