The Fibreculture Journal<br>
<a href="http://journal.fibreculture.org/">http://journal.fibreculture.org/</a><br>
<br>
<a href="http://journal.fibreculture.org/index.html">The Fibreculture Journal</a>
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.<br>
<br>
---<br>
<br>
The Fibreculture Journal - CFP - What Now? : Materiality, Recombination and Remix<br>
<br>
An issue of the Fibreculture Journal critically exploring the history of materiality, recombination and remix.<br>
<br>
Issue Editors: Christian McCrea and Darren Tofts<br>
<br>
Full Submissions Due May 17<br>
<br>
What now? <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
“ “ “ Not that again ” ” ”<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
What time is now? <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
Why?<br>
<br>
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?<br>
<br>
The themes of most concern to the editors are:<br>
<br>
- Artforms and aesthetic turns since 2000<br>
- The monotony of crisis / the crisis of monotony<br>
- What's left of (and about) hauntology and eschatology<br>
- Rococo, Mannerism and the return of Decadence<br>
- After remix<br>
- Art in the Shadow of Superflat<br>
- The turn to materiality in contemporary theory<br>
- Sensory stains and élan vital<br>
- The crash of convergence<br>
- Microhistories, specificities and morphologies of remix<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
Articles must be submitted in full Fibreculture journal house style. <br>
<br>
You must first read the Guidelines for Submission at <a href="http://journal.fibreculture.org/polstyle.html#submit">http://journal.fibreculture.org/polstyle.html#submit</a>. <br>
<br>
You can access information about house style at <a href="http://journal.fibreculture.org/polstyle.html#style">http://journal.fibreculture.org/polstyle.html#style</a>. <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Editors:<br>
<br>
Dr. Darren Tofts (<a href="mailto:dtofts@swin.edu.au">dtofts@swin.edu.au</a>)<br>
Christian McCrea (<a href="mailto:cmccrea@swin.edu.au">cmccrea@swin.edu.au</a>) – For editorial and essay enquiries. <br>
<br>
<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>"Take me to the operator, I want to ask some questions" - Barbara Morgenstern<br><br>"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<br>
<br>"I thought I had reached port; but I seemed to be cast back again into the open sea" (Deleuze and Guattari, after Leibniz)<br><br>Andrew Murphie - Associate Professor<br>School of English, Media and Performing Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, 2052<br>
Editor - The Fibreculture Journal <a href="http://journal.fibreculture.org/">http://journal.fibreculture.org/</a>><br>web:<br><a href="http://www.andrewmurphie.org/">http://www.andrewmurphie.org/</a><br><a href="http://www.andrewmurphie.org/blog/">http://www.andrewmurphie.org/blog/</a><br>
<a href="http://www.last.fm/user/andersand/">http://www.last.fm/user/andersand/</a><br><a href="http://researchhub.cofa.unsw.edu.au/ccap/">http://researchhub.cofa.unsw.edu.au/ccap/</a><br><br>fax:612 93856812 tlf:612 93855548 email: <a href="mailto:a.murphie@unsw.edu.au">a.murphie@unsw.edu.au</a><br>
room 311H, Webster Building<br>