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
Audio Proceedings of the Object-Oriented Ontology Symposium
Did you miss last month’s Object-Oriented Ontology Symposium? Lament no more. Recordings of the talks are now online at the conference website. You can download them individually as MP3 files or get an archive of all the talks in one fell swoop. Total running time is 5 hours 49 minutes. Perfect for your next flight from Chesapeake, Virginia to Reykjavik.… read more
Videogames as Art
From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Nothing is new under the sun. (thanks to Aaron Lanterman)
You can now preorder Newsgames from Amazon.com. As I post this, the price is $16.47, which is pretty good for a hardcover. It’s possible the price will change, but it’s only likely to get cheaper if it does. Oh, and the October 2010 date is a books in print date. It should hit the streets by late summer, but I… 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
What Gripes about Apple tell us about Computational Literacy
I’ve been watching reactions to Apple’s controversial decision to prohibit the publication of iPhone applications created in environments other than Apple’s own. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g.,… read more
Richard Rorty on Politics, circa 1998
I’ve been reading a bunch of reviews, interviews, and other secondary materials about Richard Rorty in preparation for next week’s event at UC Irvine. Among the works that will get mention in my talk is the 1998 book Achieving Our Country. I thought I’d share a snippet from a Rorty interview in The Atlantic about the book: How do you… 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