We are pleased to announce the publication of the latest issue of APRJA (A Peer-Reviewed Journal About) which is a result of our ongoing collaboration with Aarhus University as part of which we annually organize a research/PhD workshop related to our festival themes.

Under the title Research Networks, the 9th issue of APRJA follows presentations at transmediale 2020 organised by transmediale and Aarhus University, in cooperation with the Global Emergent Media (GEM) Lab in Montréal.

How do we think about networks under postdigital conditions? What does this imply for research? This journal issue takes as its outset, the call of the 2020 transmediale festival to “[leave] behind a decade marked by a backlash against the Internet and the network society” in order to re-evaluate the limits of ‘networks’. It refers to Robert Filliou’s “The Eternal Network,” an idealistic notion from the 1960s, pointing to the interconnectedness of everyday-life actions across an emerging global world at that time. This is a good reminder that network cultures exist beyond the technical reality of network culture as we now know it despite our primary identification of networks with social media and planetary computation. By drawing on the legacies of critical and autonomous network cultures, the aim of this journal issue is to make the limits of Internet-based networks visible but also highlight alternatives. Is there a conceivable counter-power to networks? Which alternative technological models and cultural narratives are needed to construct the principles of end-to-end communication anew? How might the critique of networks extend to non-western contexts and reflect the limits in a global perspective?

Read the journal online. 

Contributors
Sudipto Basu, Özgün Eylül İşcen, Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano, Linda Kronman, Nicola Bozzi, Giseli Vasconcelos, Tatiana Wells, Cristina T. Ribas, Iuliia Glushneva, Wenhao Bi, Rebecca Holt, Wing Ki Lee

Context
Since 2011, Aarhus University and transmediale have organised research workshops as part of an ongoing collaboration with shifting partner organizations: In/Compatible Research, Universität der Künste (Berlin, 2011); Researching #BWPWAP, Leuphana University of Lüneburg (Lüneburg, 2012); Post-digital Research, Kunsthal Aarhus (Aarhus, 2013); Datafied Research, School of Creative Media, City University Hong Kong (Hong Kong, 2014), EXCESSIVE RESEARCH, Liverpool John Moores University, the Liverpool Biennial (Liverpool 2015), MACHINE RESEARCH, Constant (Brussels, 2016), RESEARCH VALUES, Brandenburg Center for Media Studies (Potsdam, 2018), and MACHINE FEELING, University of Cambridge. 

Each of these workshops has resulted in the publication of a peer-reviewed newspaper as an experiment in new forms of scholarly publication, and an open access online academic journal, APRJA (A Peer-reviewed Journal About_).