Introducing the first special issue of Thresholds: viewing culture.

Is it possible for culture to be owned? If so, is it "owned" by its producers or by its receivers? The metaphor of "ownership" is as misleading as "author" or (the singular) "reader" because of the mediating apparatuses of production, reception, and circulation. As our critical discourses continue to undergo a procedure of self-revealing, their attendant technologies emerge as conditions of historical agency. The medium may not be the message, but sometimes it is the "artist." In a time when so much "content" is being translated into new "forms", does the availability of digital technologies to street-level producers make the auratic original work an impossibility? Perhaps the lonely cogito of traditional Western aesthetics is finding himself under attack by the tools he had thought mastered. Meanwhile, an heir apparent to the traditional "I," the contemporary corporate legal entity is making unprecedented claims on the flows and ebbs of public culture, now buying and selling publicity itself. From 2-Live Crew to Bill Gates, and from Negativland-as-semiotic-Robin-Hoods to Karen Carpenter-as-self-immolating-Barbie-doll, the re-claimings and re-toolings of that "ambient publicity" have emerged, once again, as key tasks for cultural politics.

The 1996 special issue of T:vc hopes to bring these issues further into the foreground of contemporary debate and action. We will be reviewing abstracts and finished works that provide new historical, political, and artistic insight into these relationships of knowledge, experience, and property. Possible topics include but are not limited to the following: authorship, originality, intellectual property rights, pirating/appropriation, property in the public/private sphere, corporatism, and Internet culture. Since T:vc Volume 10 will be the first issue to make extensive use of Web-based publishing, submissions that take special advantage of this medium are particularly encouraged.