Two publications are planned as part of Cultural Futures.
To support dialogues at the event, we will be publishing a poster/broadsheet which includes writings and imagery on the theme of "place, ground and practice in the new media context". The broadsheet will be distributed in November 2005 to a wide public audience to help establish an agenda for discussion during the symposium. We are also calling for contributions to a book as follows:
PLACE: Location and Belonging in New Media Contexts.
Edited by Danny Butt, Jon Bywater and Nova Paul
James Clifford notes that "land" (whenua, ples, country, la tribu, etc.) signifies the past in the future, a continuous, changing base of political and cultural operations - while a political theory "which sees everything as potentially realigned, cut, and mixed, has difficulty with this material nexus of community". Indigenous epistemologies have sophisticated structures for negotiating belonging among communities who may become widely dispersed from their homelands. New media, by contrast, demonstrates biases toward the the dislocated: a cosmopolitanism implicitly located in the urban, where communities form and fragment in "virtual" environments.
However, questions of belonging and identification remain for those who use new media networks. Knowledge in the new media environment may circulate rapidly, but it is still located in human subjects who develop knowledge and identification within physical and social locations. The aim of this publication is to directly address silences within new media discourse on place, as well as understand how long-held attachments to place are transforming in the contemporary media context.
We currently have interest from international academic publishers in a book on these issues to be published in coordination with the Cultural Futures: Place, Ground and Practice in Asia Pacific New Media Arts symposium in Auckland, December 2005. We are also interested in soliciting writing from those not attending the event, including work outside the regional focus of the symposium.
Themes that may be addressed in the publication include:
Abstracts of 500 words, along with a 200 word bio should be sent to info@culturalfutures.place.net.nz by October 14th 2005. We expect to notify authors by the end of November 2005, and require chapters to be completed by the end of February 2006, with the book to be published later that year. We also intend to issue a further call for images and pageworks in the future.
Please direct any enquiries to the editors c/- Danny Butt danny at dannybutt.net