M/C - Media and Culture
http://www.media-culture.org.au/
is calling for contributors to the ‘augment’ issue of M/C Journal
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/

M/C Journal is inviting new contributors. Founded in 1998, M/C is a crossover journal between the popular and the academic, and a blind- and peer-reviewed journal.
Our Website at http://journal.media-culture.org.au/provides open access to all past issues.

To find out how and in what format to contribute your work, visit http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/about/submissions.


Call for Papers: ‘augment’
Edited by Rebecca Caines and Michelle Stewart

Contemporary lives are increasingly saturated with the promise of technological enhancement—augmentation. Whether medically-enhanced “cyborg” bodies, AR glasses, new surveillance and crowdsourcing tools, locative media on mobile phones and gaming consoles, wearable technologies, or immersive third spaces, augmentation is often entangled in discourses of supplement and improvement. Yet augmentation is also contradictory, the logic of technological perfection co-existing with the perception of weakness or a lack. And so from within this messy space of technologies, bodies and spaces, failure is both generative and productive. Always desiring, we create, enhance, and augment: never satiated, we experiment, refine and repeat. Somatic and spatial practices collide on the promise of something more.

In this edition of M/C we seek to bring together theorists, practitioners and artists to consider the ways in which augmentation presents itself in the world and in their work. We welcome critical engagement with the philosophical, ethical and cultural implications of the augmented, cyborg and prosthetic body; interrogations of the layered information space of AR, critical reviews of augmented spatial practices; and explorations of the ways in which augmented media intersects with contemporary anxieties around power and statecraft. What is at stake when one engages in augmentation? Who/what pays the price when it falters, miscarries, or backfires? Which actors are engaged—or enrolled—in the practice? Which subjects are left vulnerable? We are particularly interested in cross-disciplinary investigations, mapping the points of connection and disruption in the application, reception and analysis of augmentation. We call upon our colleagues to discuss their forays into landscapes of prosthetics and cameras, Arduinos and QR codes, immersive zones and simulations, all the while collaborating with humans, cyborgs and nonhumans along the way.

Prospective authors wishing to contribute to ‘augment’ should send a 250 word abstract, together with a brief biography, including any institutional or organizational affiliation, to the Editors at augment@journal.media-culture.org.au by August 1, 2013.

For authors invited to submit, the deadlines will be as follows –
Article deadline: October 11, 2013
Release date: December 11, 2013
Editorial enquires can be directed to Rebecca Caines and Michelle Stewart
augment@journal.media-culture.org.au