[artinfo] Location and Belonging in New Media Contexts

[Danny Butt]

Call for contributions - please circulate - apologies if you receive 
this more than once.

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 <http://
culturalfutures.place.net.nz>. 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:

Place-based new media practices
Migration and movement
Indigeneity and colonisation
Home and belonging
New media and cultural transformation
Globalisation and cosmopolitanism
Local activism and social change

Abstracts of 500 words, along with a 200 word bio should be sent to
info at 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