From grayson.cooke at scu.edu.au Tue Sep 4 23:07:48 2012 From: grayson.cooke at scu.edu.au (Grayson Cooke) Date: Wed, 05 Sep 2012 07:07:48 +1000 Subject: ::fibreculture:: Transformations issue 22 released In-Reply-To: <201209040930.q849UQYW020392@atom.scu.edu.au> References: <201209040930.q849UQYW020392@atom.scu.edu.au> Message-ID: <50466DA4.7020305@scu.edu.au> Transformations Journal announces the release of issue 22 http://www.transformationsjournal.org/ HYPERAESTHETIC CULTURE A Critique of the Hyper State: Aesthetics, Technology and Experience Melanie Swalwell Smiling in the Post-Fordist ?Affective? Economy Kaima Negishi Sensory Regimes in TV Marketing: Boardwalk Empire?s Chromatic Enhancement and Digital Aesthetics Enrica Picarelli Benjamin?s Shock and Image: Critical Responses to Hyperaesthetic Culture Erika Kerruish Flying Objects, Sitting Still, Killing Time Christopher Schaberg Pain Sense: Nociception, Affect and the Visual Encounter Anthony McCosker Formatting the Senses of Touch Mika Elo -- Dr Grayson Cooke Course Coordinator BMedia (acting) Director of Higher Degree Research Training School of Arts and Social Sciences Southern Cross University PO Box 157 East Lismore NSW 2480 Ph: +61 2 6620 3839 http://works.bepress.com/grayson_cooke/ http://www.transformationsjournal.org From melissa.gregg at sydney.edu.au Fri Sep 14 04:36:27 2012 From: melissa.gregg at sydney.edu.au (Melissa Gregg) Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2012 02:36:27 +0000 Subject: ::fibreculture:: FemTechNet - new network and teaching initiative In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <0A0F889E9386DB4CA0ADDEEDD4F8F19C3B0C9D89@EX-MBX-PRO-03.mcs.usyd.edu.au> Apologies for cross-posting Colleagues: I am writing to introduce you to FemTechNet*, an international network of scholars and artists who are conceptualizing, designing, building and implementing the world's first DOCC* (Distributed Online Collaborative Course), a feminist rethinking and redoing of the unidirectional, massive, somewhat imperialist MOOC* (please see definitions of our terms below). Our DOCC, Feminist Dialogues on Technology, will be offered September-December 2013, on fifteen campuses around the world, at least one each per continent. Members of our network who do not take or teach the course can follow and participate in this pedagogic experiment in a variety of voluntary capacities, small and large. First step: we request that you join our network! (To learn more, see these interviews published on Digital Media and Learning: Bodies in Classrooms and Learning from Failure or sign up for our upcoming NITLE seminar: October 4, 4pm EST.) Our current home (under development) is located on the fembotcollective.org website one of our many institutional collaborators. (Using the Pull-Down menu "Participate"): here you can join our listserv to become part of the conversation, and to stay informed about our progress and needs. In the next few weeks, we will be finalizing the list of schools that will offer the course next year, and you are hereby invited to offer the course at your institution. By signing on to teach one of our nodal courses, you receive an adaptable, customizable set of learning objects, BOLs*, created and evaluated by the network, as well as fifteen other colleagues and classrooms with which to interact. Of course, you also will get to teach our Dialogues: 10 recorded conversations with pre-eminent feminist scholars and artists working about and with technology (the list of speakers will be announced shortly on the listserv). Please communicate directly with me if teaching the course at your institution and to your students seems of any interest to you: alexandra_juhasz at pitzer.edu. We are also particularly eager to network the course to colleagues outside of Europe and North America, so if you can forward this announcement to appropriate international feminist colleagues, that would be very helpful. Thanks for your interest and please see terms below. Alex Juhasz, Media Studies, Pitzer College Anne Balsamo, Media Studies, The New School for Public Engagement in New York *Terms: FemTechNet is a network of hundreds of international scholars and artists who work on or with technology in a variety of fields including STS, Media and Visual Studies, Art, Women's, Queer and Ethnic Studies. Activated by Alexandra Juhasz and Anne Balsamo , the network will design, implement, and teach the first DOCC (Distributed Online Collaborative Course), a feminist rethinking of the MOOC. Our course, Feminist Dialogues on Technology, will be offered in fifteen classrooms, at least one in every continent, in the Fall of 2013. Our project