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Category: media ethology
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…
Unbox: The speed and slowness of Lucy, Batman, Batman, Gandalf, and Dumbledore
Microethology of toys-to-life (from proposal for Toy Theory book) – I’m going to build Dumbledore [sings:] Dumbledore, Dumbledore… – Technically, you’re building Gandalf…
game | death | worlds
I compiled this sometime in the mid-2000s, as a curated list for Furtherfield. Riffing on gameworlds and lifeworlds, it resonates nicely with my current…
one or several artificial wolves
Link encounters a group of animals on a green, grassy hillside, beautifully animated in the rich landscape. Large birds, and a wild boar, promise…
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…
AI and games
Workshop with level 3 Games Design & Art students, October 2019 references: Giddings, Seth 2014 ‘Soft worlds and AI’ (extract from chapter 3 of)…
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…
AI & the achievement of animals
A stork and a wild pig in Breath of the Wild are distinct species only in a decorative sense, as mise-en-scene of the open dynamic world….