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Speaking of Everyday Life…
update: fixed the links (they don’t make it easy at Taylor and Francis). Cultural Studies has a special double issue on everyday life, which has lots and lots of goodies in it, including an article called Intimations of everyday life: Ubiquitous computing and the city by one of my favourite research bloggers, Anne Galloway, and […]
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Remix-a-licious
At Horizon 0, my new favourite online journal (at least for the next five minutes) is an evocative piece on the forms and future of remix culture. Samples from the Heap: Notes on Recycling the Detritus of a Remixed Culture by Bernard Schutze: Mix, mix again, remix: copyleft, cut ‘n’ paste, digital jumble, cross-fade, dub, […]
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Lovemarks: Loyalty Beyond Reason
Saatchi and Saatchi “discover” the affective dimensions of consumption and give it a brandname: they propose the term Lovemarks to describe brands to which consumers remain loyal “beyond reason”: Brands have run out of juice. More and more people in the world have grown to expect great performance from products, services and experiences. And most […]
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Affect and Cultural Participation
I meant to blog my notes from a seminar here at QUT the other day given by Stephen Coleman, visiting professor of e-democracy at the Oxford Internet Institute. Now, e-governance and e-voting aren’t exactly my bag, but cultural democracy (by which I mean a democratic cultural sphere) and the ways in which digital networks and […]
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Body as Machine
Came across a fantastic Fritz Kahn image called Man as Industrial Palace at city of sound. The image comes from the Dream Anatomy Exhibition at the US National Library of Medicine. In the early 20th century, Fritz Kahn produced a succession of books on the inner workings of the human body, using visual metaphors drawn […]
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Hip Hop and the Appropriation of the “Other”
Friday Night Fishfry Forever has been thinking about the politics of appropriation in hip hop, prompted by Timbaland & Magoo’s release Indian Flute. Of course, Western art music composers have always “stolen” from exotic others (their own peasant classes, gypsies, or the “orient”). In recent times, the issue was discussed at length in relation to […]
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Networks, Rings and Things
These two paragraphs are completely unrelated. I admit it. Bit 1 I keep forgetting to help spread the word about Phil Agre’s advice piece Networking on the Network, which is specifically aimed at graduate students (it’s almost long enough to be a PhD itself in fact). It isn’t just for academic types, though. It’s full […]
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Cinema, Memory, and National Identity
There have been times in years past when my own house made me so bored and restless that I spent whole Saturdays doing the rounds of my friends, dropping in for cups of tea and a chat. My behaviour in the blogosphere lately has been exactly like that – for some reason everybody else’s blog […]
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The Next Big Thing
Embarrassingly, it is yet again via Anne Galloway that I come across another excellent cultural studies-esque blog: Steven Shaviro’s The Pinocchio Theory. What sent me there was an interesting quote Anne posted from a piece in which Shaviro introduces us to a 19th Century French sociologist called Gabriel Tarde, a contemporary of Durkheim, and all […]
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The High/Popular Divide in Postmodernity
Anna wants to know why art is still imagined as an elitist enterprise, especially when there is such an “indie” (i.e. organic, collective, unfunded) culture around localised performing arts practice in Adelaide (where she lives and works). It’s not often I get to regurgitate chunks of my nearly-finished-thesis in response to a blog post, so […]