Robert Briggs

Now available in paperback. 30% discount with the code PAPER30
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-animal-to-come.html

—Thinking the politics of animals and animality beyond the critique of anthropocentrism and the concerns of biopolitics

What happens to political thought if we take the problematic nature of the human-animal distinction, not as something to be demonstrated, but rather as a given? What sorts of animal-existential possibilities are derived by tracking not the animal but the animal-to-come through the inherited traditions and institutions that continue to shape prevailing concepts of culture and politics?

In THE ANIMAL-TO-COME, Robert Briggs lays out an original interpretation of Derrida’s work which takes the ‘question of the animal’ beyond the critique of political and philosophical anthropocentrism. Eschewing approaches grounded in animal vulnerability, Briggs reviews theories of power, politics and culture in terms of their capacity to enable novel images of ‘zoopolitics’. Along the way he engages with recently translated work in the emerging field of philosophical ethology, including Vinciane Despret’s What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? (2016) and Dominique Lestel’s empirical and constructivist phenomenology of human-animal relations.

Through these and other interventions, THE ANIMAL-TO-COME departs from well-established positions in animal studies to develop new ways of thinking animal politics today.

Derrida's displacement (after Bentham) of reason in favor of suffering as the key question in thinking about animals and his subsequent remarks on a "nonpower at the heart of power" are often taken as foregrounding a compassionate ethics in the face of the vulnerable (animal) other. This paper traces a genealogy of Derrida's occasional remarks on power and passivity to question whether this ethical reading adequately accounts for Derrida's "concept" of nonpower. In doing so, it pursues a counter-reading of nonpower, the implications of which are explored in the context of recent work on animals in biopolitics.

To what extent can inherited traditions of political thought accommodate or enable the identification and assessment of contemporary animal politics?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LFgO_ycbek

Activism around animal issues is becoming an increasing sight in the public political sphere, both domestically and internationally. In Australia, animal protection organisations (Animals Australia) and political parties (the Animal Justice Party) have been working since at least the 1980s to put animal welfare issues on the political agenda, while the last few years have seen numerous incidents of “vegan activists” protesting outside farms, marching by city restaurants and campaigning in supermarket aisles. These and other demonstrations have come in the wake of numerous media reports on various forms of animal cruelty related to equine sports, pet-breeding, factory farming, and live animal exports, among many other examples.

Meanwhile, the “question of the animal” has become a major theme in theoretically and philosophically informed research, to the point that some scholars have taken to speaking of “the animal turn” in humanities inquiry. Setting out to identify and dispel the “anthropocentric” prejudice that pervades humanities thinking, such work rejects the mechanistic view of animality inherited from Descartes; the reductionism inherent in the use of a singular noun to identify an uncountable diversity of species and individuals; and an ongoing presumption of human exceptionalism which places human practices and concerns at the centre of inquiry, and marginalises any concern for animal interests. 

Against this background, this investigation reflects on the political implications of the increasing attention given, both in intellectual inquiry and in public debate, to animals and issues related to the treatment of animals. Taking online video sharing as a case study, it offers a reinterpretation of the political possibilities inherent in the online public sphere that suggests, in turn, that the “question of the animal” may demand a reassessment of conventional frameworks for engaging animals as a political problem.

Dr Robert Briggs is Senior Lecturer in the School of Media, Creative Arts & Social Inquiry and a founding member of the Centre for Culture and Technology. He is author of the forthcoming book THE ANIMAL-TO-COME: ZOOPOLITICS IN DECONSTRUCTION (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and has published extensively on poststructuralist thought in relation to questions of ethics, culture and technology.

Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008) presents a sustained reflection on a concept of ‘the animal’ that has underpinned the work of much of the philosophical tradition. Based on a series of lectures originally presented in 1997, Derrida’s speculation on the question of the animal was thus written at a time when Derrida’s thought was often turned to the motif of ‘to-come’ (see Derrida 1992; 1994), such that one may wonder at the apparent evasion, both in Derrida’s text and in its subsequent review, of the chance to think the two themes together, in the guise of ‘the animal-to-come’. Picking up on Derrida’s asides on the verb ‘to follow’, which in turn invoke notions of ‘succession’, ‘pursuit’, ‘understanding’, ‘consequence’, ‘compliance’, even ‘being’ itself, this discussion considers what it might mean to follow, ‘methodically’ perhaps, the thought of ‘the animal-to-come’? What problems might it help to bring into focus and what forces and lineages may yet bear upon its very thought? And where in our thinking goes the animal if it is to remain always to come?

To name is not to say what is true but to confer on what is named the power to make us feel and think in the mode that the name calls for. (Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, 43) A first glance is caught by an extraordinary geodesy. A gauzed sun in a deep blue sky shines down on a clutter of glacial masses, floating cloudlike above the surface of the white ground below. Shattered ice, seemingly released from the earth's gravitational pull, lines a distant horizon. Frozen, the vista nevertheless transforms after a few moments, as perceptual input processing mechanisms recalibrate. The focus adjusts, and the arresting scene, recalling any number of science-fictional visions of airborne islands, resolves into a figure not quite so fantastical, though perhaps no less disorienting than the initial impression.

While environmental ethics has become more familiar and comfortable with the work of postmodernism, it remains the case that “deconstruction” in particular is continually depicted as “destructive” and “nihilistic.” A close examination of some specific works of deconstruction, however, shows that, far from denying responsibilities to the environment, deconstruction seeks to affirm a radical obligation toward the “other.” Insofar as this possible affirmation is ruled out from the beginning by denunciations of deconstruction’s imputed relativism and nihilism, this paper begins with an occasionally rhetorical and “excessive” account of the possible reception of deconstruction within environmental ethics. It does this in order to highlight from the outset that modes of reading and of engaging with the arguments of others have implications that require ethical consideration. The paper then proceeds to demonstrate certain parallels between the work of deconstruction and that of environmental ethics. In doing so, it suggests that a certain deconstructive spirit is at the heart of environmental philosophy’s recent—and most important—work on the question of “universal consideration.”

Nigel Clark | Sean Cubitt | Thom van Dooren | Matthew Kearnes
Peta Mitchell | Stephen Muecke | Chris Russill | Isabelle Stengers | Etienne Turpin

The development of new conceptual formations and cultural practices articulated with, by or through the prefix 'geo-' suggests a shift in the location or function of 'the Earth' in contemporary knowledge. What status is accorded the Earth, for instance, in debates over the emergence of the 'anthropocene' as a (contested) geological epoch? Does the rising interest in 'geophilosophy' or 'geoaesthetics' signal a displacement of the worldly or the global in favour of the earthly? Is there a place in 'the earth sciences' for philosophical thought and cultural practice?

Or again: what role do geomediation processes (mapping, climate modelling, geoimaging, GPS navigation systems) play in the construction of the Earth as site, object or producer of knowledge? Do the technical and communicative potentials of geocoding and geolocation necessitate a reimagining of the interplay between the virtual and the physical, the ideal and the material? More generally still, how might reflection on media, technology and communication develop to address conditions and effects of the geophysical as much as the geopolitical kind?

Ctrl-Z's geo-is a 2-and-a-half day symposium (Nov 28-30), bringing together a select number of established and emerging scholars who are, in different ways, leading reflection on the significance or the problem of the Earth for understanding posthumanity, culture and technology. In its explorations of the cultural and conceptual dimensions to our planetary condition, geo-will test the capacity for humanities-based inquiry to stake a place within not only ecology and environmentalism, but perhaps also within the earth sciences more generally.

Proceedings of the event will appear as a special issue of Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy scheduled for publication in 2017.

enquiries: Robert Briggs r.briggs@curtin.edu.au
image: Ursula Biemann www.geobodies.org

… geophilosophy, geopolitics, geoaesthetics, geomedia, geoculture …


The development of new conceptual formations and cultural practices articulated with, by or through the prefix ‘geo-’ suggests a shift in the location or function of ‘the Earth’ in contemporary knowledge.

