Author: christy

CFP: Fibreculture

christy

The Australian academic journal fibreculture has announced a CFP (call for papers) for their general issue next year. Tom and I were too late in getting a paper together for the New Media and New Pedagogy issue, and for some reason I never heard back from fibreculture regarding my submission for the upcoming Distributed Aesthetics issue. It should be an interesting one though, since I think Jill Walker will be in it.

Papers are other relevant works are invited for a General Issue of the Fibreculture Journal, to be published in the second half of 2006. Proposed contributions should fall within the ambit of the Fibreculture JournalÂ’s interests, as below.

The deadline for submissions is April 30, 2006.

The Fibreculture Journal encourages 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. Other broad topics of interest include the cultural contexts, philosophy and politics of:

:: information and creative industries
:: national strategies for innovation, research and development
:: education
:: media and culture, and
:: new media arts

The Fibreculture Journal encourages submissions that extend research into critical and investigative networked theories, knowledges and practices.

Our paper went well!

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christy

Our first joint paper — that is between Jeremy Douglass, Mark Marino and I (of Writer Response Theory)– was presented by Jeremy at DAC in Denmark last week. The feedback is good. In particular, Jeremy has been getting a few queries from people following up from my sections on cross-media and adaptations. I’ll be posting about these researchers soon too. Yes, there is another cross-media researcher in the world! In fact, I have 4 more coming your way. In the meantime, here is the abstract of our paper:

How do we compare eliterature forms? What does it mean for a work to be implemented as hypertext, interactive fiction, or chatbot? “Benchmark fiction” is a methodology for creating ‘benchmarks’ – sets of adaptations of the “same” eliterature content across different media for the purpose of comparative study. While total equivalence between the resulting ‘benchfic’ is impossible, praxis remains important: by creating ‘equivalent’ media and then critiquing them, we revealing our own definitions of media through process. Work on the first story to be benchmarked, “The Lady or the Tiger” (1882) by Frank R. Stockton, inspired a framework for displaying sources through interchangeable display modules. The project is considered in terms of historical precedents (Lorem Ipsum, Hello World, Cloak of Darkness, Gabriella Infinita), contemporarytheories (adaptation, remediation, media-specific analysis, transmedial and cross-media storytelling), and current experiments (chatbots, wikis, search art, cellular automata), with some discussion of design and pedagogy.

And the bot, part of the benchmark project, is here.

Douglass, J., Marino, M. and Christy Dena (2005) ‘Benchmark Fiction: A Framework for Comparative New Media Studies’ presented at Digital Arts and Culture Conference, Department of Digital Aesthetics & Communication at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Convergence in New Media Academia

christy

New media artist Mark Amerika is giving a talk on convergence. Mark Amerika is among other achievements, the creator of an early interactive narrative work on the web: Grammatron. His bio reads:

Mark Amerika is Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the founder and Publisher of the Alt-X Online Network (1993-ongoing), which has been described by Publishers Weekly as “the literary publishing model of the future.” He was named as a “Time Magazine 100 Innovator” as part of their continuing series of features on the most influential artists, scientists, entertainers and philosophers into the 21st century.

Mark is touring to here, Oz, and is delivering a talk this week in Melbourne. I cannot make that time 🙁 but recommend others who can to do so:

“The Future of Convergent Publishing”

Professor Mark Amerika will be presenting a seminar on the future of online and distributed publishing. The Internet established an entirely new mode of publication and distribution. Recent developments in Blogging and Podcasting have enhanced the potential of networked modes of distribution that continue to revolutionise the very concept of publishing.

The seminar will be held at Swinburne University (Hawthorn Campus) on Thursday 15th December in AR103, 1.00-2.00 pm.