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The post Issue 36: Artificial Creativity first appeared on Transformations Journal.

This issue of Transformations allows scholars from the humanities and social sciences to analyse and reflect on the histories of particular territories and the impulses and justifications that have enabled them, highlighting their idiosyncratic positions and trajectories in a world order that is – paradoxically – ever more internationalised and intractably rooted in cumbersome national entities.

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The post Issue 35: Anomalous / Autonomous first appeared on Transformations Journal.

Algorithms have inhuman capacities. They do not become distracted, tired, impatient or emotional. At the same time the algorithm’s inhuman abilities can be understood as a desirable improvement on human skills. Algorithms are inhuman forces that bring social, political, material and cultural formations into being, generating and extinguishing possibilities. Their inhumanism transmutes ideas of the human and demands new (post)humanisms. This issue of Transformations presents contributions that address the inhuman algorithm.

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The post Issue 34: Inhuman Algorithms first appeared on Transformations Journal.

This issue of Transformations explores how scholars in creative arts, the humanities, and social sciences are contributing to the debates and politics of resource transformation and extraction. The complex socio-cultural and environmental legacies of nitrate, lithium, coal and uranium mining are examined across a range of sites in Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia. Across these different sites and modes of engagement, what emerges is a very tangible sense of the forces exerted by the activities of resource extraction upon environments and human populations.

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(Image credit: Ignacio Acosta, 2012)

The post Issue 33: Mineral Transformation and Resource Extraction: Pasts, Presents and Futures first appeared on Transformations Journal.

This issue considers “ecological webs” as image-worlds or umwelten and engages critically with the modes of non-human signification enacted within moving image media. Theoretical advances in ecocinema, “eco-cinecriticism” and “green film criticism” (Ivakhiv 1) over the last twenty years highlight that “the cinematic experience is inescapably embedded in ecological webs” (Rust and Monani 2). The question of what moving images do ecologically calls to attention related questions of aesthetics, poetics, politics, ethics, mediation and representation of the nature of nature and the non-human. Towards these aims, the editors welcomed submissions from any of the disciplines that concern themselves, in one way or another, with the moving image, including film and cinema studies, new media and video, film-philosophy, literary studies, environmental humanities and associated disciplines.

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The post Issue 32: What Can Moving Images Do? first appeared on Transformations Journal.

This special issue of Transformations pays critical attention to the circulation of affect by bodily technologies. Demonstrating the centrality of affect to the cultural, critical and creative analysis of technologies, these papers explore affect’s movement in and through virtual reality, artificial intelligence, gaming, disconnection, drones, Facebook, blogging, and e-sports.

Works Cited

• Ahmed, Sarah. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
• Clough, Patricia. “Introduction.” The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Eds P. T. Clough and J. Halley. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
• Hansen, Mark B. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
• Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007.
• Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

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The post Issue 31: Technoaffect; Bodies, Machines, Media. first appeared on Transformations Journal.

We define the environmental arts broadly for this purpose, with a particular emphasis on modes of thinking, feeling, sensing, designing, making, performing and composing that are attuned to environmental change and are inherently collective in nature.

In this respect, artists have often been years and even decades ahead of others in responding to the conceptual and practical challenges of environmental change. Since the 1960s, artists such as Robert Smithson, James Turrell, Robert Irwin, Helen and Newton Harrison, Joseph Beuys and Suzanne Lacy have enacted visionary environmental practices, while also conceptualising these practices within the broader fields of social theory and philosophy.

Such critical reconceptualisations of the field are urgently called for in response to mounting evidence that we have entered the Anthropocene epoch, a time typified by climate change, catastrophic loss of biodiversity, ecological instability, resource depletion, ubiquitous digitisation and rapid advances in biotechnology and computer science. In revealing the profound entanglement of human culture and natural phenomena in the contemporary world, the advent of the Anthropocene has had a destabilising effect on dualistic philosophies and binary logics that have upheld rigid barriers between the human and the nonhuman, the organic and the inorganic, the natural and the artificial, the social and the material. New concepts are called for that can mobilise creative thinking and action outside of such anthropocentric and humanistic frameworks, and mobilise new practices that are both attuned and responsive to the rapidly changing environmental conditions of everyday life.

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The post Issue 30: Concepts for Action in the Environmental Arts first appeared on Transformations Journal.

This special issue of Transformations examines the ways in which human-machine relationships are configured in social robotics. It seeks contributions that recognise that contemporary robotics produces and circulates cultural values, and consider how social robots continue and diverge from other expressive and communicative practices. It recognises that contemporary robotics produces and circulates cultural values, and considers how social robots continue and diverge from other expressive and communicative practices. In so doing it tests the scope and limits of the category of social robotics.

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The post Issue 29: Social Robots: Human-Machine Configurations first appeared on Transformations Journal.

This contemporary interest in ruins scales from numerous blogs and sub-Reddits to the vaulted heights of major art institutions, with the Tate gallery’s 2013 “Ruin Lust” exhibition. But of course – as the Tate’s exhibition charted – this fascination has its roots in much older traditions. The ruin was employed for theological purposes in the paintings of the Renaissance, and for didactic and allegorical purposes in the Romantic paintings of the 18^th century. For hundreds of years ruins have been both quotidian elements of the daily lives of many, especially in Europe, while they have also operated as rich sources of historical meaning within various modes of artistic expression.

What can be done with the ruin today? Can we put the observations of key theorists of the ruin, such as Walter Benjamin, to new purposes? And from our ancient, colonial and industrial ruins can we pull some hope, some imagination or possibility for the future that sees the ruin differently than as an emblem of a glorious or inglorious past?

This issue of Transformations reflects on the ruin and ruination, its past and its future.

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The post Issue 28: The Ruin, The Future first appeared on Transformations Journal.