In memory of card catalogs....

And to get us jumpstarted on weeks 4 + 5, if in the tone of nostalgia....


It's All in the Cards.

Bringing Sexy Bareback

It strikes me that the reading this week, from McGlotten’s queerspace to Dean’s emphasis on the distinctly modern stranger in cruising, are oriented specifically toward gay male culture, and as Tewksbury notes, one that is predominantly white. I can’t help but wonder what kind of space is opened up for female sexuality and in particular, gay women, particularly as the couple of Craigslist ads I placed were for women seeking women. The theories certainly apply to or suggest ways in which female sexuality might adhere to or differ from the web-mediated encounters that are described, though the focus on male homosexual practices like cruising or barebacking, or in the case of Bersani, the sociality of gay male community, is, for me, dangerously close to assuming that these types of encounters are common to all gay people, female and male. Tewksbury is the most explicit in delimiting his gendered scope, though as a sociologist (I am presuming), this seems to be intrinsic to his methodology; theorists like Kaye, McGlotten, Bersani and Dean, to differing degrees, posit modes of self-representation, desire, and community formation that are implicitly male.

My own experience posting on Craiglist was somewhat uncomfortable, in that I had no intention of actually representing myself or my desires accurately, and for me this was an ethical concern. This may be in part because the first response I received, and admittedly this may have been a standard reply to Craigslist postings, provoked a massive guilt trip:

i just saw your craigslist ad you posted earlier today looking for some nsa fun. i really want to take you up on it...like right now :) problem is, i responded to a similiar ad last month and was supposed to meet up with a guy but later found out after that it was just some 12 year old kid who was playing a prank on craigslist. That was my first time trying to hookup with someone from craigslist and since then i have been really skepitcal about going through with this again. but after just seeing your ad, i want to try this with you (if your ad was legit) i am for real, so i hope you are as well. i just moved here a couple months ago from vermont....wow....what a difference.

I was reminded of McGlotten’s observation of the “contradictions of sexual publicity; bodies in circulation do not necessarily want to be known.” (76) He admits at one point, “I have to wonder why some participants try to protect their identity,” yet I couldn’t help but think that anonymity in a queer culture is of paramount importance, particularly given the stigmas still attached to revealing one’s own identity, e.g. closeted identities, or the near (or sometimes actually) faceless encounters in cruising. If the fantasy of the internet is disembodiment, there is still a logic of separating the face from the rest of the body, i.e. the genitals, that still operates in this manner.

I certainly did not want to be “known,” not on the level that I normally present myself in any case. (Perhaps the certainty of that statement needs to be interrogated more thoroughly; or is it enough to say I just wasn't in the mood?) Though I posted pictures, they were movie stills that seemed ambiguous enough to be taken as candid photographs of “me.” This too spoke to the authority of the photographic image that Kaye describes, how, taking after Barthes, “a person’s photograph, much more than actually able to represent reality, makes the viewer believe in its reality.” (168) The awkwardness I felt may have stemmed from the knowledge that the photographs I used, however “fake” or “inauthentic” (i.e. misrepresentative), still evoke a certain reality, or reality-effect. It is not the indexicality of Bazin, but a signifier for authenticity nonetheless, an implied statement of disclosure, which I was, in actuality, falsifying. Kaye remarks that virtual cross-dressing only works “to the extent that they are fooling, or making themselves invisible to that hegemony,” and yet my experience with it was a heightened sense of myself, that I was not who I said I was. That, to me, felt ethically dubious. (166) Part of this problem, additionally, stemmed from the frustration over Craigslist’s lack of options for what I might have been looking for: strict divisions between gender, not being able to find more bisexual ambiguity, or having to rely on conventions of casual sex when it came to “casual encounter.” Why is there not a space for something between “strictly platonic” and something more pointedly sexual? Something like a queerspace in McGlotten's formulation: “a space of threshold, as a betweenness that opens up?" (65) A way of figuring out those dynamics in the process of their unfolding, rather than ordering off a menu of options?

my favorite reply so far

in response to an ad with the subject line "these boobs aren't real" (with a picture that certainly confirmed it), i received this reply (among many less imaginative ones):

"I disagree!!! If you can touch em...they're real!!!!   =)"

Took me right back to Laura Marks and Touch.....