What status is accorded the Earth, for instance, in debates over the emergence of the ‘anthropocene’ as a (contested) geological epoch? Does the rising interest in ‘geophilosophy’ or ‘geoaesthetics’ signal a displacement of the worldly or the global in favour of the earthly? Is there a place in ‘the earth sciences’ for philosophical thought and cultural practice?

Or again: what role do geomediation processes (mapping, climate modelling, geoimaging, GPS navigation systems) play in the construction of the Earth as site, object or producer of knowledge? Do the technical and communicative potentials of geocoding and geolocation necessitate a reimagining of the interplay between the virtual and the physical, the ideal and the material? More generally still, how might reflection on media, technology and communication develop to address conditions and effects of the geophysical as much as the geopolitical kind?

Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy
Issue #7 (2017): http://www.ctrl-z.net.au//journal?slug=issue-7

Special issue: geo- (the earth and the earth sciences in humanities inquiry)
Ed. Robert Briggs

geo-: What's a Species to Do? — Robert Briggs (Curtin University, Australia)

Matters of Concern All the Way Down — Isabelle Stengers (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)

PyroGaia: Planetary Fire as Force and Signification — Nigel Clark (Lancaster University, UK)

Three Geomedia — Sean Cubitt (Goldsmiths University of London, UK / University of Melbourne, Australia)

Is the Earth a Medium? Situating the Planetary in Media Theory — Chris Russill (Carleton University, Canada)

Mediated Geographies of Everyday Life: Navigating the Ambient, Augmented and Algorithmic Geographies of Geomedia — Peta Mitchell & Tim Highfield (Queensland University of Technology, Australia)

Wolf Creek Meteorite Crater: Indigenous Science Queers Western Science — Stephen Muecke (University of Adelaide, Australia)

Fragility, Globalism and the End of the World — Claire Colebrook (Pennsylvania State University, US)

When Jean-Françios Lyotard released his report on the condition of knowledge in computerized societies (The Postmodern Condition), he had much to say about language, but surprisingly little to say about communication. Yet the possibilities for producing and disseminating knowledge enabled by communications technologies arguably have epistemological implications far exceeding the issues of legitimation raised by Lyotard’s analysis of ‘language games’. To what extent, then, does Lyotard’s analysis hold up in the wake of the last 30 years of technological development? How have the conditions of knowledge changed since Lyotard first named ‘the postmodern condition’? Who—or what—today, is the subject of knowledge?

In the age of personal computers, the Internet, mobile phones, Facebook, Twitter, Word, Photoshop, SMS, email, desktop- and e-publishing, blogging and fan fiction, autocorrect and track changes, who — or what — is a writer?

Ctrl-Z is an arts symposium aimed at exploring the possibilities of writing in the age of new media. While the means and opportunities for writing are seemingly forever multiplying, can the same be said for the ways in which we think about what we call ‘writing’, or what we call ‘a writer’? How, today, does writing take shape: how is it produced, published, distributed and read? How might we account for cultural anxieties over the ill-effects or improper uses of new writing technologies (illiteracy, plagiarism, piracy, cyberbullying), and how might we imagine new ways of thinking about creativity, technology and communication?

Featuring panel discussions, video screenings, exhibitions, live music and more, Ctrl-Z will appeal to anyone with a professional or personal interest in writing as a cultural and communicative practice — from humanities academics, postgraduates and English and Media teachers to authors, artists and creative media practitioners; from arts patrons to general readers. Cutting across academic, professional and public divides, Ctrl-Z will present an engaging and entertaining occasion to reflect on what it means — now — to write and to be a writer.

