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January 10, 2007

M/C Journal

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Call for Contributions

M/C - Media and Culture is calling for contributors to the 'adapt' issue of M/C Journal :: Edited by Patrick West & Jeannette Delamoir :: M/C Journal is looking for new contributors. M/C is a crossover journal between the popular and the academic, and a blind- and peer-reviewed journal. In 2007, M/C Journal celebrates its tenth year in publication.

'Adapt' immediately suggests the artistic notion of adaptation: reworking a work of art across the boundaries of media, audience, and context of presentation. But once shaken loose from its attachment to this narrowly artistic formulation of adaptation, adapt seems to structure virtually all aspects of our biological and cultural selves. Darwinism holds that an organism - over millennia - adapts new forms and behaviours in order to survive, while the business of global and technological living demands a sort of accelerated Darwinism on a scale of minutes and moments. We adapt into something, but what is it that we adapt from? Does stripping back the layers of adaptation ever uncover something not itself just another adaptation? And why is this (fiction of the) original so often given precedence over the simulacrum, the copy, the adaptation? Adapt sutures the poles of such cultural hierarchies.

Adapt also plunges us into the mystery of creativity itself, fracturing the illusion of originality to precisely the degree that it presupposes layers of difference infiltrating the universe's 'steady state'. Postmodern circumstances such as cyborg existence - a combinatorial difference -depend upon just such a concept of adapt, which brings things together without forfeiting entirely what tends to keep them apart. The ethics of adapt might be found in the way it opens the whole gamut of culture up to difference. For when it comes right down to it, isn't 'to adapt' the slogan of everything? Thought, writing, art: these seem inevitably products of adaptation, to the extent that an infinity of previous instantiations must always be assumed. All thought proceeds from previous thought, all writing from previous writing, and no art is ever born ex nihilo.

Our call for papers encourages contributions about adapt that themselves act as adaptations, revising whatever may have settled into a stasis of meaning. The following list of topics should be considered suggestive rather than prescriptive:

- adapt in cross-arts practice environments
- adapt as strategy of cultural and/or gender and/or ethnic identity
- adapt as mechanism of difference production
- adapt and nostalgia for the original
- adapt and case studies of adaptation
- adapt as resistance or submission to power
- adapt and new understandings of Darwinism

Submit your essays of 3000 words in length to the editors at adapt[at]journal.media-culture.org.au.

Article deadline: 9 March 2007
Issue release date: 2 May 2007

M/C Journal was founded (as "M/C - A Journal of Media and Culture") in 1998 as a place of public intellectualism analysing and critiquing the meeting of media and culture. Contributors are directed to past issues of M/C Journal for examples of style and content, and to the submissions page for comprehensive article submission guidelines. M/C Journal articles are blind peer-reviewed.

Further M/C Journal issues scheduled for 2007:

'complex': article deadline 4 May 2007, release date 27 June 2007
'home': article deadline 29 June 2007, release date 22 August 2007
'error': article deadline 24 August 2007, release date 17 October 2007
'vote': article deadline 19 October 2007, release date 12 December 2007

M/C - Media and Culture is located at http://www.media-culture.org.au. M/C Journal is online at http://journal.media-culture.org.au.All past issues of M/C Journal on various topics are available there.

Posted by jo at January 10, 2007 07:58 PM

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