Computing HIV

I thought this was interesting in light of how most of the readings describe how the computer facilitates that spread of HIV-in this case a supercomputer is being used to map HIV DNA in an attempt to understand how the virus mutates genetically. I wonder if similar technology could be used to track who infected whom, although I believe the virus begins to mutate even within one host. It poses questions of the ambivalent relationship between technology and public health, as in one instance computers can help spread the virus, and in another may work towards finding a vaccine, or additional forms of treatment.

Call and Response

Here are some of the most interesting responses I got from the ads I posted. I posed as different genders, looking for different "things." I'm not posting their photos or email addresses, but if you are interested in any, contact me.

1. "hey im not the slightest bit gay and have never done this b4 but im as horny as horny can be! i live in encinitas if you are up for coming over here and must be discreet..."

2. "i am real, d/d free, respectful, educated, BAchelors degree in film production and a minor in business and psychology .

what would you like to know about me? my sexual interests are easy. i love sex. i am clean, i always use protection, unless requested not to. i can meet days only, but please dont hold that against me."

3. "my dick when from hard to soft at the thought that u might by a man."

4. "I DO LIKE MY ASS EATEN BALLS SUCKED DOUBLE B.J AND YES I GO 9 INCHES

DEEP IN ASSES, I DO FUCK SUB BOYS BUT ONLY WHEN A WOMAN IS INVOLVED AS
WELL "

5. "Some of us are always available. ;-) I'm off today and tomorrow, some of my guys work from home, so they're available too. I'm bi-curious, but not with my guys. Let's say if we meet you two and me I'm open to almost anything, but with my group I can do just a little bit. ;-)"

6. "im into getting you just have to be gentle. im a str8 dude, but i love the way cock feels"

7. "Would lov to hear You moan.....like masc guys out in public and sub bttm boy in the bedroom. That u?"

8. "I am honestly str8 but just curious and just want to get the curiosity out of the way...

No insertion into my mouth or ass... like i said, this is my first, and if i like, then maybe we'll break it in..."

9. "I am 6'4", 200 lbs, an aggressive top who appreciates the curves of a woman and the yearnings of a boy"

10. "really want to find a girl that i 'come home to' and find her blowing my friend. I get pissed and rape you both. nothing too rough. I fuck him in the ass hard and then rape your ass and slap you around for being such a slut. I have the friend, he's a tight indian kid about 5'7 155 lbs. "

11. "perfer rubber but raw only with cleaning tools, like disinfecting liquid and need to shower good.."

12." i never met a ts in real but saw many on the web and i am curious to see how meetingn one and talking to one in person "

13. "im str8 and top women normally but with a girl like u i prefer u too fuck me good nd be a top..although i can verse. raw or rubbers really depends on the vibe."

14. "so i am a str8 guy, who recently discovered he'd really like to suck some good cock... and what's better then a cock attached to a beautiful girl, right? nothing, i say, nothing is better."

15. "straight, slim latino guy here. I just want to suck a cock very badly but i don't like guys. "

16. "Im the type that if a woman gets involved in a mans conversation, she just needs to stay out of it because it aint her place to be involved in a mans circle or conversation. Im from Turkey and have my temper at times and not afraid to show it. Here is my picture and hope to hear from you."

17. "I'm not a fag and will only fuck something very passiable with tits and fat ass. "

18. "My gf is half black and seriously hot with insame sex appeal so you know that i have to represent.. hahaha shes no joke! So tell me all you want.."

19. "ill let a guy suck me, if u can prove d/d free raw not big on ass eating"

20. "I need a girl or $"

21. "I am clean and I top raw and bottom with condoms."

22. "I will eat a girls ass but not a guys...I will get fucked like I said,if the guys cool..but girls have to be present..."

23. "I want you to be my aunt that wants to fuck with me but i never knew...."

