Issue No. 12 (December 2005) — Rethinking Regionality

Editorial

This issue of Transformations, titled "Rethinking Regionality", arises from a min-conference titled Concepts for Change: Representation, Community and the Transformative Power of Technology. This conference was held at Bundaberg in November 2004 as a joint production of the Transformations journal and the Bundaberg Media Research Group.

Globalisation and all that can be implied by that term has been exerting considerable pressure on the traditional idea of regions and on everyday life in the regions. This issue of Transformations is interested in exploring beyond the centre-periphery model of regionality, and particularly with both critical and artistic engagements with regionality.

The articles and artworks in this issue explore, in various ways, new and transformed approaches for engaging a critical regionality. Darren Tofts' article f2f 2 url & b ond: space/time and the dissemination of community gives its critical scrutiny to various aspects of mediated experience. It challenges the pervasive assumption of community building emerging from the growth of real time online communication and media through a number of instances. Terrence Maybury's '[Captain Cook):(Re-Births):(Byron Bay]' is a re-reading and re-imagining of the Endeavour's famous voyage of discovery up the east coast of Australia in 1770. It asks how the semantic order Cook brought to the region is related to the kind of order discernible in Byron Bay and the surrounding area today and considers how this "voyage of discovery" might be recast.

In The Edges of the Earth: Critical Regionalism as an Aesthetics of the Singular, Warwick Mules explicitly sets out to rethink regionality. He argues for critical regionalism based more strongly on considerations of localised practice, and linked strongly with experience as experimentation with the materials at hand. This work offers an interesting and different contribution to the debate and possible redefinitions of regionality. Grayson Cooke and Dea Morgain introduce us to some of the issues surrounding new media art in the regional context in Regionality and New Media Art. Dealing with both the question of regionality and cultural production, the three new media art projects discussed offer workings of issues of regional identity, address or interpellation of the "local" audience (questions of "voice"), and questions of authorial positioning, all of which suggest a new (regional) economy of cultural production. In Ghostwriting: The Alkimos and its Ghosts, Phillip Roe works at the intersection between critical and creative work, biography and cultural analysis, in producing two Ghostwriting texts (the article and the new media artwork).

Issue Editor

Phillip Roe
School of Contemporary Communication,
Faculty of Informatics and Communication,
Central Queensland University.
p.roe@cqu.edu.au