Indie Games and Code and Los Angeles
I have two June 1 deadlines to remind you (and myself) about: (1) The IndieCade independent game festival. You can submit online. The festival will be held October 8-10 in Culver City, CA. (2) The Critical Code Studies conference. It will be held July 23, 2010 at USC. Both are worthwhile and deserve some of your weekend attention, if you’ve… read more
The Onion on Foursquare
Leave it to The Onion to say what we’re all thinking, or should be, about Web 2.0 “social games” like Foursquare. “Foursquare is a little bit of everythingâ??a friend-finder, a local city guide, an interactive mobile game,” said company cofounder Dennis Crowley, as if reading from the same tired script used by every one of these Web 2.0 or whatever-the-fuck-they’re-called… read more
Time Will Tell, But Epistemology Won't: In Memory of Richard Rorty
In 1999, the Silicon Alley entrepreneur Josh Harris rented an underground warehouse in lower Manhattan and subjugated a hundred friends to a home-made police state he named “QUIET.” Its residents slept in open bunk pods stacked atop one another, each with a bus depot television with a closed-circuit feed from every other pod. Quieters partook of bacchanal feasts and abusive… read more
Pragmatism and Realism
On Friday I was honored to participate in Time Will Tell, But Epistemology Won’t, a conference in memory of Richard Rorty and in celebration of the opening of his collection of papers in the UC Irvine Critical Theory Archive. Particular attention was given to the “born digital” materials, which are offered in a unique “online reading room,” allowing researchers access… read more
On "Heavy Rain" and interactive cinema. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.
Heavy Rain is not an interactive film. I know that’s what its creators were after, and I know that’s how it’s been pitched to the market, and I know it’s been critiqued as both a successful and an unsuccessful implementation of that goal. To understand why the game is not a playable film, it’s important to review what makes film… read more
Mereology and the Partitive Plural
Levi Bryant has written a drove of meaty new posts in the past couple days. There’s one about his blue mug, one about entanglement, one that asks if eclipses are objects, and one about ideology. But it’s his post about strange mereologies that I want to point you to today. As Bryant explains, the strangeness in object-oriented mereology is this:… read more
Design Beyond the Object
In addition to our new book Newsgames, the Fall 2010 MIT Press catalog (PDF) includes a wonderful new title called NONOBJECT, by designer Branko LukiÄ? (frog design, IDEO) and writer Barry M. Katz (California College of Design). I paste the press’s blurb below in its entirety, it’s so lurid and wonderful. The “objective” world is one of facts, data, and… read more
Object-Oriented Ontology Recordings, Book, Mirth
As Levi has revealed, he and I are putting together a book, Object-Oriented Ontology. It will carry both the proceedings of last week’s symposium, as well as new contributions from Katherine Behar, Melanie Doherty, Katherine Hayles, and Adrian Ivakhiv. We may add at least one more contribution as well, stay tuned. The collection will be published in the Open Humanities… read more
Reactions to the Latour Litanizer
Levi just posted a link to my Latour Litanizer, which has generated a bunch of new traffic to and reflection about the tool. Over at Effervescent Crucibles, Michael points out that the litanizer tends to bring up people quite frequently. As he observes, “it points to the fact that, because of various aspects of our way of being in the… read more
Interview for Gratton's Realism Course
Peter Gratton was kind enough to interview me in conjunction with his realism course. You can read the interview here, on his blog Philosophy in a Time of Error. You might also want to revisit the previous interviews with Harman and Bennett. Bryant’s is coming up next. I’m at a slight disadvantage compared to Harman and Bennett, because Gratton’s questions… read more