Toy Theory: technology and imagination in play will be out in November. No cover image yet, but here is the draft marketing blurb: A…
Category: toy theory
A Toy Theory of Drawing
My contribution to the Ordinary Things exhibition: A toy theory of drawing: a short essay to accompany this piece, and the exhibition 2ND—25TH NOVEMBER…
toy economics
In Toy Theory I have plotted points at which economic systems and imaginaries are evident in toys and games, from the proto-economics of ancient…
toy animals
This article – in Cultural Politics 20(1), March 2024 – maps the child’s toy and media environment as one populated with artificial animals, from…
robot ludologists
video on its way
Unbox: Cardboard Cinema
The Beauty and the Beast board game is an ingenious engineering of cinematic, narrative and architectonic space into a slot-together cardboard allegory. A tie-in…
AI has always been a toy
We should look to the digital game for the most compelling and generative toyetic source of concepts and material developments in artificial life and…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…