Cruising Bresani

The film Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980) opens up an interesting dialogue with our readings this week, as well as the required sex ads on Craiglist, “looking for things,” as Diego put it. In the film, Frank Burns (Al Pacino) goes undercover in the New York S&M scene of late 70’s (pre AIDS) to catch a serial killer who has been preying on gay men. The victims, explains the police captain while detailing the operation to Burns, “were not in the mainstream of gay life. They were into heavy leather, S&M, a world unto itself.” Burns is sent out into the hedonistic scene as bait, to “cruise” the killer, as he matches the physical descriptions of the victims. Perhaps problematically, the film equates the act of cruising, or searching for an anonymous, casual sexual partner, with a radical underworld of leather, whips, public sex, and secret bars. The whole movie is available here, on Youtube, if you want to check it out (scroll through this guy's uploads, the film is there, broken into 14 segments). I highly recommend renting it though; it is one of my favorite films, despite stirring tons of controversy during its production and release for portraying gay men as wild, uninhibited, and dangerous.

Although more of the differences and comparisons between the film and our readings/homework can be drawn out at another time (perhaps in class if anyone else has seen the film), I thought Burns’ descent/ascent into this world was particularly relevant to the new ethics Bresani assigns to cruising. Quoting Foucault, Bresani discusses an asceticism of a homosexuality to come, “in other words, not in the sense of a morality of renunciation but as an exercise of the self on the self by which one attempts to develop and transform oneself, an to attain a certain mode of being” (20). This mode of ethics, as Bresani notes, contrasts to the typical queer response to the hetero-moral condemnation of cruising, S&M, and public sex, which has historically been to suggest that these practices are novel and/or claim that they are perfectly within the realms of decency. Yet asserting the civility of these acts for Bresani means implicitly accepting “homophobic morality” values and striking the potentiality of cruising as new dynamic of sociability. Bresani believes that cruising can become a dismissal of moral worthiness itself, creating a new group of people who evade archaic moral categories all together. In short, cruising demands a new set of ethics, an asceticism of the self where the self is left behind to a radical otherness, a mutual surrendering to otherness, a “moment we relate to that which transcends all relations” (22). Combining this “jouissance of otherness” with an ascetic, rather than masochistic (S&M) erasure of inter-subjectivity, leads to a new mutuality in sex and society, where the desire for the other’s desire is feasibly eradicated. This fascinating reading of an ethics to come definitely mirrors Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism which also attempted to free thought and humans from the constraints of transcendence and its results: judgment, clichés, common opinion, failures of thinking, etc.

It’s a stretch, but perhaps we can see Bresani in Burns from Cruising. I won’t spoil the film entirely, but as Burns gets deeper into his new mode of life, his identity begins to unravel, or perhaps Burns begin to view his life, his identity, as already unraveled, fractured, and unexplainable. His experiences expose a new ethics, a new group of people, gathering in the park at night, shirking all of the homophobic morality weighing down the rest of the city (notably, all of the characters in the film that are “proper” heterosexuals, Burn’s lieutenant, the other cops, etc., are enslaved to the red tape of their jobs and wear it on their leaden faces). The killer is re-inscribing this morality on the “cruisers,” a morality that Burns himself must uphold if he is to catch the killer, one that he has known all his life and will not know “appropriately” again.

Urban Loving Strangers

I am interested in Tim Dean’s notion of cruising within a context of urban planning and the construction of a city/social way of life. Using Jane Jacob’s text, Dean constructs a re-negotiated site of urban modernity (relying also on Baudelaire and Whitman). In his examination of promiscuity, Dean begins his discussion surrounding the phrase “Why should strangers not be lovers?” This question resurfaces throughout his essay, opening up a terrain for further negotiating the possibility of the “Stranger” or “other” within the context of cruising as part of the fabric in urban safety and life.


Strangers make up cities (perhaps part of a modern/postmodern definition of a city?). Dean furthers this point by considering “erotic encounters” as a point or more specifically a “metaphor” in defining this notion of “otherness” (pg. 181). Thus, the pleasure of urban life or city life comes down to the principle of not only living next to and within a set of strangers, but also this possibility in contact (pleasure in contact). At this point in Dean’s argument, he goes on to reconstruct a personal example from his own life, meeting a homeless man on his way to the gym. He provides an interesting recollection of the encounter, noting the physical details of mapping and remapping a walk to a destination through a “short-cut” and social exchange between someone of an “other-ed” position. In a certain sense, it seems a bit indulgent to me (I don’t know if this is the right word here), but this example seems to fit so readily into Dean’s example of defining the “urban” poor as part of this invisibility in defining the stranger in urban life…I know this is digressing from this week’s topic, but Dean’s example made me think about the homeless man’s mapping of the city (after their departure from Gold’s Gym). Where did he go after this point? In a sense, the homeless man almost becomes this object of “otherness” that Dean is attempting to depart from…or perhaps, that is part of his point- this man becomes wrapped up into Dean’s understanding of the pleasures of contact.


