Tag Archives: voodoo methodology

transforming creativity

With Dan Ashton I have recently set up the Transforming Creativity Research Group at WSA. We are waiting for the official website to be launched, but have a news and events blog up and running: https://transformingcreativity.wordpress.com/ We have already run the After VR: the archaeology and potential of immersive media symposium, and Dan and I […]

sensory ethnography

This is from an old blog ages ago, but is useful for a WSA PhD ethnography event in a few weeks, and my forthcoming trip to Australia. Some rough notes from a very interesting day run by Sarah Pink based on her book Doing Sensory Ethnography: The proposal for the day (and for sensory ethnography) […]

DiGRA 2015: the past and future of players

ecological and ethological studies of children’s play My contribution to the DiGRA 2015 panel From Game Studies to Studies of Play, with Frans Mäyrä, Sebastian Deterding, Mia Consalvo, Joost Raessens, Torill Elvira Mortensen, and Kristine Jørgensen I’ll prepare an online, illustrated version of my brief contribution, but in the meantime, Frans has written a reflective account […]

actualite as (machine) ethnography

Cinema of attractions as de facto ethnographic film… the actualities captured royalty, children, native cultures, everyday life, urban panoramas. The cinema provided its own logic of the spectacle: whatever it captured became an attraction by virtue of being filmed (51). By the centenary of cinema in 1995, the great wealth of early cinema had begun […]

DanceTag in the wild

A moment from a playtesting / publicity event for the Dancetag project as part of the Digital Festival in Brighton. A group of women enthusiastically obliged. They played the part too – insisting they ‘dance round their handbags’. Interestingly, the app completely failed at this moment – the dancers couldn’t hear the music over traffic […]

Configuring the dancer

In the DNS / Stratus usability trials, neither machine nor user is settled / experienced / established. Consequently, the interactions are part of the process of establishing the identity of the interacting entities. In other words, in this situation, the interaction between machine and user invites assessment both of whether or not the machine is […]

Connecting the Dots…

I presented at Connecting the Dots: movement, space and the digital image at Cambridge University’s CRASSH last Friday – thanks to a kind invitation from Jenna Ng. I shared a session with Cambridge’s Alan Blackwell (great talk on the significance and player-generated worlds and virtual computers of Minecraft) and the session was streamed to a hungry audience at HUMlab at Umea University, Sweden. Humlab […]

The Reality of Imagination

A moment that didn’t make it into the final video version of a microethological study of play across a Real-Time Strategy game (Age of Mythologies) and a paddling pool: One of the children (J), on being told by me (S) that he couldn’t use a footpump in the paddling pool to suck up and squirt […]

Complex

If the object of study of microethology is the event (and often entails the zooming on particularly rich sub-events for close attention), then how can the selection of particular events or sub-events from the ‘flux of varying viscosity’ or ‘plane of immanence’ be accounted for in terms other than those of intuition or unreflective attraction? I find […]