[Nettime-bold] M/C - New issue 'mix' now online

[Elissa Jenkins <mc@api-network.com>]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - April 30, 2001

The Media and Cultural Studies Centre at the University of Queensland
and M/C Online are proud to present issue two in volume four of:

M/C - A Journal of Media and Culture - http://www.api-network.com/mc/

'mix' Issue editors Jason Ensor and Carolyn Hughes

1. Editorial
2. List of articles

1. Editorial:

'Social Dexterity: Manoeuvring through the Mix' By Jason Ensor and
Carolyn Hughes

It would be fair to say that in our day to day negotiation between the
personal and the public, we encounter and process cultural, material and
symbolic products in all strata and sections of society. In our homes
and in our workplaces, we appear to manage multiple senses of
timekeeping and contrasting time-frames with fluid unconscious
dexterity. In our forms of entertainment and relaxation, from print to
television to cinema or from html to Mp3s to DivX, we juxtapose like and
unlike metaphors/images/products/text in a post-Frankensteinian
assemblage of innovated cultural meaning - for example, The Phantom
Menace and Austin Powers are commentaries on our visual eclecticism,
from mixing mythological elements from feudal times in a space opera to
our nostalgic enjoyment of presenting the old sixties' "style" as
renewed, millennium-way; Napster is a logical extension of file-sharing
which reflects a globalising trend towards the distribution of all
content worldwide while meeting the specific requirements of individual
taste (that is, the do-it-yourself musical cdrom drawn from thousands of
international mp3 libraries).

Likewise, in our trade of human utterances and syntax, multiple meanings
become attached to words and sentences simultaneously in a variegated
exploitation of interpretative dissonance. Oxymora abound and debates
over interpretation form the contents of a great number of publications
or the motivation behind short-circuiting dominant meanings. For
example, in the oxymoron play with language, there exist useful
combinations of opposite terms like "Original Copy", "Pretty Ugly",
"Genuine Imitation", or "Microsoft Works" which have a commonsense use
in daily exchanges.  Or, in dialogues on the power behind mutual
intelligibility, a term like 'sex', which means one thing in gender
discussions, can be used in other contexts or moments
to indicate the erotic. Through such language manoeuvres in the fields
of meaning-application and interpretation, persons are accepted or
discriminated where power differentials are predicated on difference of
understanding.  Where interpretative practices differ, or where
intelligibility is definitely not mutual, misunderstandings and
resistance breed.  In this way, in our millennium of revealing
society's mixture of meaning, the instrumentalities of master narratives
are being unmasked in voicing these moments (and rules) of
misunderstanding and resistance.

What was once predominantly treated as a text or object  -- sometimes
exhaustively studied in isolation from various social and historical
contexts, other times as cultural products facilitated by processes of
production and consumption -- is now examined within or alongside
different contexts and meanings. It is more contemporaneously sensitive
towards our wonderfully elaborate and diverse mix of interpretative
practices to situate cultural products and interpretative orders in
relation to other social practices, political structures of dominance
and exploitation, and cultural hierarchies like race, class, gender and
cyber. The implication of this approach is that the meanings of material
and symbolic products
are no longer stable nor replicated in identical fashion within cultural
dna. Society instead is transmitted from generation to generation with
mutations, and unlike cultural artefacts conjoin in new births of
meaning. The mix gene, it would appear, is widely dispersed in intricate
and novel ways.

The articles in this publication by M/C serve to illustrate the
significance of 'mix'  for reshaping cultural products, social ideas,
even learning pedagogies, in ways that dramatically affect how we
perceive and interpret the world.  The interpretations of 'mix' by
contributors were diverse, as expected by the broad uses of the word
'mix'.  Popular culture, however, remained a dominant aspect of culture
for analysis, and this is reflected in the mix of articles we have
chosen.  These articles demonstrate that the fine lines separating
genres can be smudged and shaded, and that meaning can be created from
blending and swirling rather than only through linearity.

