[ecrea] Nyx 7: Call for Contributions

Nyx 7: Call for Contributions: Machines

Nyx, a noctournal calls for abstracts and new work for its forthcoming 
spring/summer 2012 issue on MACHINES. Critical theorists, writers, 
artists, photographers, revolutionaries and wage-slaves are asked to 
consider: what do contemporary relationships and uses of machines reveal 
about popular culture; political structures; shifts in social or 
economic systems? What possibilities or dangers do they present? Have 
machines liberated us, as the early 20th century Modernists and social 
reformists dreamed, or have human beings become bound by machinery, 
tangled up in digitised information and intensive demands for 
productivity in the modern precarious workplace, made redundant by 
automation or reduced to passive cogs in a vast autopoietic network over 
which they no longer have any control?

Each era is defined by its usage and experience of machinery. Produced 
to wage war or save time, the machine is laden with exciting and 
horrific possibilities. What if the machines malfunction or revolt? Are 
machines a threat to the poor worker, as Marx feared, or is access to 
cheap electric goods a hallmark of the contemporary consumer social 
contract? What new sensations, perils and experiences of time have video 
games, smartphones, televisions, cars, gym equipment, e-books, the 
Internet and other machines brought? Is the organic obsolete, another 
health-food fad paid on credit card at a self-service checkout?

Nyx is a biannual print publication of new cultural studies, critical 
theory, design and flash fiction, based at the Centre for Cultural 
Studies, Goldsmiths, London. Its previous issue on Monsters featured 
work from Nick Land, Eugene Thacker, Laura Oldfield Ford and Lucy 
Pepper, with interviews of Mark Fisher and Stik. The full call can be 
found on www.nyxnoctournal.org.

Email images, abstracts or ideas of around 300 words with a short bio to 
(noctournal /at/ gmail.com) by 1st February 2012.


----------------
ECREA-Mailing list
----------------
This mailing list is a free service from ECREA.
---
To unsubscribe, please visit http://www.ecrea.eu/mailinglist
---
ECREA - European Communication Research and Education Association
Postal address:
ECREA
Universit�ibre de Bruxelles
c/o Dept. of Information and Communication Sciences
CP123, avenue F.D. Roosevelt 50, b-1050 Bruxelles, Belgium
Email: (info /at/ ecrea.eu)
URL: http://www.ecrea.eu
----------------