This article seeks to characterize deconstruction (and “theory” generally) as a practical activity in order to assess its potential effects in view of Marx’s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach. Taking its cue from Derrida’s reference to the “inner edge of philosophy” in Theory and Practice, the article juxtaposes Derrida’s ostensibly philosophical approach with the contentious, historiographic approach taken by Ian Hunter. Reflecting on the activity of deconstruction from the outer edge of philosophy, as it were, the discussion first reviews Derrida’s diagnosis of the philosophical impulse to monopolize authority over all theory and practice, then interprets this move via Hunter’s “empirical” attempt to situate and analyze different modes of philosophizing as concrete exercises in self-problematization. The discussion highlights the surprising convergences in Derrida’s and Hunter’s arguments before adopting this view from the outer edge of philosophy in order to reassess where and how deconstruction’s practical effects may be registered.

At the time of its presentation, Derrida’s ‘Force of law’ represented deconstruction’s perhaps most direct statement on the possibility of justice and its most explicit engagement with law. The ensuing responses to that paper have typically focused on deconstruction’s position regarding the force and authority of law and especially on what is taken as Derrida’s theory of justice. As such, ‘Force of law’ is often discussed in isolation to mainstream legal philosophy or is otherwise understood to represent a radical counter to that tradition. It is possible to take a different direction, however, by considering the event of that paper’s presentation and reception in relation not only to the existing disciplines of legal studies, but also to the problematic of discipline itself. Rereading some of the work of contemporary legal philosophy in the light of that problematic may thus enable a certain questioning of the disciplinary divisions whose very institution underscores the ‘radical’ nature of deconstruction’s ‘critique’ of traditional understandings of law. Such a rereading may even allow a speculation upon a certain (trans)disciplinarity of deconstruction, reconsidering the latter’s relation to traditions.

Ever since famed science fiction (SF) author Ursula Le Guin insisted that SF is “not about the future” but rather “about the present”, critics of SF narratives have largely rejected the genre’s popularly held associations with the function of “prediction”. Recent celebration of ex-cyberpunk William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition as “artistically ambitious” SF, notwithstanding its “present-day” setting, thus appears to mark the inevitable conclusion to Le Guin’s claims for the allegorical function of future-based fictions. Taken together, these events or trajectories may provide an opportunity to explore the question of the place of “prediction” not only in contemporary SF and science fiction studies, but also in what Bruce Sterling has called our “truly science-fictional world”. For in a string of largely unremarked upon novels Gibson published throughout the 1990s the function of prediction seems displaced from the level of narration and onto particular objects and characters appearing within the novels’ diegetic world. The narratives thus take on a strange kind of metafictional quality, speculating on the very activity of prediction that is sometimes imagined to define the work of SF. Examining Gibson’s “Bridge” stories with a metafictional eye to how they imagine the future of prediction, therefore, may enable us to pursue a speculative engagement with cultural discourses on futurity — thereby reconsidering not only routine denunciations of SF’s predictive sheen but also the “worldly” uses of SF’s visions of the future.

In the call for papers for this special issue on ‘research in the humanities’ we asked, ‘What counts as research; what doesn’t; and who decides? Does the traditional distinction between critical and creative work still hold? Is creative work, or any form of non-traditional academic work (i.e. whatever doesn’t conform to a notion of the standard academic essay), quantifiable and measurable according to an idea of research modelled on a certain conception of science? And who or what is humanities research for? What are its most appropriate or effective means of dissemination, and what kinds of effects might be expected of it once—if—it reaches its proposed destination?’.

The contributions eventually published here under that theme are largely consistent, if not steadfast, in their evasion of the specific terms of those questions, preferring to tackle the issue of research in the humanities via other routes and by other means. In doing so, they touch on aspects of that issue unanticipated by the original call: the pursuit of collaboration, the industrial conditions of production, the economics of ‘free’ publication, the new guises of performativity (research as practice; publish or perish), the nature and technics of information networks, and more.

