Machinology

Keep an eye on this one: open, online and with the branded mark of a great journal, the Fibreculture book series with Open Humanities Press.

“After over a decade of transition, digital and networked media’s disruption of so-called ‘heritage’ media is now the status quo. Even if change is ongoing, and even if media institutions and disciplines are still playing catch up, digital and networked media are now very much the established media. They have massively expanded the range of niches they can inhabit. They have colonised many practices in everyday and professional life. They have transformed politics and activism, science and research, art and design. They have questioned forms of rationality and standard modulations of affect. Yet if we now live in an atmosphere infused by media technologies and communicational events, this atmosphere is both intimate and alien. Like the weather under climate change, the common world is one in which nothing seems quite as it was. Clear communications and fluid networks—like clear skies and warm temperatures—feel as preternatural as they are comforting. They still hold the promise of a new world, but sometimes this new world looks as much like a complex form of neofeudalism as a celebration of a new communality. In such a situation the question of what ‘media’ or ‘communications’ are has become strange to us. It demands new ways of thinking about fundamental conceptions and ecologies of practice. This calls for something that traditional media disciplines, even ‘new media’ disciplines, cannot always provide. The Fibreculture book series explores this contemporary state of things and asks what comes next.”