EDITORIAL: DEVILS, ANGELS, AND OTHER POPULAR FIGURES
The second issue of Popular Inquiry: The Journal of the Aesthetics of Kitsch, Camp and Popular Culture (2018: 1) is out. With the first issue (2017: 1), we gained more readers than we were expecting. We hope the second issue broadens up our audience, as we touch again upon fresh topics. Issue 2 deals a lot with human interaction with technologies, with an aesthetic touch and a dangerous margin.
Sini Mononen’s “When a Stranger Calls: An Acousmatic Stalker Character and Sonic Representation of Fear” discusses films, stalkers and cinematic audio tracks. Yvonne Förster’s “From Digital Skins to Digital Flesh: Understanding Technology Through Fashion”, works on the intersection of flesh, technology and fashion. Claude-Louis Sokei’s Doctor Satan’s Echo Chamber is an already classical essay on popular culture, which Sokei kindly let us republish. The text has appeared in different places, in a variety of forms, and we ourselves found it for the first time in a South-African Chimurenga publication. Carlos Arenas’ ”H.R. Giger. Seul avec la Nuit / H.R. Giger. Alone with Night: A Giger Exhibition in Nantes” reports and analyzes a curation work on Giger (known for his work for the film series Alien) in an art museum context.
The future will, besides our ‘normal’ issues, bring out at least two (we are already negotiating a third one) guest-edited issues. The first one will be an anthology of texts on the topic Apperances of the Political, edited by Emily Sharratt, Olivia Glasser and Noora Korpelainen. The second one will be edited by Adam Andrzejewski and Mateusz Salwa, and it will touch more broadly upon the topic of popular culture and aesthetics.
We still hope authors could consider our journal to be a place where to publish work which could be hard to get out somewhere else. We are open to all lowbrow and all kinds of perspectives, and we hope the journal would get contributions from all over the world and from all folk groups (e.g. working class, sexual margins, ethnic margins).
Jozef Kovalčik and Max Ryynänen
