
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…
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…
hand-held cinema
The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum has uploaded my report on this archive research: Handheld cinema, or the other successful toys that move. more…
toying with the archive
I’ve just been awarded a research stipend by the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University of Exeter. Here’s the rationale: My interest in the Bill Douglas collection centres on two categories: Toys in general, and Optical Toys. A particular concern is toys as media objects, both as communication media in their own right and […] more…
toying with the singularity
I’ve added a draft of ‘Toying with the singularity’ to the Publications page – a chapter for The Internet of Toys: practices, affordances and the political economy of children’s smart play, edited by Giovanna Mascheroni and Donell Holloway, out now with Palgrave. Below is from an early version of the introduction: Eight Year 5 children sit around […] more…
gesture, technology and play
This is the website for a symposium organised by Helen W Kennedy, Patrick Crogan and myself at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol in 2010. Its ‘reading room’ has links to presentations and subsequent publications. The body has of course always been central to our playful engagements with games and games technologies. Yet, the embodied player […] more…