Electronic Arts Eyes the South
You may have heard that Electronic Arts is considering opening a large studio in Georgia, either in Atlanta or Savannah. Many of us in the area had heard rumblings about this, but the Atlanta Business Chronicle filed the first official story on the matter late last week. Georgia has offered tax incentives for film production for many years, and a… 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
Paper written with Nick Montfort for Digital Arts and Cultures 2009
In this paper, we describe and respond to six common misconceptions about platform studies, an approach to the study of computational creativity. â??Platform studiesâ? is a new focus for the study of digital media, a set of approaches which investigate the underlying computer systems that support creative work. In 2009, the first platform-focused book about creative digital media was published:… read more
Game Developer Magazine holds an annual Front Line Awards, for “the year’s best game-making tools in the categories of programming, art, audio, game engine, middleware, and books.” Racing the Beam is among the finalists. We’re definitely an outlier, the other books covering much more “practical” development concerns (Game Coding Complete 3e, Game Engine Architecture, Mastering Unreal Technology, and Real Time… read more
Promotional Materials for Think Inside the Box
Nick Montfort and I are giving a lecture tomorrow (Friday) at UC Irvine, as a part of the Center for Computer Games & Virtual Worlds lecture series. The talk, held at 4pm in Donald Bren Hall, covers aspects of Racing the Beam and platform studies. All of that’s just context so I can show you the awesome poster Liz Losh… read more
Broken dreams and cool boxes
Panic Software, who makes Mac utilities like Transmit (an FTP client) and Unison (a USENET client), has created a set of hypothetical boxes and watercolor box art, as if their apps had been made for the Atari 2600. You can buy them online. They are insanely awesome.
A definition for ordinary folk
Recently I was speaking to a writer about my recent work. She’s doing a feature for a local magazine on creativity research and design practice in the region. I’ve been fortunate to get a lot of press over the years, and it’s become increasingly important to me to find ways to make my work comprehensible and applicable to a general… read more
A Memento Stulti
Twenty-five years ago, Peter Headley gave me the Transformer “Skids” for my birthday. He couldn’t come to my party so he gave it to me at school. That very day, before I got to play with it much, Jeremiah Glenn broke one of its arms off whilst transforming it. It was a hard lesson. Jeremiah was overly aggressive with the… read more
Exhibiting Guru Meditation
I spent part of today assembling and testing Guru Meditation cartridges. Some are bound for collectors, but I’m also readying one to ship off to Slovenia for exhibition at Pixxelpoint 2009, the 10th International New Media Art Festival. The theme of the show is “Once Upon a Time in the West,” and it focuses on work made for “obsolete” platforms.… read more
My Contribution to the Speculative Heresy/The Inhumanities Cross-Blog Event
This week and next, Speculative Heresy and The Inhumanities are running a series on speculative realism and ethics, responses addressing the following question: â??While speculative realism has critiqued anthropocentrism in ontology, and critical animal studies has critiqued anthropocentrism in ethics, there has yet to be many productive connections made between the two. With each offering the other important insights, the… read more