serial consign

[Eva and Franco Mattes (0100101110101101.ORG) / Perpetual Self Dis/Infecting Machine - Custom made computer infected with the virus Biennale / 2001-2004]

A new issue of Vague Terrain has launched and I'm quite excited to help spread the word about this provocative body of work. Vague Terrain 11: Curediting-Translational Online Work is a CONT3XT.NET organized survey of contemporary thinking about new media art, online curation and broader web culture.

The issue includes work from: Joasia Krysa, Laboratorio 060 (Lourdes Morales, Javier Toscano, Daniela Wolf), Annette Finnsdottir, Eva Moraga, CRUMB (Beryl Graham and Verina Gfader), Ela Kagel & Ursula Endlicher, Michelle Kasprzak, Furtherfield (Marc Garrett, Ruth Catlow), Geoff Cox, Jodi.org (Joan Heemskerk, Dirk Paesmans) and Domenico Quaranta. Neil Wiernik and I also contributed a text on our experience in developing Vague Terrain as a publishing/distribution platform over the last three years.

I'm extremely impressed with the work that CONT3XT.NET (Sabine Hochrieser, Michael Kargl & Franz Thalmair) have assembled and it was a pleasure to work with Franz in consolidating this material over the last few weeks. Please take some time to examine Vague Terrain 11: Curediting-Translational Online Work.

The last week has been quite hectic! I'm in the midst of rebuilding Vague Terrain in Drupal, exploring some exciting new opportunities and knuckling down for an impending crunch at my day job. Despite all this activity, I've been diligently working through some great writing and media. Please note the following:

• _Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_, a new blogging project by the prolific poet/theorist Mez Breeze. Mez launched Augmentology this past April and she has quickly amassed an (expectedly) idiosyncratic series of posts which explore notions of presence, identity and play across a variety of gaming and social media platforms. Mez is in the midst of expanding the scope of Augmentology by inviting a number of guest contributors to provide content for the project - these will tentatively include: Joseph Delappe, Howard Rheingold, Azdel Slade, Trevor Dodge and Shane Hilton. I've also been invited into the fold, and I am excited at the prospect of further exploring some of the themes I've touched on in my previous posts on gaming.
• Last week Mitchell Whitelaw tipped me off about Strange Ontologies in Digital Culture, a paper that he recently co-authored with Troy Innocent and Mark Guglielmetti. The essay explores the implications of social software (facebook, del.icio.us, etc.) and some of the counterintuitive percepts and phenomena made possible by immersion in digital space. I found the discussions on death in gaming and character deletion particularly engaging.
• The video archives of the recent Software Studies workshop/symposium at UCSD have been posted. The two dozen or so pecha kucha-style presentations provide an incredible window into the current research projects of numerous top shelf digital theorists and practitioners including Jordan Crandall, Warren Sack, Nick Montfort, and many others. I've only watched a few videos thus far, but I found Ian Bogost's presentation on the forthcoming Platform Studies project quite fascinating.