Tag Archives: post-phenomenology

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 […]

distributed imagination

Distributed imagination: small steps to an ethology of mind and media This project will theorise the imagination in postdigital mediated environments. Imagination has at best been regarded with suspicion in critical studies of media communication and communion. Its Romantic and humanist legacy, and its associations with art and children, seem to push it aside as […]

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 […]

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 […]

McLuhan, media, massage

Contributed to a day of screenings and seminars recently at the Watershed celebrating Marshall McLuhan’s centenary. Here’s the blurb for the panel I was on (‘Extension’): Technology, McLuhan argued, is an extension of natural human ability – allowing us to think, feel, and act in ways that were not previously possible. This is possibly most […]

DiGRA 2011

There’s a review of the Bristol interventions into this year’s remarkable, and building-site-themed, DiGRA conference in Hilversum, Utrecht by Jon Dovey here, which saves me a job. I should note that I did a version of the Phenomenology of Angry Birds for a redux version of the Puppy Machines panel with Patrick, Helen and Bart, and there was […]