Software grows like new leaves
Thanks to Jan Holmevik, Cynthia Haynes for hosting me and Greg Ulmer at Clemson University last week. The occasion was a seminar and symposium on games and rhetoric, organized thanks to Victor Vitanza and his Pre/Text journal. I enjoyed lively conversation with students and faculty alike. Somehow it was the first time I’d met Ulmer, who gave a thought-provoking talk… read more
Liz Losh on Object-Oriented Teaching
Over at the Digital Media and Learning blog, Liz Losh writes a nice introduction to the “emerging theory” of object-oriented philosophy. Her post discusses the surprise popularity of objects at last month’s Digital Arts and Cultures conference, including very prominent mention in Kate Hayles opening plenary. Losh then asks how object-oriented teaching might work at a practical level, offering some… read more
Generate your own Latour Litanies
In my book Alien Phenomenology, I coined the term “Latour Litany” for the lists of things in writing—whether in Bruno Latour’s or anyone else’s. The philosopher Graham Harman has also adopted this term, and in general it’s enjoyed some success as an appelation for “bestiaries of things,” as I’ve called them. Alien Phenomenology is a book about “pragmatic” speculative realism,… read more
Observations from SLSA
This weekend the SLSA Conference is taking place in Atlanta, and a few things of interest to those of you who follow speculative realism are going on. For starters, I presented my keynote yesterday, on alien phenomenology. In general, the audience seemed still unfamiliar with SR and OOO, but also very curious. I took a number of useful new thoughts… read more
Abstract for my SLSA plenary
The Society for Science Literature and the Arts annual conference is about to start up here in Atlanta. The program is online, and the SLSA folks have updated it with the abstract for my Friday evening plenary. I thought I’d reproduce it here for those of you who are interested in such things. In recent years, a small cadre of… read more
A colloquium with Espen Aarseth, Fox Harrell, and Janet Murray
The School of Literature Communication and Culture at Georgia Tech is hosting what is sure to be a great colloquium next week, “How to Think About Narrative and Interactivity.” It will be held 4:30-6pm on Tuesday October 20th in the Skiles building on campus (map), room 002 on the ground floor. The colloquium will feature the following speakers and topics,… read more
Politics and Slow Cooking
There’s been a surge of discussion in the past couple days about the relationship between object-oriented ontology and politics. For one part, Levi Bryant responded to Reid Kane’s concerns about what he perceived to be the “absent political dimensions” and “neoliberal alliances” of OOO and Actor-Network Theory. A liveley discussion ensued, and Levi followed up with some thoughts on the… read more
Cultural Studies, Politics, and Realism
If you’re the kind of person who is the subject of Michael Bérubé’s scathing critique of cultural studies in last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, then you’ve probably read it already. To summarize via citation, Bérubé argued that the impact of cultural studies “has the carbon footprint of a unicorn,” and yet nobody within the field notices or cares. If… read more
A Visit to the Bestiary
When I was a philosophy undergraduate student, I had a life-changing experience in a class on the philosophy of language. It was a good class, as undergraduate classes tend to be: I learned the basics of a subject had known little about previously. The course was taught by a newly minted PhD whose specialty was that subject. She was young… read more
Kafka in Spore
Georgia Tech alumna Kate Compton has been working for Maxis on Spore for the past four years or so. Back when she was a masters student, she took my course on videogame translation and adaptation. This week, Kate announced a new official scenario for Spore Galactic Adventures, which she created based on Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Given the pliant nature of… read more