uses technology to enable interdisciplinary and international conversation while privileging situated diversity and networked agency. Building the course from a shared set of recorded dialogues with the world's pre-eminent thinkers and artists who consider technology through a feminist lens, the rest of the course will be built, and customized for the network's local classrooms and communities, by network members who submit and evaluate Boundary Object that Learn?the course's basic pedagogic instruments. DOCC: Produced collectively by FemTechNet, Dialogues in Feminism and Technology delivers (and grows) ten weeks of course content covering both the histories and cutting edge scholarship on technology produced through art, science, and visual studies. Recorded conversations between luminaries in these fields will anchor each of ten weeks of themed content, but from there, each professor will tailor a course best-suited to her students, institution, locale, and discipline from a diverse, robust, and growing database of ?Boundary Objects that Learn.? Shared assignments will link learners around the globe as their own efforts become part of the feminist database and dialogue. Boundary Objects that Learn: Readings, media, web-resources, and conversations that have been both submitted to and evaluated for teaching by the network. A feminist rethinking and remaking of the boundary object, our network will together create situated, variable, responsive teaching tools best suited for particular learning communities and environments. ?A boundary object is a concept in sociology to describe information used in different ways by different communities. They are plastic, interpreted differently across communities but with enough immutable content to maintain integrity. The concept was introduced by Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer in a 1989 publication (p.393):[1] ?? MOOC: Massively Open Online Course . MELISSA GREGG | Senior Lecturer Gender and Cultural Studies | Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY J406, Quadrangle A14 | The University of Sydney | NSW | 2006 T +61 2 9351 3657 | F +61 2 9351 3918 | M +61 408 599 359 E melissa.gregg at sydney.edu.au | W http://sydney.edu.au New book: Work?s Intimacy http://www.politybooks.com/book.asp?ref=0745650279 Also out: The Affect Theory Reader (edited with Gregory J Seigworth) http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=17901 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From a.munster at unsw.edu.au Fri Sep 21 04:58:55 2012 From: a.munster at unsw.edu.au (Anna Munster) Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2012 12:58:55 +1000 Subject: ::fibreculture:: FCJ Mesh Launch!! Message-ID: <001A0DBE-FD8F-4C72-9134-7707E053508C@unsw.edu.au> The Fibreculture Journal announces the launch of a new yet conjoined publication platform: FCJ-Mesh: http://mesh.fibreculturejournal.org/about-mesh/ In the age of ubiquitous content curation becomes increasingly important. With that in mind we?d like to offer ?Mesh? as space for reblogging relevant academic material and publishing new material that builds and explores connections (links) between journals, events, blogs and so on; which collates and engages with perspectives from across our extended networks whatever form they may take. With all that in mind we invite submissions of 1500 words or less that engage with, mobilise, or explore connections between contemporary cultural, philosophical and media theory and its implications and applications. We encourage (active) links between open access journals, blogs, and other sites (on- or off-line) of research creation. We are particularly interested in work that engages, mobilises, or otherwise connects with the issues and research published in the Fibreculture Journal. We also welcome accounts and reviews of relevant events or works in the wide variety of fields and forms relevant to the the Journal and the community of which it is part (Critical and transdisciplinary theory, media and art theory and practice, theories of technology, cultural theory, media & politics, network culture etc.) FCJ-Mesh will be tightly curated and edited for quality of scholarship, writing and interest. Submissions will not be peer reviewed and works published will be identified as FCJ-Mesh Publications accordingly. We welcome unsolicited work but reserve the right to refuse publication for any reason. We hope to publish or re-publish submissions promptly and continuously without the delays associated with Journal publication. A/Prof. Anna Munster Deputy Director Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics College of Fine Arts UNSW P.O. Box 259 Paddington NSW 2021 612 9385 0741 (tel) 612 9385 0615(fax) a.munster at unsw.edu.au -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ned at nedrossiter.org Wed Sep 26 05:34:16 2012 From: ned at nedrossiter.org (Ned Rossiter) Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2012 13:34:16 +1000 Subject: ::fibreculture:: =?windows-1252?q?Digital_Media_Research_Seminar_?