A preview of an answer that might be forthcoming
Shortly after Alien Phenomenology was publsihed, Darius Kazemi asked: what’s the difference between carpentry and art? Carpentry, for the record, is my name for the philosophical practice of making things, of which articles and books are but one example. I borrowed and expanded the term from the ordinary sense of woodcraft and adapted from Graham Harman and Alphonso Lingis, who… read more
A Toilet Training Koan
Some time ago I lent my voice to the audio guide for a Koine Greek curriculum for kids. Around the time it was released, we found out a family friend’s then-three year old had taken to listening to the CD at bedtime, not for the Greek but just because he liked the sound of my voice. At the same time,… read more
Firearms, not entertainment, lead to mass shootings, and yet gamers have irrevocably become implicated in the conversation over violence in America.
This week, Vice President Biden’s announced the establishment of a task force on gun violence. Invitations for input were sent to the NRA, of course, but also major gun retailers like Walmart and representatives from the video game industry. In response, Kris Graft, the editor-in-chief of video game trade publication Gamasutra, penned an editorial criticizing the games industry for allowing… read more
Prosperity and austerity in contemporary philosophy
I’ve had the pleasure of visiting with a number of classes recently after they’ve read Alien Phenomenology. Very different groups as well, from freshmen to graduate students. A common question that arose in many of these conversations relates to the consequences of object-oriented ontology. This question usually takes a form like, “Doesn’t object-oriented ontology risk turning our attention away from… read more
A review of the catalog that accompanies the Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibition
This review was published in The American Journal of Play 5:1 (Fall 2012). You can also download a PDF of the review provided by the journal. The Art of Video Games: From Pac-Man to Mass Effectby Chris Melissinos and Patrick O’RourkeNew York: Welcome Books, 2012. Contents, images, credits. 215 pp. $40.00 paper. ISBN: 9781599621098 The Art of Video Games,… read more
Reviews, Links, Code, and Discussion
Some links to discussion about 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. One of the common ways to interact with the idea seems to be writing and posting re-implementations of the program in other languages and environments. Geeta Dayal’s review of the book in Slate. Discussion on Reddit r/Programming, including a hilarious Enterprise Java version. A discussion at Stack Overflow stemming… read more
You Can't Buy A Better Book About a One-Line BASIC Program At Twice The Price
My latest book is out! It’s called 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 and it’s about a one-line Commodore 64 BASIC program. I wrote it with nine other authors, but it’s not an anthology; we write in a single voice collaboratively, producing a monograph-like text. You can buy it in a beautiful hardcover edition, designed by one of the authors,… read more
A whole book about a single line of code. By ten authors.
This book is available in digital or physical format. Buy from Amazon This book takes a single line of code—the extremely concise BASIC program for the Commodore 64 inscribed in the title—and uses it as a lens through which to consider the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture.The authors of this collaboratively written book… read more
Get A Slow Year and Racing the Beam when you support this indie film about videogames in 1982 on Kickstarter
A few months ago Brett Neveu sent me a script for a movie he is producing, about a group of teenagers hoping to get an Atari VCS for Christmas 1982. The script is fun and charming, sitting somewhere just between Dazed and Confused and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. There’s now a Kickstarter for the film, Christmas Bytes, meant to cover… read more
A quick image litanizer
You may be familiar with my Latour Litanizer, a simple example of what I call “carpentry” in Alien Phenomenology. It uses Wikipedia’s API to assemble randomized lists of objects of the sort I refer to as “Latour Litanies.” If you’ve read Alien Phenomenology, you may also remember a related example, that of the “image toy” I made to add some… read more