Notices: Publications 

Volume 12, Number 3
May, 2002 

Publication Announcements

• Topia

  "Content Providers of the World Unite! The Cultural Politics of Globalization"
  Special Theme Issue: #8 (Fall 2002), edited by Susie O'Brien and Imre Szeman

  Depending on which accounts of globalization one reads, culture is either at the center of the new global economy, or it has been totally eclipsed by it. Cultural objects and practices now appear as absolutely constitutive of economic, political, and social practices, yet as culture becomes reduced to mass culture on an intensified, global scale, the liberatory and resistant impulses once associated with it seem to have been fatally diminished.

  The term "content providers" captures the paradoxical position of culture in globalization. In the new global economy, culture has become "content," and cultural workers and critics have become "content providers" whose work is more essential to the operations of the economy than ever before, but only as content that does nothing to challenge the structure or form of the new world order. The papers in this issue address the challenges that globalization poses for an adequate understanding of cultural politics and the politics of culture today.

  For more information about Topia, visit <http://www.utpjournals.com/topia> or email topia.yorku.ca.

• Blackbird

  Blackbird, an online journal of literature and the arts, has launched its inaugural issue, featuring two Pulitzer Prize winners, a National Book Award winner, and a PEN/Faulkner finalist. Blackbird is a joint partnership between the English Department of Virginia Commonwealth University and New Virginia Review, Inc., a nonprofit Richmond literary arts organization. Literary editors are Mary Flinn and Creative Writing professors Gregory Donovan and William Tester. The magazine offers its readers both streaming audio and video to supplement the writing it presents, and the semi-monthly addition of individual "Features" will illuminate the content of the core journal.

  In the future, Blackbird will appear twice each year, on May 1 and November 1. The journal publishes poetry, prose, and interdisciplinary essays. The first issue includes some of VCU's finest, including School of the Arts Research Professor in Sculpture Elizabeth King, who provides an essay on the history of automata (robots), MFA program alumnus John Hoppenthaler, who contributes a poem from a forthcoming book, and Art professor emeritus Richard Carlyon, who opens the "Gallery" section of the journal with his video "Flight Song." A streaming media play for four voices by New York playwright Romulus Linney will be available for site visitors to read and hear acted by some of Richmond's finest actors. A "Links" section provides avenues for travel to other arts venues, literary journals, and related sites.

  The "Features" planned for the first issue include interviews and readings from Margaret Gibson, Eleanor Ross Taylor, George Garrett, and Henry Taylor. In an e-mail discussion, editor Gregory Donovan invites Beckian Fritz Goldberg to explain her shift to prose poems.

  Blackbird and New Virginia Review, Inc. are made possible in part by the Virginia Commission for the Arts, which is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, and by the Richmond Arts and Cultural Consortium, which is supported by the City of Richmond and the Counties of Henrico and Hanover.

  Visit Blackbird at <http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu>

• Year Zero One

  Year Zero One announces the launch of Issue #10, the tenth edition of our forum for dialogue about contemporary art practice and digital culture through on-line critical reviews, essays, interviews, and news.

  Featured in the current issue are the following items:

  TEXT FM: Open Broadcasting System--An interview with Graham Harwood and Matt Fuller
  Michelle Kasprzak

  FRAMING THE 20TH CENTURY--From Soviet Man to Dolly the Sheep; some thoughts on the Cyborg Shadow
  Gillian McIver

  PROGRAMMING AS POETRY--A few brief musings on Antiorp, Kurzweil, and Stallman
  David Johnston
  

  IN PRAISE OF AUSTRALIA--A report from Australia traces aspects of new media culture across the continent
  Nina Czegledy

  THEATRUM MUNDI: Honey I Still Love You--Recent site-specific performance in Amsterdam
  Moritz Gaede

  RACE IN SPACE--Reflections on race as "otherness" in digital space
  Camille Turner

  Year Zero One is an on-line artist-run center which operates as a network for the dissemination of digital culture and new media through web-based exhibitions, an extensive media arts directory, and the YEAR01 Forum--an electronic art journal.

  Visit YEAR ZERO ONE at <http://www.year01.com>.

• Organdi Quarterly

  Announcing the launch of the fourth issue of Organdi Quarterly, titled "Can We Still Talk about Art?", with contributions in English and French by Stanley Bulbach, Jean Catoire, Nicolas Bacri, Nicolas Robert, Rimy Oudghiri, Ellen Gorman, Brian D. Crawford and Malte Schophaus, Edem Awumey and Anton Karl Kozlovic.

  The issue may be accessed at <http://www.geocities.com/organdi_revue>.

• Beyond Webcams: An Introduction to Online Robots

  Beyond Webcams: An Introduction to Online Robots
  Edited by Ken Goldberg and Roland Siegwart
  MIT Press; 346 pages.
  ISBN 0-262-07225-4 (cloth)

  Remote-controlled robots were first developed in the 1940s to handle radioactive materials. Trained experts now use them to explore deep in sea and space, to defuse bombs, and to clean up hazardous spills. Today robots can be controlled by anyone on the Internet. Such robots include cameras that not only allow us to look, but also go beyond Webcams: they enable us to control the telerobots' movements and actions.

  This book summarizes the state of the art in Internet telerobots. It includes robots that navigate undersea, drive on Mars, visit museums, float in blimps, handle protein crystals, paint pictures, and hold human hands. The book describes eighteen systems, showing how they were designed, how they function online, and the engineering challenges they meet.

  Ken Goldberg is Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the editor of The Robot in the Garden (MIT P, 2000). Roland Siegwart is Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

  For more information, please visit <http://mitpress.mit.edu/0262072254/>

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