But perhaps more illustrative of how research in the humanities ‘works’ today is the way the pieces collected here found their way into the issue. Notwithstanding the façade of ‘special issue’, those pieces came about not simply as considered responses to a call for papers but also as a result of the expediency and sociality of professional practice: artful repurposing, happy accident, invitation, obligation and quid pro quo.

The question remains as to whether reliance on such mechanisms constitutes the norm or the exception when it comes to research in the humanities. If the contributions to this issue are anything to go by, however, it feels safe to say that the results may be both enlightening and entertaining, either way.

RB

It is with great sorrow that I must write this note as but one—using the first-person singular pronoun rather than the first-person plural—in the wake of the untimely death of Ctrl-Z’s founding Co-Editor Niall Lucy in early June, 2014.

Niall was a thinker and a cultural critic of unquestionable merit. His international reputation as an authority on deconstruction and postmodernism was built on a series of insightful, inventive readings of Derrida, while his later work has been admired for its eclectic approach to cultural analysis and for its success in crossing divides between disciplines, genres and readerships. A scholar and writer of great wit, Niall was a source of inspiration and delight for those who have had the chance to enjoy his many books, articles and minor works.

Well known to many academics across the globe for his professional achievements, Niall was also known personally by members of the Ctrl-Z Editorial Board. And while the pages of Ctrl-Z, and humanities scholarship generally, will feel barer for a lack of future contributions from Niall, it is his humour, amity and loyalty that will be missed most by those who were fortunate enough to count him as a friend.

Niall and I were in the final stages of preparing this current issue of Ctrl-Z for publication when he died. Issue #4 is hereby dedicated to his memory.

RB
June 2014

Welcome to the third issue of Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy, in which you will find representations of some of the ideas, challenges and possibilities presented at the Ctrl-Z: Renewal! event held in Melbourne earlier this year.

More than just a journal, Ctrl-Z began a little over two years ago as an arts/theory festival (of sorts) organised around the theme of ‘Writing in the Age of New Media’, held at the Fremantle Arts Centre in Western Australia. Beyond or before the ‘academic’ end of exploring ideas and questions prompted by the event’s subject matter, the objective was first and foremost to experiment with ways of conducting and disseminating humanities research outside the conventional formats of academic publication and conference presentation. Panel-based, multimedia and interactive, Ctrl-Z: Writing in the Age of New Media sought not only to embrace ‘non-traditional research outputs’ (to use the current lingo of Australian research quality measurement agencies) by including video productions, art installations and dramatic performances, but also to cut across academic, professional and public divides by engaging ‘non-traditional research audiences’ too. And while perhaps not quite as eclectic as its predecessor, this year’s Renewal! continued in this vein, we feel, by gathering its own diversity of themes, disciplines, participants, media, formats and registers—as the sample of contributions featuring in this latest issue of Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy may go some way towards indicating.

This impetus to engage humanities research as a question is what has driven and continues to drive Ctrl-Z in all of its guises, including its expansion into the trade of ‘book’ publishing and the release of Setting Up the Nyoongar Tent Embassy: A Report on Perth Media, by Thor Kerr and Shaphan Cox. Recalling the notion of ‘occasional papers’, Ctrl-Z Press—through which we hope one day to ‘publish’ audio-visual productions as much as books, scripted lectures and reports—seeks to exploit the affordances of digital and online communications technologies to publish important and innovative research, free from the exigencies that constrain commercial academic publishers, their production schedules and their marketing requirements.

Via the operations of Ctrl-Z Press we thus raise a research question: in an age of digital and networked media, what are the most appropriate or effective means of disseminating academic scholarship, of communicating experimental ideas and forms, or presenting, as a matter of urgency, research findings to their many possible—sometimes unforeseeable—readerships? Indeed, given the objects and domains of inquiry with which we engage: what is the task of (specialist) humanities inquiry today, in an age where the possibilities of knowledge contestation and conceptual innovation once theorised and affirmed by postmodern theory have become not only practically plausible but effectively routine and widespread?