= =?windows-1252?q?=96_Ben_Abraham_and_Adam_Ruch=2C_4_October?= Message-ID: <133C7600-8F80-4E66-A058-24BB9CC13BBD@nedrossiter.org> Digital Media Research Seminar ? Ben Abraham and Adam Ruch, 4 October School of Humanities & Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney http://www.uws.edu.au/hca Date: Thursday 4 October Time: 2-4pm Venue: EB2.21 Parramatta Campus, UWS, Cnr of James Ruse Drive and Victoria Road, Rydalmere. All welcome. Please RSVP by 2 October to Robyn Mercer r.mercer at uws.edu.au Ben Abraham, School fo Humanities & Communication Arts, UWS Twitter, ?Discursive Activism?, and the Shame Tactic On the 13th of August a minor controversy erupted in the videogame criticism twittersphere following the publication of an interview with John Hemingway, a lead developer on the hotly anticipated title Borderlands 2. In the interview, Hemmingway referred to a newbie friendly gameplay mode as the ?girlfriend mode?, in what seemed another eye-rolling typical example of the casual sexism endemic to many parts of the game development community. This attitude would often elicit an exasperated comment, and be offered up as evidence of the continued importance of anti-sexist activism and education. But on this occasion the comments sparked a controversy with a number of prominent activist community members who were understandably incensed and infuriated by the developer?s comments. Their response entailed a ?silent boycott?, enforced primarily by statements ?shaming? others into the boycott: ?You should not be okay with giving money to sexists?, was the clear implication. The argument demonstrated a clear desire for communal action, but which found itself limited by the frame of consumer/producer relations within the capitalist marketplace. The ?shame tactic? presents a significant innovation, an attempt at collective action through a kind of cultural enforcement, reflecting similar processes to what Frances Shaw has identified as ?discursive activism? in the Australian feminist blogosphere. In this talk I will discuss the importance of this tactic, as an innovative communal strategy, and also suggest that it may prove insufficient on its own as an activist tactic within the market place. Bio Ben Abraham is a PhD student from the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney Australia, writing about videogame criticism and internet communities. In 2009 he started the blog Critical Distance in order to highlight excellent videogame blogging, writing and criticism from outside the mainstream. His writing has been published online at Gamasutra, Kotaku Australia, and in print with KillScreen Magazine and the Halo and Philosophy anthology. http://www.critical-distance.com http://iam.benabraham.net Adam Ruch, Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University Literary Games: The Ancestry of Videogame?s Lore Understanding a particular videogame is a complicated and involved task. It is possible to dwell on mechanics and interactions in order to describe the ?gameplay? of a videogame. It is equally possible to focus on aesthetic issues, and relationships of the videogame?s fictional content to literary, dramatic or filmic traditions. Even better is to combine the two, acknowledging the dynamic nature of the game as fundamental to the experience of its fiction. This discussion will approach two videogames from the latter angle. Grand Theft Auto IV and World of Warcraft will be examined here. I will explore GTA's relationship to the themes of modernist literature including Woolf and Eliot through the lens of the city. For World of Warcraft, I will outline a more straight-forward intertextuality between Warcraft and the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft. These two contrasting examinations will demonstrate two varied relationships videogames may have to other forms of story. Bio Adam Ruch has recently submitted his PhD Thesis, entitled ?Understanding Videogames: 3 Genres for Criticism?. His research focuses on different ways to approach and understand various kinds of videogames, from the social and competitive, dramatic and literary, and spatial and performative practices. He also writes games criticism for various media outlets including PC PowerPlay, Kotaku Australia, and Games.on.net.