Fibreculture journal, 18: trans (2011)

“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.”

Articles:
Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders: Other Ways Of Knowing: Embodied Investigations of the Unstable, Slippery and Incomplete
John Tinnell: Transversalising the Ecological Turn: Four Components of Felix Guattari’s Ecosophical Perspective
Vince Dziekan: Anxious Atmospheres, and the Transdisciplinary Practice of United Visual Artists
Kristoffer Gansing: The Transversal Generic: Media-Archaeology and Network Culture
Christoph Brunner and Jonas Fritsch: Interactive Environments as Fields of Transduction
Troy Rhoades: From Representation to Sensation: The Transduction of Images in John F. Simon Jr.’s ‘Every Icon’
Michael Dieter: The Becoming Environmental of Power: Tactical Media After Control
Simon Mills: Concrete Software: Simondon’s mechanology and the techno-social
Fenwick McKelvey: A Programmable Platform? Drupal, Modularity, and the Future of the Web

Edited by Andrew Murphie, Adrian Mackenzie and Mitchell Whitelaw
Publisher Fibreculture Publications/The Open Humanities Press, Sydney, Australia, October 2011
ISSN 1449-1443

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Jussi Parikka: Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (2010)

“Since the early nineteenth century, when entomologists first popularized the unique biological and behavioral characteristics of insects, technological innovators and theorists have proposed insects as templates for a wide range of technologies. In Insect Media, Jussi Parikka analyzes how insect forms of social organization—swarms, hives, webs, and distributed intelligence—have been used to structure modern media technologies and the network society, providing a radical new perspective on the interconnection of biology and technology.

Through close engagement with the pioneering work of insect ethologists, including Jakob von Uexküll and Karl von Frisch, posthumanist philosophers, media theorists, and contemporary filmmakers and artists, Parikka develops an insect theory of media, one that conceptualizes modern media as more than the products of individual human actors, social interests, or technological determinants. They are, rather, profoundly nonhuman phenomena that both draw on and mimic the alien lifeworlds of insects.

Deftly moving from the life sciences to digital technology, from popular culture to avant-garde art and architecture, and from philosophy to cybernetics and game theory, Parikka provides innovative conceptual tools for exploring the phenomena of network society and culture. Challenging anthropocentric approaches to contemporary science and culture, Insect Media reveals the possibilities that insects and other nonhuman animals offer for rethinking media, the conflation of biology and technology, and our understanding of, and interaction with, contemporary digital culture.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Posthumanities Series 11
ISBN 0816667403, 9780816667406
320 pages

Review: Jennifer Gabrys (Mute).

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Aleksandra Sekulić (ed.): Media Archaeology: The Nineties (2009)

Media Archaeology is a long term research and program project, initiated in Archive of alternative film and video in “Students’ City” Cultural Center in Belgrade, programs initially hosted by Academic Film Center in 2006. Dealing with media forms as symptoms of social phenomena the team of the project presented this research through a dynamic program model of screening and discussion between two hosts with participation of the audience, which turned out to be a right model to establish a communication with the generation who hadn’t have a chance to experience the appearance and transformation of particular media phenomena.

In 2007, the series of lectures which embraced particular media forms from the history of media production of Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, with a special program dedicated to the translation of Western pop culture in Asia, the program concept enabling communication with the younger audience, with creating an insight into their perception of contemporary media forms was established, and also opened a call for collecting material for a media archive.

In 2008, with the support of the ministry of culture and media of the Republic of Serbia, a project Media Archaeology: The Nineties was initiated, and focused on analysis of the models used for media coverage and shaping of the disastrous social crisis of the 1990’s and to remind of the depth and the long term influences of the changes still visible in media production.

Project team: Boško Prostran, Jovan Bačkulja, Stevan Vuković, Aleksandra Sekulić, Ivica Đorđević, Nebojša Petrović
Translation: Vesna Jovanović, Aleksandra Sekulić, Greg de Cuir
Publisher: Center for cultural decontamination; with Archive of alternative film and video, “Students’ City” Cultural Center, Belgrade, September 2009
35 pages

authors and project (incl. video archive)

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