This notion of urban mapping also connects very much to Leo Bersani’s “Sociability and Cruising” text. Bersani’s first line opens up with the idea of social composed of desire (pg. 9). I hope to discuss this text further in class (at least for my own personal understanding). One of the more striking lines comes near the conclusion of Bersani’s text, in his discussion of otherness. Bersani states, “The jouissance of otherness has as its pre-condition the stripping away of the self, a loss of all that gives us pleasure and pain in our negotiable exchanges with the world.” It is here where I think the center of both Dean and Bersani’s writings connect, opening up further discussion in regards to an urban-mapping of the other and carving out a human subject that can negotiate this inner/outer dynamic with the understanding of home and embodiment that re-configures the social stranger.

Constraint City- the Pain of Everyday life

I recently came across this art/social project regarding a physical/emotional mapping of a city space (“literally”) onto the body. The participants in this project wore a corset, which allows for psycho-geographical writing and rewriting of the city. This project reminded me of the readings for this week, especially Tim Dean’s writing on “Cruising as a way of Life.” This notion of the pleasure-pain principle is quite apparent in the Constraint City project (even though the project doesn’t focus on a “sexualized” or queer space). I am curious as to how the programmers/artists for this project would conceptualize queer space in relation to public/private space, and the coding and negotiation of these spaces when approaching wireless networks/areas. How do we understand this “invisible architecture” that is supposedly transposed onto the body? Especially considering this notion of the stranger or “other” bodies? How is queer space re-negotiated in this context?

Cancelling cruising.

While posting the post below my mailbox found 6 more emails from craigslist readers/practitioners. I think I'll erase the ad in an h or so.

Fast it is.

Wow.

Posting as Asian Femme Fatale, it took not even 5min to get a response from http://www.craigslist.org/about/scams.html aka "kneel".

Pervasive, Perverse, Perennial

I've actually seen the inside of a sex-based text-based MOO. I've a friend, who shall remain nameless, who invited me to take a look, and I was certainly curious. The experience was broadening to say the least. I learned, amongst other things, that 'water sports' does not mean having sex while water skiing.

Water sports were, in fact, on a huge list of pre-determined 'kinks' that you could toggle on your character, that could be accessed by anyone on the game who typed +kinks . It was considering good form to be comprehensive here, and while there was a large and comprehensive list of kinks, ranging from 'size queen' to 'big bodied' to 'knife play' to plain old 'vanilla', there was also the option of writing up your own custom kinks. Very liberating, one might assume.

But I found, from my fascinated investigations, that rather than there being a destruction of hierarchies and discrimination, what ended up happening is that the representations people used in this cyberpornographic space tended to emphasize classically racist/sexist/domination based relations. Black characters always had huge penises, improbably so. Women were generally 'sluts' or 'bimbos' or tight laced librarian types who could be forced into adopting one of the previous two roles. There was a hardwired system of power relations, with masters and slaves, and one's personal position a required characteristic or 'tag' that needed to be chosen and could not be altered without consent from the authorities running the game. In short, freeing up identities and symbols caused these identities and symbols to develop a sort of giganticism, become almost hyper-racist and hyper-sexist.

As such, I think that the optimism of cybersex is questioned rightly by the authors we've read for next class. Certainly these forms of sex are physically 'safe', and it is much better that these fantasies be played out in a consequence-free environment, there is something concerning, in my eyes, about the way that unmoored and unmediated symbols, left to play, in fact tend towards greater expressions of domination. It could be argued, and cogently so, that the fact that one can play, with two different characters, both a master and a slave, but the need to separate to two demands that they be considered mutually exclusive. Separations are maintained and even emphasized, and cyberspace becomes, rather than a frontier of freedom, a reinstantiation of those fantasmatic desires that structure relations of domination.

