Radical media, politics and culture.

New Issue Launched: Networked Utopias and Speculative Futures — The Fibreculture Journal

New Issue Launched: Networked Utopias and Speculative Futures
Fibreculture
Edited by Su Ballard, Zita Joyce and Lizzie Muller

Our 20th fully Open Access issue, in our 10th year of publishing!

Articles on: The material substrate of networks; the Arab Spring; re-imagining mobile communications via encounters with a neolithic village; the 'freedom of movement and freedom of knowledge' events that have taken place between Spain and Morocco; utopias and political economies of networks, space and time; networks and health; networks and food; and Montréal residents' appropriation of train tracks.

From the Su Ballard, Zita Joyce and Lizzie Muller's Editorial Essay:

The future began somewhere. The impulse behind this issue of The Fibreculture Journal was a crisis of imagination with regards to how the future might look and behave. Our starting point was the notion of post-millennial tension – the idea that in the decades following the year 2000 we find ourselves living in an era that was meant to be the future, but where many of our futuristic hopes and fantasies remain unfulfilled. Worse, our historical visions of hyper-technological futures seem to have propelled us into a perilous position where humankind may not have any kind of future at all. 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, we asked if the age-old concept of utopia still has the strength to generate galvanising visions of the future.

Articles:

FCJ-138 This is not a Bit-Pipe: A Political Economy of the Substrate Network Rachel O’Dwyer and Linda Doyle

FCJ-139 Sand14: Reconstructing the Future of the Mobile Telecoms Industry Laura Watts

FCJ-140 Radio Feeds, Satellite Feeds, Network Feeds: Subjectivity Across the Straits of Gibraltar Nicholas Knouf

FCJ-141 Spaces for Play – Architectures of Wisdom: Towards a Utopic Spatial Practice
Dan Frodsham

FCJ-142 Spectacles and Tropes: Speculative Design and Contemporary Food Cultures
Carl DiSalvo

FCJ-143 Ouvert/Open: Common Utopias
Nathalie Casemajor Loustau and Heather Davis

FCJ-144 Healthymagination: Anticipating Health of our Future Selves
Marina Levina

FCJ-145 Temporal Utopianism and Global Information Networks
Andrew White

FCJ-146 Mannheim’s Paradox: Ideology, Utopia, Media Technologies, and the Arab Spring
Rowan Wilkens

FCJ-147 Liberation Technology and the Arab Spring: From Utopia to Atopia and Beyond
Ulises A. Mejias

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