Nyx 7: Machines

Nyx, a Noctournal calls for abstracts and new work for its forthcoming spring/summer 2012 issue on MACHINES. Critical theorists, writers, artists, photographers, revolutionaries and wage-slaves are asked to consider: what do contemporary relationships and uses of machines reveal about popular culture; political structures; shifts in social or economic systems? What possibilities or dangers do they present? Have machines liberated us, as the early 20th century Modernists and social reformists dreamed, or have human beings become bound by machinery, tangled up in digitised information and intensive demands for productivity in the modern precarious workplace, made redundant by automation or reduced to passive cogs in a vast autopoietic network over which they no longer have any control?

Each era is defined by its usage and experience of machinery. Produced to wage war or save time, the machine is laden with exciting and horrific possibilities. What if the machines malfunction or revolt? Are machines a threat to the poor worker, as Marx feared, or is access to cheap electric goods a hallmark of the contemporary consumer social contract? What new sensations, perils and experiences of time have video games, smartphones, televisions, cars, gym equipment, e-books, the Internet and other machines brought? Is the organic obsolete, another health-food fad paid on credit card at a self-service checkout?

Nyx is a biannual print publication of new cultural studies, critical theory, design and flash fiction, based at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, London. Its previous issue on Monsters featured work from Nick Land, Eugene Thacker, Laura Oldfield Ford and Lucy Pepper, with interviews of Mark Fisher and Stik. The full call can be found on www.nyxnoctournal.org.

Email images, abstracts or ideas of around 300 words with a short bio to noctournal@gmail.com by 1st February 2012.