Failure Notice

Guest editorial for October 2007 issue of M/C Journal

Distributed Terror And The Ordering Of Networked Social Space

Truth be told, the “Y2K bug” was quite a disappointment. While the technopundits wooed us with visions of network failures worthy of millennial fervor, Jan. 1, 2000, came and went without even a glimmer of the catastrophic. Yet the Y2K “bug” did reveal the degree to which the American apocalypse now took the form of the network itself. The spaces of everyday life in America and elsewhere in a developed world produce and are produced by network structures that Manuel Castells has called “spaces of flow.” As such, Catastrophe today is marked more by dispersion and dissipation, rather than breakdown — a dis-strophe of social forms, structures, and experience.The dissipation of enactive networks does not, however, equate with a system failure. With the Internet “bubble burst” of March, 2000, the very exuberance of market flows were very much the conditions of possibility for both the irruption of a new economy and its sudden evaporation. It is not the ephemerality of these social forms and structures that disorients activities of everyday life in a network society, but rather our lack of control over distributed processes. The bubble burst, then, by no means sounded a death knell for distributed network functions. Rather, it marked a moment of increased misrecognition of the forms, structures, and practices that were the conditions of possibility for the event itself, as an ideology of authentication eclipsed a rhetoric of emergence and flow. Billions in capital disappeared in a matter of weeks, but the network forms and structures that allowed individual users “direct access” to the flows of capital remained in place for a normative virtual class, articulated as personalized and privatized spaces of control

Ways Of Unseeing: Crowdsourcing The Frame In Roger May's Looking At Appalachia

Mark Nunes considers Roger May's Looking at Appalachia, a crowdsourced photography archive of spaces, places, and people in Appalachia, drawn from the work of many photographers of the region. As this online project reproduces and challenges tropes of Appalachian photography, Nunes describes how it encourages openness to documenting and delimiting the boundaries of Appalachian representation

Beyond The "Holy See": Parody And Narrative Assemblage In "Cyclops"

No abstrac

A Million Little Blogs: Community, Narrative, And The James Frey Controversy

No abstrac

Semiotic Perturbations: What The Frog's Eye Tells Us About Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake presents a semiotic dilemma for the reader: How is it that the Wake means anything? And, Why doesn't it mean everything? To gesture, somewhat metonymically, toward the Wake itself: It is told in sounds in utter that, in signs so adds to, in universal, in polygluttural, in each auxiliary neutral idiom, sordomutics, florilingua, sheltafocal, flayflutter, a con's cubane, a pro's tutute, strassarab, ereperse and anythongue athall. [FW 117.12-16] As such, Finnegans Wake lays bare the dilemma of semiotics in general: that is, the problem of signification and indeterminacy of meaning

Engaging Appalachia: Digital Literacies, Mobile Media, And A Sense Of Place

Objectives: To provide students with an opportunity to explore the intersection of digital and civic engagement through project-based learning; to develop digital literacy skills through critical media practices. Rationale: While it has become a commonplace of sorts to assume that students who have grown up in a period of widespread access to web-based resources and mobile devices will have well-developed digital literacy skills, a growing body of knowledge would seem to suggest that so-called “digital natives” are by no means generationally united in their ability to critically engage in new media practices (Selwyn, 2009; Davies, Halford, & Gibbins, 2012). To compound matters, our classroom practices often tend to stress the importance of critical thinking as it applies to reading the media, with less emphasis on producing media objects. But as Jenkins (2006) notes, “Just as we would not traditionally assume that someone is literate if they can read but not write, we should not assume that someone possesses media literacy if they can consume but not express themselves” (p. 170). Project-based learning provides an opportunity for students to produce media objects as a means of reflecting upon theoretical concepts. As Thomas (2000) notes, in project-based learning, “projects are central, not peripheral to the curriculum” (p. 3); in addition, the projects should enable students to explore critical course learning outcomes through an application of these concepts to “authentic (not simulated) problems or questions” (p. 4). Lee, Blackwell, Drake, & Moran (2014) note that while project-based learning has become fairly well- established in K-12 reform, higher education has been slower in adopting project-based methodologies, even though an emphasis on experiential learning, and a liberal education model informed by the related, Deweyian concept of problem- based learning, are by no means novel concepts on college campuses . . . This activity, and all of the other projects in this course, required students to critically engage in the region in which they found themselves going to school – Southern Appalachia

Postmodern Spacings

In February of 1997, a dozen individuals began working on a collaborative on-line project entitled “Postmodern Spacings.” We came from various academic and professional fields in North America, Europe, and Australia. Our only initial “guiding principle” was that we were to discuss a variety of understandings of postmodern space. The seminar as a whole would be responsible for drawing up a syllabus and setting the focus. Together, we set up our reading list, held real-time discussions in an on-line meeting space called 1k+1 MOO (hero.village.virginia.edu:7777), carried on conversations via a list-serv, and constructed collaborative, interwoven texts. The hypermedia work we present here is the culmination of that effort. Multimedia Link: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/27678#pre_in

Integrating the extended clarinet : an exploratory process for incorporating extended techniques into traditional clarinet pedagogy

As the clarinet has evolved, the instrument’s capabilities have expanded into new and creative areas of technical, musical, and sonic expression. Modern performers refer to these novel, unconventional uses of the instrument as “extended techniques.” These “extended” techniques on the clarinet have been a hot topic of discussion for decades. But even as the wide palette of sounds produced by these techniques has garnered increasing attention from composers, clarinetists themselves often approach these techniques with skepticism. Performers who have embraced these sounds, however, often claim that the learning of these techniques has not only enabled their ability to play modern works, but also strengthened their fundamentals and widened their options in how they choose to perform standard repertoire. Although we profess modern ideals, our pedagogical approach still relies on the traditions started by pedagogues like Baermann and Klosé, which date to the 18th and 19th centuries respectively. And while traditional teaching methods certainly have their place and need not be replaced, extended techniques provide new tools for teachers who are looking for novel ways to thoroughly and effectively identify and diagnose their students’ performance issues. This study explores some of the pedagogical possibilities inherent within a sampling of clarinet extended techniques. How can these techniques be utilized to strengthen fundamental skills on the clarinet? What are ways in which extended techniques can be applied to more traditional repertoire as a practice tool? How does a working knowledge of modern conventions enhance a student’s overall musicianship? This document conducts a review of currently available pedagogical material on the subject, instructs on possible uses for extended techniques for fundamentals practice, and provides a sample guide on how to use these techniques and apply them to standard works such as Carl Maria von Weber’s Concertino in E-Flat Major, Op. 26 and Johannes Brahms’ Sonata No. 2. Also included are full transcripts of interviews with renowned clarinet pedagogues Gregory Oakes and Eric Mandat, both of whom are experts on the clarinet’s wide range of extended techniques. Specific techniques discussed are: glissando, portamento, and pitch bending; the manipulation of partials and multiphonics; microtones and quarter-tones; flutter tongue; growling and singing while playing; double tongue; slap tongue; and circular breathing. With an open mind and an eye toward exploration, clarinetists everywhere can see their performance and pedagogical practices enhanced by an honest engagement with the instrument’s vast network of extended techniques