As an ideas network, exhibition space, publisher, events machine and—most significantly—experiment-in-process, Ctrl-Z aims to investigate these questions by fostering and promoting contemporary humanities research into the broad areas of media, art, culture and philosophy (and perhaps more besides). Committed to the dissemination of ideas and interests across specialist divides, Ctrl-Z prizes novel approaches to old problems, innovative forms of presentation, unlikely collaborations and chance encounters.

Ctrl-Z is hardly the first academic enterprise to undertake any of the abovementioned activities—not the first to hold an unconventional symposium or to promote a radical interdisciplinarity; nor the first to peer-review multimedia artworks and to branch out into ‘e-publishing’. But in coordinating (here, now) these activities under the banner of a question, or series of questions, about the contemporary forms and objectives of art and scholarship, we seek to establish Ctrl-Z as a vehicle for exploring the nature—and future—of humanities research in a digital age.

To that end we invite submissions and proposals for collaboration that engage with the questions that animate this enterprise and its speculative impulse, while maintaining the highest standards of editorial and academic quality. See the main site for contact details. And for a sample of the fruits that such collaboration and questions may bear, you need look no further than any issue of Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy.

This third issue of the journal could not have been produced without the assistance of our ‘Renewal!’ co-hosts—Lisa Gye, John Hartley, Scott McQuire, Maria Miranda, Norie Neumark, Nikos Papastergiadis and Darren Tofts—to whom we give our thanks, as we do to all of our contributors and anonymous reviewers.

Check the main site early in the new year for an archive of other ephemera associated with the Renewal! event, as well as for details of forthcoming Ctrl-Z activities, including the next issue of the journal, scheduled to appear by the middle of 2014.

RB & NL
December 2013

Welcome to the second issue of Ctrl-Z!

With Issue #1 we sought to sketch, by way of speculation and permutation, a promising ‘field’ of inquiry, and to do so without seeking to force any identity (in terms of disciplinary objects, approaches or genealogies—nor, indeed, of genre or mode of presentation) upon it. This second issue, #2, presents less a refinement of the field than a continuation of that inaugurating impulse, throwing further into question the journal’s orienting terms: ‘new’ ‘media’ ‘philosophy’.

Hence ‘innovation’, ‘ideation’ and ‘information’—no more definitive than our original terms of inquiry, no doubt, but hardly mere arbitrary place markers for all that.

Our first section, INNOVATION, approaches Ctrl-Z’s animating questions predominantly through the medium and example of ‘art’. While art can hardly be said to hold a monopoly on innovation, nevertheless something like art, or perhaps the poetic impulse that art is thought to embody, often stands out as a practice or a space heralding ‘the new’. Thus Benjamin Forster’s mixed media art—a sample of which appears as our cover image for this issue—is showcased here for the new uses that it makes of the apparently ‘old’ medium of ‘writing’, raising questions along the way about the very media through which aesthetic questioning, in the so-called age of new media, may be pursued. We might say that, as ‘art’, Forster’s work raises these questions ‘performatively’, which begs the question of how the inanimate materials which feature in his installations may be said to ‘perform’. Concepts of performance are at the heart, too, of Ken Miller’s ‘film’ Graphology Relapse, which as a ‘film’ of a John Kinsella ‘poem’—two poems, in fact—likewise presents novel thoughts about the impossible purity of aesthetic media, as we argue in our own contribution to this second issue, an exploration of the ‘research value’ of art (as ‘creative production’) and humanities inquiry more generally. For where there’s art, there’s reflection on art, and so what might be called ‘art criticism’ plays its part in the production of the ‘new’ that aesthetic innovation brings into the world. Hence Martin Štefl’s contribution to this issue, and its work in drawing out the new concept of ‘the body’ presented in—literally embodied by—performance artist Stelarc and his extensive ‘corpus’.

