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glenfuller

glenfuller has written 4 posts for The Fibreculture Journal : 27
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FCJ-202 Simulated Wars, Virtual Engagements

By ⋅ March 21, 2016 ⋅ Post a comment

Seimeng Lai University of New South Wales at Canberra Scott Sharpe University of New South Wales at Canberra Pixelated Camouflage The television personality, Richard Hammond, was offered a rare glimpse into the life of a tank operator in an episode of Richard Hammonds’ Crash Course, which featured him training on the U.S. Military’s Abrams Tank. Immediately after his first few simulation training sessions as a tank gunner, Hammond exits the tank simulator and exasperatedly remarks, ‘I… see why you practice it in here …that was really hard!’. In reply, the gunnery sergeant quips ‘Yes, if we would have done that on the [gunnery] range …somebody would have gotten fired… That is why we spend a lot of hours in here’ (Mesirow, 2013). We have here an environment in which habits are learned and relearned. With so-called military precision, simulators enable the learning of occupations to become second nature. Such an […]

FCJ-201 Visual Evidence from Above: Assessing the Value of Earth Observation Satellites for Supporting Human Rights

By ⋅ March 21, 2016 ⋅ Post a comment

Tanya Notley University of Western Sydney Camellia Webb-Gannon University of Western Sydney Introduction: Satellites as Earth Observers Digital technologies provide new opportunities for human rights advocates to mobilise people, coordinate activities, uncover and document abuses, publish findings and engage new audiences (Notley and Hankey, 2013). Earth Observation – which involves gathering information about Earth or activities on Earth via remote devices – offers important opportunities to capture information that may otherwise be unobtainable. Balloons, planes, helicopters, drones and submarines are all capable of remote sensing and all of these technologies can be used in human rights contexts. However, of all these Earth Observation vessels, this article focuses on satellites given their rapid development and application in human rights contexts. Earth Observation via satellites began when the first artificial satellite was sent into space by the Soviet Union in 1957 during the Cold War. Named Sputnik (‘fellow traveller of the Earth’), […]

FCJ-200 When Memes Go to War: Viral Propaganda in the 2014 Gaza-Israel Conflict

By ⋅ March 18, 2016 ⋅ Post a comment

Chris Rodley University of Sydney You won’t believe what #Hamas was hiding in a mosque! Retweet if you are outraged! #IsraelUnderFire #HamasWarCrimes
(@IsraelUnderFire, 2014, August 1) In one of his best-known provocations, Jean Baudrillard (1995) declared that the Gulf War of 1991 did not take place. For Baudrillard, the idea of the war broadcast to Western audiences by media organisations such as CNN was merely a ‘masquerade of information’, and what actually took place on the ground in Iraq was not a war at all but a horrifying ‘disfiguration of the world’ (40). In other words, the semiotic rendering of the conflict by the mass media was a simulacrum with no relationship to its supposed referent. Much has changed in the 24 years since Baudrillard’s essay series was first published. The discourse network which mediates our understanding of war – that array of technologies and institutions enabling information to be sorted […]

FCJ-199 Modelling Systemic Racism: Mobilising the Dynamics of Race and Games in Everyday Racism

By ⋅ March 18, 2016 ⋅ Post a comment

Robbie Fordyce University of Melbourne Timothy Neale University of Western Sydney Tom Apperley University of New South Wales Preface On the 15th of April, 1914, one Mr. Francis James Shaw, of 23 White Street, Melbourne, applied for, and was granted, a copyright for the White Australia Game. This boardgame was to be played by two players, one person playing ‘the White Men,’ the other playing ‘the Coloured Men.’ These names did not, of course, simply refer to the colour of the pieces, but represented the ethnic identity of either colonists or the Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders targeted by the ‘White Australia Policy’ after 1901 (Lake and Reynolds 2008). Players had four tokens on each side, and points were given depending on how far one moved their pieces. While today the National Archives of Australia holds gameplay instructions, a board for gameplay, and copyright information, there is little known about […]