Spring 2003

This issue contains several projects that provide pathways to the system of linkages between IT, cultural production, and social infrastructures. Being the first issue, we have organized it around the general theme of our mission, the contextualization of New Media Art within current political economies. Future issues will focus on more specific topics, like genetics/informatics. Each of the works included here deals with viewing New Media culture within a specific political economy. While they each do this in a different way, it is the foregrounding of such connections that makes them of interest to us. What we seek to do is provide more of an unpacked context, yet one not overdetermined by a narrow, constrictive reading of reality. These readings should cross and short circuit, while remaining grounded in material conditions.
The current geo-political situation (US/Iraq and beyond) has infected all communities, as no one is immune from its ramifications, however it gets played out. Resistance to the current, catastrophic trajectory is vast and highly visual. But for some, the reality of apocalyptic death has been assimilated into the mundane fabric of existence. Whether it's in the "transnational" workforce, or local disposable ones, the very act of work (or just wanting work) means death and oppression. How do the shared concepts of "transnationalism" and "open borders" get used aesthetically by both forces of resistance and those of subjugation? Analogies and metaphors have become tactical devices for reproducing ideology, as well as forming counter-ideologies. New Media has been promised as the ultimate in communication due in part to its facility in using analogy and metaphor. What interests these are serving is in need of investigation.