<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Dear All,<div>A reminder that this call is still open for a few more days, for abstracts only at this stage, please.<br><br>Special Issue for the Fibreculture Journal: Networked Utopias and Speculative Futures<br>Call for Abstracts<br><br><a href="http://fibreculturejournal.org/">http://fibreculturejournal.org/</a><br><a href="http://fibreculturejournal.org/cfp-special-issue-for-the-fibreculture-journal-networked-utopias-and-speculative-futures/">http://fibreculturejournal.org/cfp-special-issue-for-the-fibreculture-journal-networked-utopias-and-speculative-futures/</a><br>-----<br><br>Please note that for this issue, initial submissions should be abstracts (200 - 350 words) only.<br><br>Editors: Susan Ballard, Zita Joyce and Lizzie Muller<br><br>abstract deadline: February 20, 2011<br>article deadline: May 30, 2011<br>publication aimed for: November, 2011<br>-----<br><br>"Since most of history’s giant trees have already been cut down, a new<br>Ark will have to be constructed out of the materials that a desperate<br>humanity finds at hand in insurgent communities, pirate technologies,<br>bootlegged media, rebel science and forgotten utopias." Mike Davis<br>“Who Will Build an Ark: The Utopian Imperative in an Age of<br>Catastrophe” in Telepolis [Germany], 12/11/2008.<br><br>For many centuries the dawn of the new millennium –the year 2000–<br>epitomised the future to come. The twentieth century raced eagerly<br>towards this most dazzling of dates fuelled by the cult of modernity<br>and the turbo-charged transformations of globalisation and digital<br>communication. Now, a decade past the threshold of what was meant to<br>be the future, we look up, blinking, and find ourselves gazing at a<br>terrifying void. We are living in a time where our present actions are<br>steadily<br>destroying our own future. This issue of the Fibreculture Journal<br>asks, as we struggle to imagine what the next decades may bring, is<br>this any time to think about utopia?<br><br>The rhetoric of utopia is well-worn territory, explored from one<br>magnificent boundary to the other, and now requires new treatments<br>according to the impact of networked cultures and digital media.<br>Historically, utopian societies are often portrayed as physical<br>spaces, bordered and isolated in some way from other social<br>structures. However, the utopian effort to make things better has been<br>a core activity for networked communities and social groups operating<br>both on and offline. In the techno-utopian world of the 1990s<br>communities formed around the emergence of the world wide web. These<br>moments of intensive thought formed genealogies for our current dreams<br>of the network. New tools of networked cultures and digital media open<br>up possibilities for imagining, mapping, reaching towards, narrating,<br>and critiquing models of the future. In the space between ever-hopeful<br>techno-futurism and the realities of a world forever changed by the<br>pursuit of the resources required to fuel it, how can the concept of<br>networked utopias help us speculate on the future?<br><br>This issue of the Fibreculture Journal brings together studies in<br>networked communities with novel, historical and creative approaches<br>to utopia in order to examine the productivity of future-thinking from<br>our present location. The network may be technical and interpersonal,<br>a mesh of servers and routers, connectivity, participation, creation,<br>and support. It may exist in the physical location of its<br>infrastructure, in a shared no-place of communication, or both. It is<br>as much a body as an event. What then is the relationship between an<br>idealistic transcendent no-place, and the embodied realities and<br>contingencies of the changing world in which our selves and our<br>technologies are actually located? How have current practices broken<br>down this opposition between virtual and real? We ask: is it possible<br>to create more sustainable narratives out of the current moment, and<br>explore imaginative solutions on the verge of near-future crisis?<br><br>We invite papers that look at the convergence of technology and<br>foresight; forethought, imaginings, and speculation. We seek research<br>that explores the future worlds, experiences, technologies, peoples<br>and events of networked technology. We are romantics dreaming of<br>wishworlds; networked utopias and connections hovering between time,<br>place, and being.<div><br></div><div><br>all contributors and editors must read the guidelines at;<br><a href="http://fibreculturejournal.org/policy-and-style/">http://fibreculturejournal.org/policy-and-style/</a><br>before working with the Fibreculture Journal<br><br>email correspondence for this issue:<br><br>Susan dot Ballard at op dot ac dot nz<br>lizzie at lizziemuller dot com<br>zita dot joyce at canterbury dot ac dot nz</div><div><br></div><div><br><br>Topics and papers might include discussions of:<br><br>- internet DIY<br>- experimental communalism (on and off-line)<br>- economic collectivism<br>- studies in prototypes<br>- speculation on alternative futures in media arts<br>- grass roots community organisation: free software, DIY,<br>neo-liberalism, survivalist modes<br>- the technological sublime<br>- the Internet of Things<br>- communities and architectures formed around media technologies<br>- radio as a harbinger of things from the future<br>- technofeminist utopias / cyberfeminism / feminist science fiction<br>- social/ethical/technological experiments<br>- the technosublime<br>- studies in futurism (past/ historical/ present)<br>- speculation and future imagining<br>- digital speculative objects, prototypes, thought experiments etc.<br>- the deficiency of the actual<br>- the space race<br>- dystopia<br>- hope<br>- cloaning, cloaking and invisibility<br>- deferring the future<br>- apocalypse<br>- curation of/ for the future<br>- speculative social/ethical/technological experiments – either real<br>(lived) or imagined, fictionalised or proposed<br>- networked community formation or disintegration<br>- the angel of history – historical networked utopias<br>- dreams of ubiquitous connectivity, of communication and connection<br>- transcendent myths of wirelessness<br>- Web 3.0, 4.0 5.0…<br>- re-enactments and wistful thinking<br>- imaginary museums<br>- industrial utopias: the Ford Motor company, The Bata shoe factory,<br>Phillips’ forbidden city<br>- The EPCOT centre<br>- cold war science fictions<br>- incomprehensible technologies<br>- robots<br>- military research & development<br>- information design<br>- open-source cultures and ‘free’ media<br>- biospheres<br>- cities of the future<br>- optimism and cynicism in post war culture</div></div></body></html>