Illustrated transcript of my keynote talk – Barbaric toys: technologies and bodies in play before and aftermath Human – at the 15th Beyond Humanism…
Category: media ethology
talking toys
Talking toys: a ludic archaeology of the synthetic voice (and impairment) video and transcript of a talk I gave at Winchester School of Art…
read me!
Nearly all of my publications are freely available, either open access or in ‘author’s version’ format. Please see the Publications page. And do get…
toyetic thinking
Historically, and globally, the toy has tended to occupy a material-cultural position between the ritual object and the instrumental tool, neither fully sacred nor…
the machine wants to play
Slideshow sketch of a ludic/media archaeology of AI, A-Life and robotics. Displayed at the University of Southampton AI Arts Festival, 2nd June 2024. Designed…
technology and play
Hot off the press: Playground equipment: postdigital design and the mechanics of history, urban space, and play. Space and Culture 27(2). Open access: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/12063312231213261…
PhD as play workshop
First in person iteration of this workshop for PhD Intensive Week at WSA since the pandemic. Much of the time, PhD research and writing…
robot zoo SOTSEF
watch this space added this text 16th nov
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…
ethno-video
A short video introducing the ethos of my ethnographic ethology, made for the Lived Research Experiences event, organised by Southampton’s Debating Ethnography research group
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…
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…