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Raymond Williams with a word on climate aesthetics
Two short excerpts from Raymond Williams’ essay ‘Culture is Ordinary’ (which is nice for lots of reasons) – but these two are important things to keep in mind for climate activists and action. The first is about the working class’ relationship to (industrial/mechanical/electrical) power and the real benefit to life that it brought, which…
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Videogame visions of a post-climate change future
I wrote an essay on the way games have depicted climate change for Memory Insufficient. I was pretty happy with how this turned out, and the plan is to whip it up into a more fleshed out paper later in the year. I haven’t had a chance to read the other essays but if prior…
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Clint Hocking on sense of place and the effect on violence in Far Cry 2
Steve Gaynor has a new Idle Thumbs offshoot podcast called Tone Control, and in this episode he talks to Clint Hocking, and they spend about the last 50 minutes talking about Far Cry 2. I wanted to excerpt this one great little quote that I think is really important. It’s from about an 1hr 10mins…
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Gone Home: Jump Scares and Ludonarative Harmony
So there’s a new game out called Gone Home and I don’t have the superlatives to describe it adequately so just take my word for it and go play. It’s some trifling amount of money on steam. If you haven’t finished playing it, I advise you to stop reading this essay now and just spend…
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Eve Sedgwick on Paranoia
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on paranoia, one of the best things I’ve read recently and which I’ll be incorporating into a chapter for sure. If you want to understand much of what goes on, both online and off, and particularly to do with activism, then look to understand paranoia: The first imperative of paranoia is There…
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[talk] Flarf ‘poetry’ and the Facebook tagging algorithm
So I gave a short paper at CODE last week entitled ‘Flarf ‘poetry’ and the Facebook tagging algorithm’ and got lots of positive comments and questions afterwards. Here’s an embed of the audio, and here’s a direct download. The slides to accompany the talk can be found here.
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Notes and highlights from Code 2k12
The following mostly dot-point notes are what I remember to be the stand-out points from a few of the highlight talks from Code 2012, held at Swinburne this week. It’s telling that the “standouts” are just about every single paper and presentation I went to (no slight on the rest that I also attended but…
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Some comments on, and two reservations about, #AltLit
I’ve recently joined (found?) the massively distributed online (sub?)culture that calls itself (is called?) Alt.Lit. My journey of discovery is not so important, but it started on twitter, moved to Facebook and now I see it everywhere. And let’s be honest, it’s not really a literature movement anymore; it’s become a cultural juggernaut steamrolling everything…
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Modern camouflage
In the following video, McDonald’s Marketing Director Hope Bagozzi answers a question asked (I think) via Facebook: “Why does your food look different in the advertising than what is in the store?” To answer the question (and this is the brilliant part) she goes on to reveal over the next three minutes all of the painstaking…
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Audio: Neuroscience, Technospectacularism and the Mind
On Wednesday the 9th of November I presented a paper to the Knowledge/Culture/Social Change International Conference at UWS Parramatta. The title of my paper was “Neuroscience, Technospectacularism and the Mind” and I recorded my talk which you can listen to below. The 29 minute recording includes some questions asked by the audience at the end…