Mr Happy
This video essay ‘Monsters, mini-games and Mr Happy’ was originally published in Audiovisual thinking: a journal of academic video, no.2, September 2011. The journal seems to be defunct now, so I’m posting it here. There is a written account in my Gameworlds: virtual media and children’s everyday play (Bloomsbury 2014): 22-26. Link to Open Access book. The […] more…
transmedia toyetics
An MA Global Media Management workshop with Maggie Li and Megen de Bruin-Molé: incorporating toy mechanics and media into transmedia storyworlds. Here are monsters from Chinese mythology, an escape room, Spongebob in the Qin Dynasty, and a dangerous roller coaster. more…
touch toyetics
A toy stops being a toy when it is no longer touched the relationship between the hand and the toy [is] an example of technogenesis, or coevolution of humans and technics. Wanda Strauven 2021 Touch Archaeology. Lüneburg: meson press, 189, 205. more…
redefining the toyetic
Critical attention to toys demonstrates that the instrumental nature of machines and systems is less stable than generally assumed. And it shifts ontological questions from the essences of particular types of object to the ways in which objects are used; that is, rather than categorising toys as distinct from other classes of artefact and technology, […] more…
industrial creativity
Lovely responses from year 2 BA Graphic Arts students to my talks on the ideologies and practicalities of industrial creativity and play. I love the toy designs in particular. View this post on Instagram A post shared by BA Graphic Arts WSA (@ba_ga_wsa) more…
robot zoo
Our Creative AI in the Robot Zoo room at the University of Southampton Hands-on Humanities Day, Saturday 20th November 2021. AI and robots are set to play an increasingly important role in our everyday lives. Will they be human-like in appearance or intelligence, or quite different from us – more like toys, pets, and other […] more…
Surviving the Singularity
Please go here: http://www.microethology.net/robot-zoo/ more…
Toy Theory
My book, Toy Theory, will be published by MIT Press in 2023. Here’s a section of the proposal: Headline Rethinking culture, media, technology and the human through play with objects and materials. Placing toys at the centre of the postdigital era through a philosophy and genealogy of play with objects, of toying and being toyed with. […] more…
toy cinema
Video of a short lecture on precinematic and postcinematic toys for Estrella Sendra’s SOAS module ‘Introduction to Film Language, History and Theory’ October 2020 more…
ethology of AI
What are the implications of taking the animality of AI and A-Life entities as real and not metaphorical or symbolic? This question in turn demands ontological questions of the synthetic animal itself: what kinds of speciation gives rise to it, what habitats and what kinds of behaviour shape its existence, and how might the status […] more…
not not animals
Does it make any sense to consider virtual animals as animal in any serious way? Both the naturalistically-rendered wolves of Legend of Zelda: the breath of the wild and the chatty anthropomorphised citizens of the Animal Crossing games are inorganic abstractions, assemblages of animated drawings, behavioural algorithms and audio clips. Their material substrates – digital/electronic […] more…
Unbox: The speed and slowness of Lucy, Batman, Batman, Gandalf, and Dumbledore
Microethology of toys-to-life (from proposal for Toy Theory book) – I’m going to build Dumbledore [sings:] Dumbledore, Dumbledore… – Technically, you’re building Gandalf [They rip open the small plastic bags containing LEGO pieces and minfigs] – [In a gruff voice] I only use black and very very very dark grey… Why am I quoting […] more…
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