Call for Papers: M/C Journal 'error' Issue

We're now calling for contributors for the next issue of M/C Journal:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 27 June 2007

M/C - Media and Culture
http://www.media-culture.org.au/
is calling for contributors to the 'error' issue of

M/C Journal
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/

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.

To see what M/C Journal is all about, check out our Website, which contains all the issues released so far, at <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/>. To find out how and in what format to contribute your work, visit <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/journal/submission.php>.

Call for Papers: 'error'
Edited by Mark Nunes and Kelly McWilliam

In an age of information, utopia takes the form of an error-free world of efficient processing and clean transmission. Signals reproduce. Codes replicate. Communication crosses channels uncorrupted and pure. But something slips away or refuses to compute. Replication falters, introducing variance; the process wobbles, introducing deviation. Signal and noise merge and reverse.

Error marks the errant, the erratic - a heading that leads us astray. Is there not, then, something seductive in error as it draws us off our path of intention, interrupting the course of goals, objectives, and outcomes and pulling us toward the unintended and unforeseen?

Six Sigma black belts revive the Taylorist dream of absolute efficiency, streamlined processes, and waste-free production. And what could be more efficient than a system that provides a response before a query is formed, as commercial websites now aim to provide consumers with purchase suggestions based on a well-worn, algorithmic path of profiles and predictable results? But what happens when error occurs? What happens when the algorithm returns an errant result, leading the user off this path from source to receiver? "Noise" and "error" refuse to signify, and as such, they threaten to disrupt the cybernetic regime of efficiency and maximum performance. Error marks a rupture of signification that lays bare the dispersive and dissipative structures of an informatic society.

The aberrant marks a similar moment, a deviation that is decidedly off the path, an error in gender and generation. Every mutation marks an "error" in reproduction - and every production that is not a reproduction is erratic, "off the mark." Outliers - the statistical abject - are "throw-aways", errant events that occur out of field and out of genre. Yet it is the materially and informatically abject form that, by ceasing to signify within a system, marks an opening, a poiesis. This asignifying poetics of "noise," marked by these moments of errant information, simultaneously refuses and exceeds the cybernetic imperative to communicate.

The "error" issue will focus on the situation of noise, aberration, errancy, deviation, and mutation in a culture increasingly dominated by principles of maximum efficiency and maximum control. As we increasingly define politics as polling, networks as social, and bodies as information complexes, what is the meaning - or the refusal to mean - marked by error? Submit papers of 3,000 words in length to the editors at error@journal.media-culture.org.au.

Article deadline: 24 August 2007
Issue release date: 17 October 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.

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Further M/C Journal issues scheduled for 2007:

'error': article deadline 24 August 2007, release date 17 October 2007
'vote': article deadline 19 October 2007, release date 12 December 2007

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M/C - Media and Culture is located at <http://www.media-culture.org.au/>.

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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.

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