[-empyre-] a Question

[Anna Munster]

I don't want to sound like a fascist here...but as  moderator I am supposed to keep people on topic on the empyre list as it is a list devoted to particular topics by the month.

The question has been raised about whether networks involve a sustainable form of future energy. This is tangentially related to the topic at hand insofar as reading/writing/making online does involve consuming energy.

However, I'd rather not have an explosion of comments about networks and energy use etc in a topic where we are looking primarily at networked writing/reading UNLESS there are salient points to be made about the relation of each to the other.

Just a general note about the fact that I will moderate an onslaught of off-topic posts IF they come!

cheers
Anna

A/Prof. Anna Munster
Director of Postgraduate Research (Acting)
Deputy Director Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics
School of Art History and Art Education
College of Fine Arts
UNSW
P.O. Box 259
Paddington
NSW 2021
612 9385 0741 (tel)
612 9385 0615(fax)
a.munster at unsw.edu.au
________________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Julian Oliver [julian at julianoliver.com]
Sent: Wednesday, 28 October 2009 10:37 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] a Question

..on Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 10:20:19PM +0000, sdv at krokodile.co.uk wrote:
> I may have missed this during the past month but has anyone here
> actually talked about the cost of networks and whether the network forms
> are sustainable ?

If there's something I don't grokk here it's the strangely time-less,
willy-nilly projection of the term 'sustainable'. From when to when and what to
what is sustainable?

'Sustainability' is a concept that refers to a temporary control over energetic
decay that favours one or more (inter)dependent organisms.

We live on a sphere in a void and we're breeding like rabbits. Let's talk about
minimising inevitable harm (a 'sensible harm'?) rather than invoking the myth of
'sustainability' no?

My 2 watts,

Julian

P.S For all the hair-dryers, needles, routers, castles, deep-sea probes, Zaha
Hadids, Ikea bookshelves and false teeth made, it's my suspicion that the Earth
has not grown any heavier and nor has it grown any lighter.

--
Julian Oliver
home: New Zealand
based: Berlin, Germany
currently: Berlin, Germany
about: http://julianoliver.com


>
>
> Anna Munster wrote:
> > I'd now like to bring Anna Gibbs and Maria Angel into the discussion, perhaps as 'other voices' and I've intro'd them below. They aren't authorial contributors to Networked but hopefully they might become contributors anyway!
> >
> > I'm wondering if either of you might comment upon the question of reading new media/networked writing. We've had a lot of discussion the difficulty of reading dense theoretical writing in online environments and hence of people participating in the Networked project. Do either of you have any comments about the screen (broadly speaking) as a reading interface and/or the role and place of the reader in collaborative and participatory writing?
> >
> > best Anna
> >
> > BIOGRAHIES
> > Anna Gibbs is Associate Professor in the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney. A specialist in affect theory, she works across the fields of cultural, textual and media studies and her most recent publications are in Cultural Studies Review, Interrogating the War on Terror (ed Deborah Staines) and forthcoming in The Affect Reader (eds Greg Seigworth and Melissa Gregg). A writer of experimental fiction, she also collaborates with visual artists and has recently curated an exhibition on Art, Writing and the Book. She is currently working on a project about Writing in the Media Culture with Maria Angel, and together they have published essays in Literature and Sensation (ed Anthony Uhlman and Helen Groth) and forthcoming in Beyond the Screen (eds Joergen Schafer and Peter Gendolla).
> >
> >
> > Maria Angel is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. Current research interests include the transformation of literary genres in new media contexts, theories of writing, memory, and corporeality. She has published essays in the areas of literary aesthetics and visual rhetoric. More recently she has worked on the convergence of theories of affect with writing and new media. Her current collaboration with Anna Gibbs theorises the emergent field of literary writing in digital media and they are currently completing a manuscript At the Interface: Writing, Memory, and Motion.
> >
> >
> > A/Prof. Anna Munster
> > Director of Postgraduate Research (Acting)
> > Deputy Director Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics
> > School of Art History and Art Education
> > College of Fine Arts
> > UNSW
> > P.O. Box 259
> > Paddington
> > NSW 2021
> > 612 9385 0741 (tel)
> > 612 9385 0615(fax)
> > a.munster at unsw.edu.au
> > _______________________________________________
> > empyre forum
> > empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> > http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> >
> >
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre

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