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…
Building a creative AI Lab
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chatbots in the gallery
Earlier this year we ran a Web Science Institute-funded pilot project called ‘Chatbots in the Gallery.’ The project team, Dr Sarah Hayden, Samantha Schäfer, Lesia Tkacz and myself explored the use of conversational agents or chatbot applications in an art gallery setting. Building on the SIAH-funded ‘Towards a Creative AI Lab’ project (Sam, Lesia and myself), […] 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…
toy-being
Attention to toys as technical objects troubles the prevailing notion of technological development as driven by the identification and satisfaction of material, practical and instrumental needs for human society and economy. Toys are technical, machinic, operational, they often have moving parts, i.e. they are machines in their own right, and even non-articulated toys have their […] more…
an imaginary system
Whilst the cultural, representational, ideological and economic assumptions that feed and are fed by imaginaries can be uncovered and subject to critique, imaginaries are no mere whimsy, but obdurate and operational phenomena – they have their own reality and agency. LEGO privilege is nothing if not a technological imaginary, predicated on and sustained by the […] more…
the history of games is the history of technology
A longer version of a short piece for the launch issue of ROMchip: a journal of game histories. The editors asked ‘What could the history of games be?’ Among the British Museum’s thirteen million objects is a beautiful game board and set of counters or tokens fashioned from wood and inlaid with shells forming rosettes […] more…
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