The contributions gathered under the heading of IDEATION find their way into this issue by way of a call for submissions, predating the inception of Ctrl-Z, for a project intended to revisit Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, especially with regard to his work on ‘spectrality’. The notions of ‘spectrality’, ‘hauntology’ and ‘the ghost’ seem to us particularly pertinent to the field of new media philosophy (see, for instance, Tony Thwaites’ piece in Issue #1), not only owing to Derrida’s place (however ambivalent and contested) in a tradition of continental philosophy, but also for their radical reconceptualisation of ‘time’ and ‘timeliness’, as well as their potential to transform analyses of simulation, mediated public spheres, political economies of the media, and so on. In different ways, the contributions from Nicole Pepperell, Jane Mummery and Glen Fuller demonstrate the continuing conceptual returns to be derived from Specters, connecting notions of politics, justice and loyalty to the conditions that define ‘today’.

As if to prove the point, the two contributions to our final section, INFORMATION, clearly demonstrate (albeit, without ever using the term) the spectral nature of contemporary information flows and the role of new media in transforming the relations between information technologies and information users. Tero Karppi takes up this issue in the context of the emerging technology of ‘augmented reality’ (AR), exploring the ways in which the cutting-edge technology, which superimposes ‘online’ information over the physical world, ‘rewires’ users through its privileging, hence fostering, of a kind of ‘schizophrenic’ disposition. Touching on this same technology, the piece from Tama Leaver, Michele Willson and Mark Balnaves brings Karppi’s observations home by identifying the processes of information filtration that underpin not just seemingly science fictional technologies like AR, but also those information platforms—search engines, for example—that pretty much every reader of this journal is likely to use on an everyday basis.

Undoubtedly, this organisation risks appearing to conform to a traditional taxonomy—as though innovation as such belongs to art; as though only philosophy can do anything meaningful with ideas; and as though information falls under the domain of media criticism exclusively. But it should be clear that, even after only its second issue, Ctrl-Z has no interest in settling for (or into) the solace of established forms. These organising categories, then, are intended not so much as revealing terms, but as terms under erasure—unavoidable, perhaps, but far from indispensable.

Our thanks to all of our contributors and anonymous reviewers.

Keep an eye on our website for details of our next Ctrl-Z event, to be held in Melbourne next year.

RB & NL

Ctrl-Z is a peer-reviewed international online journal and exhibition space from the Centre for Culture & Technology at Curtin University.

The journal flickers at the intersection of multiple possible relations between ‘new’, ‘media’ and ‘philosophy’, disrupting any notion of these being understood as a simple series of modifying terms.

To what extent, for example, do ‘new media’ represent a new concept and mode of art, or provide for radically different forms of social and political practice? What kinds of histories, social formations and aesthetic transformations may be called for or identified by ‘new media’ understood in the broadest possible sense of the term?

What does philosophy have to say about new media, given that it has never had much to say about ‘old’ media? What are the implications of media — new or old — for the objects or fields of enquiry (existence, knowledge, ethics and so on) that have traditionally been the domain of philosophy? What might a philosophy of (new) media look like? What forms and concepts might it invent?

Alternatively, have art and philosophy been made redundant by new media? Or can electronic and networked communications technologies function as new media of philosophical investigation and creative practice? Is a new philosophy (a ‘new ontology’, for instance) or a philosophy of ‘the new’ possible today and, if so, to what extent must such philosophy allow for questions of (the) media?

To what extent, too, do new media necessitate a rethinking of traditional concepts of communication and representation? If these concepts may be seen to underpin traditional ideas of community and the public (to which, historically, journalism has addressed itself), then what might new media have to say to and about contemporary political, professional and philosophical frameworks for traditional media practice?</i>

These and similar matters — questions concerning culture and technology, as it were — are the focus of  Ctrl-Z, which welcomes creative and critical submissions in experimental, traditional or multimedia formats.

Contributors to #1: Mark Amerika, Clare Birchall, Paul Bowman, Simon Critchley, Chantal Faust, Gary Hall, John Kinsella, Chad Mossholder, Baden Pailthorpe, Tony Thwaites, Darren Tofts, Petere Woodridge