Ctrl-Z first issue

Whatever might be ‘new’ about new media, then, could never be absolutely so, which is not to say that new media don’t have forms, effects, affects and possibilities of their own. It’s precisely for the sake of experimenting with and speculating on those possibilities that we’ve developed Ctrl-Z—as a journal, an exhibition space, an events machine and inevitably (we hope) a ‘brand’.

The inaugural issue of the journal Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy is live. The Ctrl-Z website uses frames, so I am already ‘breaking’ it by direct linking to certain pages. Here is the first issue’s contents. The above quote is from the editorial by Niall Lucy and Robert Briggs.

In Graphology Variorum 1-10 John Kinsella and Simon Critchley develop a poetic rap/rapport. In Graphology Variorum 9 Kinsella on the repetition of absences:

[…] each player

throws the die until a ‘6’ be obtained, such

are classic games, such are losses we replay

to intensify absences; whose to celebrate,

whose to template our works and days upon.

It reminds me of this wonderful line from Francois Dosse’s excellent biography of Deleuze and Guattari: “Time creates a crisis in causality beneath which lies a law of pure chance, rendering it ontologically secondary but negating it.” The rhythm of ‘whose to’ in the orchestration of loss; the chance event ‘to lose’ is paradoxical, the positing of a loss, and yet owned (‘whose’) at the roll of a dice. The template of a futurity of absences, intensified by their repetition. Is this the impossible object of the cogito? Affirming through the potentiality of roll/role replaying loss. A pure affirmation conducted (conduit, conduct, conductor); loss conducts the replay. Feed-forward loops of loss, whose to celebrate? Passenger of the impasse: impasse as passage.

And as part of the same GV9 Critchley invokes the fiction of the world:

This closeness to self and to world and of self to world is so close that one cannot separate them, divide and sunder them. Self and world are of a piece, they are one piece of a garment that should not be broken down into pieces like mind and reality or subject and object. They are the one piece of which I am made and which I have made. We are thrown into a world that appears ready-made, yet the world is what you make of it. That is to say, self and world are a fiction, a fiction that we take to be true and in which we have faith. The difficulty is making that faith explicit.