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FCJManager

FCJManager has written 7 posts for The Fibreculture Journal : 24
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FCJ-178 Network Affordances: The unpredictable parameters of a Hong Kong SPEED SHOW

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Audrey Samson City University of Hong Kong Winnie Soon Aarhus University Introduction Internet-based activities like social communications, money transactions, education, and entertainment are increasingly inseparable from everyday life. Artists work with and within this banal network and explore its affordances to address network technologies, politics, aesthetics, and culture. This paper examines the notion of network affordance, a term used in the field of Human Computer Interaction and Software Studies, within the context of network art. Building on James Gibson’s theory of affordance in the context of psychology, we understand affordance as the directly perceived parameters and properties of things in an environment (Gibson, 1977: 127). The study of parameters and properties is useful in comprehending the affordances of network technologies. In the context of design, William Gaver discusses the interactivity between things and users with what he calls the affordance of predictability (Gaver, 1996). Both Gibson and Gaver call for […]

FCJ-177 Television Assemblages

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Teresa Rizzo University of Western Australia Introduction It is an understatement to say that television and television culture have undergone a dramatic transformation over the last decade. As little as ten years ago typical Australian viewers would sit in front of the television set at a particular time to watch their favourite show. If they wanted to record a programme they would have to go through an elaborate process which included: searching the scheduled programme time and then entering the start and end dates and times on a video recorder; rummaging for a free tape and making sure the video recorder was left on. Today, by contrast, viewers can access their favourite shows in a number of different ways, on a variety of platforms and devices, at a time of their choosing. New forms of digital television have emerged, including Internet television and IPTV, that offer new ways of accessing […]

FCJ-176 A Skeuomorphic Cinema: Film Form, Content and Criticism in the ‘Post-Analogue’ Era

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David H. Fleming University of Nottingham Ningbo, China William Brown University of Roehampton, London In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new. (Karl Marx, 2000: 327) In this essay we utilise a ‘digitally detoured’ notion of the ‘skeuomorph’ to better understand the ‘gaseous’ form and content of contemporary cinema, arguing in particular that this concept entails various nuances that make it a more fecund framework through which to consider the aesthetics of digital cinema. Looking in particular at digital cinematography and performance, we argue that because of its emphasis on concealed and/or misunderstood novelty, the skeuomorphic framework yields a […]

FCJ-175 Humans at play in the Anthropocene

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Troy Innocent Swinburne University of Technology culture arises in the form of play, that it is played from the very beginning. Even in those activities which aim at the immediate satisfaction of vital needs , €“hunting, for instance, €“tend, in archaic society, to take on the play-form. Social life is endued with supra-biological forms, the shape of play, which enhance its value. It is through this play that society expresses its interpretation of life and the world (Huizinga, 1949 : 46). Introduction The Anthropocene marks ‘a new phase in the history of both humankind and of the Earth, where natural forces and human forces become intertwined.’ (Zalasiewicz 2010: 2231). It is the current time in which human processes such as culture and language, the use of tools and technology, are acknowledged as part of the earth’s ecology, €“and as integral to the operations and behaviours of the earth’s ecology largely […]

FCJ-174 Constructing the contemporary via digital cultural heritage

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Torsten Andreasen University of Copenhagen The digital cultural heritage archive appeared in the discourse of cultural heritage around the beginning of the new millennium and did so with certain specific goals, €”the digital preservation of and accessibility to cultural heritage should serve global tolerance, strengthen regional and national identity and, finally, inspire entrepreneurial creativity and innovation. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the predominant global agent of cultural heritage since the Second World War, has tended to express the potential use-value of cultural heritage by appropriating a quote from Arjun Appadurai: ‘Culture is the resource that society needs to move from today to tomorrow’ (UNESCO, 2010: 7). According to this discursive formation, operated internationally by UNESCO in parallel with its supranational and national counterparts, digital cultural heritage has a specific strategic temporality, €”the digital construction of the past as a force driving the present into the future. […]

FCJ-173 Being and Media: digital ontology after the event of the end of media

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Justin Clemens University of Melbourne Adam Nash RMIT University Everything is Digital Today, everything is digital and the digital is everything. Surely such a totalising, yet reductive, assertion can’t be right, even if we accepted that it had any sense? What about rocks and stones and trees? The great eighteenth-century literary critic Dr Johnson famously responded to Bishop Berkeley’s idealist, ‘immaterialist’ philosophy broached in A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding by kicking a boulder and declaring “I refute it thus!” (Boswell, 238). Such a naturalist rejoinder has found its contemporary avatars in the field of media studies under a variety of names, ranging from Bruno Latour and Actor-Network-Theory [1] to Luciano Floridi’s philosophy of information (Latour, 2007; Floridi, 2014). Despite their manifest, manifold differences, what unites such projects is their commitment to fundamentally naturalistic redescriptions of the complex interactions of trans-human agents. They are directed at displacing ‘the human’ from the […]

Issue 24: Images and Assemblages

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Editorial: Possible worlds It is worth paying attention to images. Picture opening the pages of a neglected book and finding an image of some bland nineteenth century industrial dreamscape with a small black smudge in the bottom left corner. Clues to the future of the world can be found in this microcosm; a sooty mark left by over-heated carbon as it drifted down to the surface of the page. Impossible to erase from either the page or the history of its own making the soot is a terrible troublemaker; together with the humans who learnt to manufacture it, it is a locus of anxiety and concern. In looking closely at this small sketch I find documentation of the transformations of the biosphere; mundane media twisted into a networked and sustaining dialogue that points towards something of the possible world to come. Even with their backs turned, images continue to have […]