[csaa-forum] The Fibreculture Journal - CFP - What Now? : Materiality, Recombination and Remix

[Andrew Murphie]

The Fibreculture Journal
http://journal.fibreculture.org/

The Fibreculture Journal <http://journal.fibreculture.org/index.html> is a
peer reviewed international journal that explores critical and speculative
interventions in the debate and discussions concerning information and
communication technologies and their policy frameworks, network cultures and
their informational logic, new media forms and their deployment, and the
possibilities of socio-technical invention and sustainability.

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The Fibreculture Journal - CFP - What Now? : Materiality, Recombination and
Remix

An issue of the Fibreculture Journal critically exploring the history of
materiality, recombination and remix.

Issue Editors: Christian McCrea and Darren Tofts

Full Submissions Due May 17

What now?

Even filing cabinets have designers, and even collectors must pin the
butterfly. We can move media around but what do our gestures give away when
we do?  And exactly who are we addressing when we lovingly splice the most
obscure B-film JD trash trailer with carefully sutured sound samples from
the Oprah Winfrey Show? Cultural objects become eternal cuds, passing
between unwilling stomachs, looking for any Youtubes out of the digestive
system. The opulence and decadence of the fragmenting media apparatus is
feeding aesthetic concerns, political realisations and social actions just
as the old familiar shadows – legal, technical and formal – grow so massive
as to blot them out.

“ “ “ Not that again ” ” ”

In his landmark 1967 essay “The Literature of Exhaustion”, American novelist
John Barth uncannily forecast the contemporary aesthetic fashioning of
remix, mash-ups and modding.  Far from being dismayed by the “used-upness of
certain forms”, Barth celebrated the creative potential of remaking and
remodeling everything and anything cultural history had to offer and in
doing so solicited what would come to be called remix. His portrait of any
given creative work as a kind or ur-architexture endlessly open to
reconstitution, reassembling and dissembling into new forms, prefigured
poststructuralist notions of alterity and intertextuality, the radical
approaches to textual editing proffered by Jerome McGann and Hans Walter
Gabler, the ‘80s obsession with appropriation, quotation and, perhaps most
dramatically, the intervention of the digital paradigm.  Recognition of the
already said was vital to reconciling the brittle and fraught balance
between plagiarism and invention in the re-use of found material; think of
it as a kind of genteel acknowledgment or recognition of another happy
return of an old favourite.

What time is now?

The cultural and academic fascination with the modalities of remix during
the 1990s has elapsed, repeated, recursed and reversed. New exigencies of
cultural control, such as DRM, (also known as the rights of corporations
digitally managed for free by the consumer), are not a romantic polar
opposite to the sensation of freer and freer access to our digital
histories. They are part of the same process, by which the openness of the
text is literalised and sold back to us.

Why?

In this issue of Fibreculture Journal we invite critical responses to and
tactical engagements with questions of aesthetics under the digital
compress. Another compress has preyed on our criticality; the univocality of
‘convergence’ that professes to map difference, collect it, catalogue it and
publish it from our digestive centres of excellence. What endures, and what
haunts is a vital point of distinction in how culture forms under conditions
of apparent endless reproducibility. Materiality matters. For example, do
the possibilities of remix still offer up contingencies for interruption and
play? Is a Youtube video equipped with the same political affordances as a
lo-fi VHS dub?

The themes of most concern to the editors are:

-    Artforms and aesthetic turns since 2000
-    The monotony of crisis / the crisis of monotony
-    What's left of (and about) hauntology and eschatology
-    Rococo, Mannerism and the return of Decadence
-    After remix
-    Art in the Shadow of Superflat
-    The turn to materiality in contemporary theory
-    Sensory stains and élan vital
-    The crash of convergence
-    Microhistories, specificities and morphologies of remix

This issue seeks critical and creative responses to the concerns described.
Critical work will be reviewed according to the journal’s peer review
system, and creative work will be assessed curatorially in terms of the
proposal’s engagement with the issue’s suggested themes.

We seek full papers rather than abstracts for submission, although the
editors welcome enquiries about the suitability of essays in preparation, or
the generation of creative works.

Articles must be submitted in full Fibreculture journal house style.

You must first read the Guidelines for Submission at
http://journal.fibreculture.org/polstyle.html#submit.

You can access information about house style at
http://journal.fibreculture.org/polstyle.html#style.

Please note, submissions not in house style will automatically be returned
to authors for formatting. That is, you will not be able to have your paper
considered for publication unless you have formatted it correctly.  The
journal is peer reviewed and authors are expected to take readers reports
into consideration when finalising their articles for publication.
Negotiation with the editors over potential changes is usual practice.

Editors:

Dr. Darren Tofts (dtofts at swin.edu.au)
Christian McCrea (cmccrea at swin.edu.au) – For editorial and essay enquiries.



-- 
"Take me to the operator, I want to ask some questions" - Barbara
Morgenstern

"A traveller, who has lost his way, should not ask, Where am I? What he
really wants to know is, Where are the other places" - Alfred North
Whitehead

"I thought I had reached port; but I seemed to be cast back again into the
open sea" (Deleuze and Guattari, after Leibniz)

Andrew Murphie - Associate Professor
School of English, Media and Performing Arts, University of New South Wales,
Sydney, Australia, 2052
Editor - The Fibreculture Journal http://journal.fibreculture.org/>
web:
http://www.andrewmurphie.org/
http://www.andrewmurphie.org/blog/
http://www.last.fm/user/andersand/
http://researchhub.cofa.unsw.edu.au/ccap/

fax:612 93856812 tlf:612 93855548 email: a.murphie at unsw.edu.au
room 311H, Webster Building
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