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…
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…
game | death | worlds
I compiled this sometime in the mid-2000s, as a curated list for Furtherfield. Riffing on gameworlds and lifeworlds, it resonates nicely with my current writing, but with a morbid twist… a study of the materiality and imaginary of artificial life in which most of the links and projects, and hence their animate entities, are now […] more…
one or several artificial wolves
Link encounters a group of animals on a green, grassy hillside, beautifully animated in the rich landscape. Large birds, and a wild boar, promise meat if successfully hunted. As the player-avatar approaches, carefully, to within range of his bow and arrow he spots a wolf tracking a wide A* path through the immediate environment. Proximity […] more…
AI and the future of play
Placeholder for a position statement on my current research and teaching on the genealogy and emergent dimensions of artificial intelligence in play and technoculture. more…
AI and games
Workshop with level 3 Games Design & Art students, October 2019 references: Giddings, Seth 2014 ‘Soft worlds and AI’ (extract from chapter 3 of) Gameworlds: virtual media and children’s everyday play. New York: Bloomsbury. http://www.microethology.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Soft-Worlds-and-AI.pdf Giddings, Seth 2007 ‘Playing with nonhumans: videogames as technocultural form’, in Suzanne de Castell & Jen Jenson (eds) Worlds in […] more…
toying with the singularity
My chapter on the design of playful AI and robotics – and the relationships between the material, the technical and the imaginary – is in The Internet of Toys: practices, affordances and the political economy of children’s smart play, edited by Giovanna Mascheroni and Donell Holloway (Palgrave 2019). Titled ‘Toying with the singularity: AI, automata and […] more…
AI & the achievement of animals
A stork and a wild pig in Breath of the Wild are distinct species only in a decorative sense, as mise-en-scene of the open dynamic world. As prey however they are simply the same: moving targets and soon-to-be raw meat. At first glance, a horse in Breath of the Wild is defined primarily by its vehicular potential. it is […] more…
robots for everyone
As I’m working on a cluster of ideas about robots, AI, automata and animals, here is an entry on Robot that I wrote for The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy (2015). The word “robot” was coined by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek in 1921, in his play R.U.R. He took his inspiration for it from […] more…
we both know your yearnings
I know who I am, but who are we? Distributed subjectivity in the postindustrial machinic phylum. The card is delivered to me from a fairground fortune-telling machine in the collection of the SeaCity Museum in Southampton. Its message is printed on thick card and has the look of handwriting. It assumes an intimacy between us, […] more…
robot phenomenology
From a fascinating and wide-ranging talk (2011, copied here from an old blog) at the Pervasive Media Studio by Prof. Chris Melhuish of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory… The focus was the challenge of making robots that can operate socially, i.e. in everyday settings with humans – e.g. in the domestic environment or in healthcare. I […] more…
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