future issues
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@swin.edu.au)
Christian McCrea (cmccrea@swin.edu.au) – For editorial and essay enquiries.
Other issues of the Fibreculture Journal will
include: cross-signal processing and transversality; contemporary media
ecologies, urbanism and locative technology. CFPs will be distributed soon.
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