Fibreculture: the Australasian Network for Critical Internet and New Media Studies

Department of Digital Cultures

The facilitators group in 2005

Axel Bruns teaches at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. His PhD research at the University of Queensland looked at resource centre sites on the world wide web such as SlashDot.org and MediaChannel.org. He founded the online journal M/C - Media and Culture, and manages the QUT streaming media site.

Chris Chesher (University of Sydney) is Director of the Digital Cultures program in the School of English, Art History, Film and Media at the University of Sydney. Recent work includes articles and papers on computer games and comparative regimes of vision, the institutional frameworks of new media art and games, and the status of authorship in the context of blogs.

Gillian Fuller is Senior Lecturer in the School of Media, Film and Theatre at the University of New South Wales. She recently published a book Aviopolis: a book about airports, and is working in the areas of convergent architectures, biopolitics and biometrics, and the politics and methods of movement.

Dr Gerard Goggin is an Australian Research Fellow at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. Gerard is writing a cultural history of Australian Internet, and is editor of Virtual Nation: The Internet in Australia (University of NSW Press, 2004). He is researching an Australian Research Council-funded study of mobile phone culture, policy and regulation. Gerard has published widely on the Internet, telecommunications, new media, and disability, including Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Disability in New Media (with Christopher Newell; Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), and Disability in Australia: Exposing a Social Apartheid (University of NSW Press, 2004).

Lisa Gye is Lecturer in Media and Communications at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. She has an active interest in exploring alternative forms of non-fiction content new media and the Internet.

Geert Lovink currently works in Amsterdam. His books include My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in Translation, Dark Fiber : Tracking Critical Internet Culture and Uncanny Networks : Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia.

Esther Milne is lecturer in Media and Communications at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne.

Adrian Miles teaches the theory and practice of hypermedia and interactive video at RMIT University, Australia. He has also been a senior new media researcher in the InterMedia Lab at the University of Bergen, Norway. His academic research on hypertext and networked interactive video has been widely published and his applied digital projects have been exhibited internationally. Adrian's research interests include hypertext and hypermedia, digital poetics, and the use of Deleuzean philosophy in the context of digital poetics.

Anna Munster is a lecturer in ditigal media theory in the School of Art History and Theory at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney. Together with Elspeth Probyn she is currently editing Body-to-Body: A Corporeal Reader (London and New York: Routledge, forthcoming). She is also a digital artist. Her latest digital worl is titled wundernet, an online art work that explores the relationship between baroque and digital topologies and affects.

Andrew Murphie is the Editor of the Fibreculture Journal. He has published on the philosophies of technics and of the virtual, the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, digital media and aesthetics, popular music, performance and the visual arts, the culture and politics of theories of cognition. He has recently published Culture and Technology, co-authored with John Potts, and is working on books on machines and the world, affect and the limits of theory, and "differential media" (about what might best be called media divergences).

Ingrid Richardson is Lecturer in Communication and Cultural Studies at Murdoch University in Perth.

Ned Rossiter is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies (Digital Media) at the Centre for Media Research at the University of Ulster, Coleraine in Northern Ireland. His research revolves around digital media cultures, information economies, network societies, social movements & ICTs, media theory and political philosophy. His current research projects include looking at organised networks as new institutional forms; political economy of the Internet and Civil Society; Creative Industries, information economies and the precarious condition of labour; and Latin American-Asia/Pacific new media initiatives.

David Teh is a Sydney-based writer, curator and teacher. He has lectured in new media aesthetics, critical and cultural theory at the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales, and has written for numerous journals and exhibitions. David recently curated an exhibition of digital video art entitled "Prospectus: projections in new media" at Sydney's blank_space Gallery.

Facilitators of the Fibreculture network meet in Melbourne in December 2004. (From left: Esther Milne (Swinburne), Anna Munster (COFA, UNSW), Lisa Gye (Swinburne), Chris Chesher (Digital Cultures, University of Sydney), Danny Butt, Gillian Fuller, David Teh, Adrian Miles (RMIT University) and Ned Rossiter (University of Ulster)).

Fibreculture is an Australasian network of academics, students and industry practitioners with an active interest in critical approaches in theory, policy, education and practice around the Internet and other new media. Its activities include mailing lists with over 900 subscribers, several print publications, an online journal, and conference and workshop events that have been held in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth.

Fibreculture is a network of academics and other practitioners with an active interest in critical approaches to the Internet and new media. Fibreculture is an experimental collaboration that is not formally affiliated with any institution. The activities of the wider network are seeded by a smaller invited group of facilitators and task force members.

Fibreculture has several manifestations including two active email lists: fibreculture and fibreculture-announce with over 900 subscribers. The ‘Fibreculture’ list is a forum for contemporary issues in new media and the Internet. The ‘Fibreculture-announce’ list is forum for notifying the subscribers about upcoming events, calls for papers, advertised positions, new publications in the area and other themes of interest. Fibreculture also manages a website hub that includes a listing of new media courses, and hosts an active refereed academic online journal . There have been several fibreculture conferences including meetings in Melbourne in 2001, Sydney in 2002, Brisbane in 2003, Perth (as part of the Biennale of Electronic Art, Perth) and Melbourne in 2004.

Fibreculture was established in 2000 by the prominent new media critic Geert Lovink, and David Teh, a teacher in Arts Informatics. Chris Chesher, who has been the Director of Digital Cultures since December 2004, joined the Fibreculture facilitators group in December 2001. He organised the Fibreculture 2002: Networks of Excellence conference in Sydney at the Museum of Contemporary Art. This conference also coincided with the release of a colour newspaper that was nationally distributed as an insert in the new media arts newspaper RealTime.

Brown, Hugh, Geert Lovink, Helen Merrick, Ned Rossiter, David Teh, and
Michele Willson (eds) (2001) Politics of a digital present: an inventory of Australian Net culture, criticism and theory, Melbourne: Fibreculture Publications.