Publication no longer pending

One of my hats achieved it’s first contribution to Amazon (direct from Cambridge Scholars Press here.)

Place: Local Knowledge and New Media Practice (Hardcover), by Danny Butt (Editor), Jon Bywater (Editor), Nova Paul (Editor)

Product Description
Place: Local Knowledge and New Media Practice explores tensions between global cosmopolitanism and local practices in the new media environment. This edited collection of work by practitioners and scholars emphasises political issues raised by artists working in an indigenous cultural setting. Indigenous epistemologies provide sophisticated structures for negotiating belonging among communities who may become widely dispersed from their homelands. New media, by contrast, demonstrates biases toward the the dislocated: a cosmopolitanism implicitly located in the urban, where communities form and fragment in virtual environments. Nonetheless, questions of belonging and identification remain for those of us who use new media networks. Through analysis of a range of contemporary art and film projects, and tracking recent developments in cultural theory, the book provides diverse perspectives on how long-held attachments to place are transforming in the new media context.

A belated “woohoo”; only in-principle excitement. I wrote this so long ago, I read my own essay as being only just fine if I am not to be too hard on myself; it doesn’t come anywhere close to achieving what it needed to within the context of this great publication, particularly in my didactic and fairly uncritical engagement with mythology. Regardless, I have re-read the other essays in my pre-press PDF version quite a few times, often as a grounding and imaginative measure before doing any writing on or thinking about indigenous and place-inflected media art. Each of these essays is very strong and will be useful for many years to come for those interested in the intersections of cultural politics, aesthetics and media technology, particularly within the Pacific and Asia, but hopefully more broadly also. Thanks so much to Danny, Jon and Nova for their tireless efforts.