small steps to an ethology of mind and media
Slides for my talk at the Media Theory in Transit symposium organised by Yigit Soncul and Jussi Parikka at Winchester School of Art, 24th November 2015. more…
the imaginative turn I
Yigit Soncul and Jussi Parikka organised Media Theory in Transit, a stimulating symposium at WSA this week. Full details and the programme are here. It was one of those events where an unexpected theme appeared through connections and resonances between the speakers, and through discussion. Given that my talk was explicitly about imagination, it was […] more…
SimKnowledge
I have a chapter in Michelle Henning’s Museum Media, one of Wiley’s new International Handbooks of Museum Studies. It’s called ‘SimKnowledge: what museums can learn from videogames’. PDF here. more…
on not re-inventing Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy
Outside, in the garden, it was playtime. Naked in the warm June sunshine, six or seven hundred little boys and girls were running with shrill yells overs the lawns, or playing ball games, or squatting silently in twos or threes among the flowering shrubs […] The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and […] more…
prosthetic imagination
Rules themselves create fictions by the very fact of complying with their respective rules, is separated from real life where there is no activity that literally corresponds to any of these games [they] are played for real. As if is not necessary (Caillois 1962, 8). Replace cops and robbers and dolls houses with their digital descendants Grand Theft […] more…
towards the phenomenology of Angry Birds
draft: The phenomenology of Angry Birds, or, how to live in virtual gravity [PDF download here] Abstract Taking the popular mobile game Angry Birds (Rovio 2009) and its simulation of gravity as a starting point, this essay explores the nature of sensation, perception and proprioception in contemporary digital and mobile culture, as exemplified in digital […] more…
gender gamified
From a discussion on Kotaku.com following the redesign of female soldiers in Warface for the Russian market, apparently based on a survey of Russian players. Male soldiers in body armour, female soldiers with cleavage and arched backs… This particular exchange jumped out at me, WFROSE’s apparently serious and well-meaning transduction of sexual differences (both biological […] more…
Connecting the Dots…
I presented at Connecting the Dots: movement, space and the digital image at Cambridge University’s CRASSH last Friday – thanks to a kind invitation from Jenna Ng. I shared a session with Cambridge’s Alan Blackwell (great talk on the significance and player-generated worlds and virtual computers of Minecraft) and the session was streamed to a hungry audience at HUMlab at Umea University, Sweden. Humlab […] more…
permeable realities
Video here. Current developments in mobile and locative media, and in augmented / mixed reality media (for instance at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol) take the permeability of virtual and actual space as a given. Digital space is thought of not as the worlds within worlds of virtual reality or cyberspace as imagined […] more…
The Reality of Imagination
A moment that didn’t make it into the final video version of a microethological study of play across a Real-Time Strategy game (Age of Mythologies) and a paddling pool: One of the children (J), on being told by me (S) that he couldn’t use a footpump in the paddling pool to suck up and squirt […] more…
Monsters, mini-games, and Mr Happy
A video essay on virtual and actual play. Published in Audio-Visual Thinking: a journal of academic videos, no. 3, Sep 2011 more…
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