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