Our feature article, "Digital Transformations: The Media is the Mix" by
Lori Landay talks about the digital media and its hybrid form and
content.  This article thinks through "how digital narrative emerges
from the mix of interactivity and nonlinearity" - this makes for a
non-traditional narrative in both its structure and the way meaning is
derived from it. The recombinations draw the spectator into the
mix, where the mix is the content.

Owen's Chapman's "Mixing with Records" follows Landay's article in the
sense that the linear format of the vinyl record, both in its
constitution and the way it is played and listened to, is disrupted by
the dj practice of "mixing" to create a new audio product.  This new
sound is created by the interaction of the dj and the choices of
sounds, and how these sounds are put together in a new 'mix'.

Toby Daspit's "The Noisy Mix of Hip Hop Pedagogies" responds to a
familiar parental request - "Turn down that damned noise!!!" - in an
engaging examination of educational experiences, epochal shifts and the
wider implications of incorporating hip-hop aesthetics and recombinant
textuality into schooling pedagogies. Daspit's discussion over a
fundamental reorientation to educational pedagogies is a timely piece
which resonates well within the 'mix' imperative.

The mixes evident through narrative are also investigated by Jody Mason,
though her article on Bharati Mukherjee's Wife looks more at thematic
mixes within an individual literary character's life, rather than mixes
of meaning, structure and format.  Mason's article looks at the mix of
cultures and the impact of that mix upon a female
character.  It seems, through an analysis of Wife, that different
components and subject positions don't always mix well, if indeed at
all.

Cutting up narrative, and cutting up sound, mixing it up and creating
something new.  These two distinct media are twisted together in Jeff
Rice's article, "They Put Me in the Mix: William S Burroughs, DJs, and
the New Cultural Studies".  The article itself cuts and pastes three key
cultural events to prepare an argument that
questions the methods of cultural studies regarding new media
practices.  

Mark Pegrum takes a theological perspective on 'mix' in "Pop goes the
spiritual", and interrogates society's increasing trend towards
religious eclecticism via an assortment of contemporary examples of
religious references made by Western pop stars. Pegrum introduces us to
this relatively new phenomenon by looking at the dizzying admixture of
religions to be found in the songs and words of artists
and groups worldwide.

Todd Holden analyses the intriguing semiotic processes within Japanese
advertising in "Resignification and Cultural Re/Production in Japanese
Television Commercials". 
Advertising in Japan is characterized less and less by attention to
product.  Instead, the endless stream of Greek myths, Hollywood movies,
political references, pop music, scientists and novelists comprise a
major corner of audio-visual space. Holden examines the place of
Japanese commercials as cultural historian, entertainer,
social commentator or hawker.

Collectively, these articles demonstrate how dynamic meaning is
intimately linked to the idea of 'mix' and is concerned with questions
of meaning and value, of culture and philosophy. To rework a tired
cliché, no meaning is an island to itself but is an integral part of a
shifting, fluid, and unusual combination of cultural,
material and symbolic products in various 'mixes'.


2. List of articles

Feature Article:

Digital Transformations: The Media Is the Mix
By Lori Landay

Articles:

Mixing with Records
By Owen Chapman

The Noisy Mix of Hip Hop Pedagogies
By Tobi Daspit

Rearticulating  Violence:  Place and Gender in Bharati Mukherjee's Wife
By Jody Mason

They Put Me in the Mix: William S. Burroughs, DJs, and The New Cultural
Studies
By Jeff Rice

Pop Goes (the) Spiritual! or Remixing Religion in Western Pop Music
By Mark Pegrum

Resignification and Cultural Re/Production in Japanese Television
Commercials
by Todd Holden

M/C - A Journal of Media and Culture - http://www.api-network.com/mc/

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-- 
Elissa Jenkins 
Co-ordinating Editor 
M/C - A Journal of Media and Culture 
mc@api-network.com 
http://www.api-network.com/mc/


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