The Ballad of Gay Tony

The latest of the Grand Theft Auto IV spin-off episodes:



Sadly, it doesn't appear that Tony's the protagonist, so there probably aren't any barebacking missions...

Tinker.Solder.Tap

http://www.sarai.net/publications/occasional/tinker-solder-tap

(Free Download)

We live in a tumultuous media environment. There is widespread  confusion,
uncertainty and awe at the inventiveness of the thousands  of people in
media networks who innovate, copy, tinker, recycle,  produce, remix and
relay. The protagonists of Tinker.Solder.Tap bring  alive the ways in which
the relationship between life and the media  has been re-scripted in the
various neighbourhoods of our cities. The  story begins in the mid-80s,
when a man returns home with an object  called a VCR. The chain of effects
that follows transforms  irreversibly the social life of the neighbourhood
and its  reverberations can be felt all over the world.

Produced and Designed at the Sarai Media Lab

Text: Bhagwati Prasad
Graphics: Amitabh Kumar
Translation and Editing: Shveta Sarda
Additional Research: Rakesh Kumar Singh, Lokesh
Pencilling sequential comic pages: Raja Pocket Books (Raj Comics)
Design and Cover: Amitabh Kumar

Published by
The Sarai Programme
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29, Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054, India
Tel: (+91) 11 2394 2199 Fax: (+91) 11 2394 3450
Email: dak@sarai.net
www.sarai.net
Delhi 2009

Any part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the prior
written permission of the publishers for educational and non-commercial
use. The authors  and publishers would, however, like to be informed.

This work is part of the project, ?Social and Material Life of Media
Piracy? of Sarai-CSDS and Alternative Law Forum (Bangalore) supported by
International  Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada .

ISBN 9788190585316
Published by the Director, CSDS.
Printed by Impress, New Delhi

Gonzalo Frasca @ IMD

Please join us for a talk by Gonzalo Frasca, who is the co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Powerful Robot Games. His talk will describe a framework for understanding how play and games convey ideas through the use of rhetoric rather than rules.

Gonzalo Frasca is a game developer, researcher and entrepreneur, who lives in Montevideo, Uruguay. He co-founded the studio, Powerful Robot Games, in 2002 to build both commercial and experimental games. Their game for Cartoon Network reached over 13 million player accounts. They described it as "our biggest gaming success in our history".

One of their most popular indie projects is Newsgaming.com, a project mixing journalism with videogames. It received the Knight Foundation News Games Lifetime Achievement Award at the Games for Change 2009 conference.

Time: Wednesday, October 28, 6-8 pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

(USC IMD)

Madden Journals

http://football-freaks.com/forums/index.php?showforum=43

For those who are interested.

Oh, and for an examination in fan culture, check fm-britain.co.uk for the best forums on Football Manager.

EA Sports Hockey Final

Check out the EA Sports Hockey League cup final -- real people playing simulated hockey in real space after playing a simulated season via telepresence... With interviews between the periods that sound just like real hockey player interviews!

http://www.easports.com/media/play/feature-video/NHL09_EASHL_Finals#

Civilization: Quality of Life

Speaking of procedural rhetoric, check out IMD grad student Ethan Kennerly's project, "Civilization IV: Quality of Life," a mod for the popular world-simming game:

"My Civ4 mod (a directed research with Peter Brinson) appeared at a conference "Games for Change" and a workshop "Logic and the Simulation of Interaction and Reasoning." Thank you, Tracy, for inviting me to demo at Games for Change. It's refreshing to meet fellow humanitarian developers!

About the mod: The original Civilization IV rewards imperialism through scoring the glory of the empire. I reprogrammed the game to score the health and happiness of the citizens. By adapting John Broome's extended quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), and responding to Derek Parfit's repugnant conclusions, I designed an ethical calculus that rewards restraint, diplomacy and art in Civilization IV. See the presentation and play the mod." (USC IMD)

Conference in San Diego

This sounds relevant to our class.

Videogame- movie tie- ins...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvuB9CJr-HI

I was recently alerted to this videogame involving an Irishman living (and killing Nazis, of course) in Paris...It amazes me looking at this preview in connection with Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards...I don't think they're connected, but it's quite striking (timing wise) to see the obvious influence of film in presenting an image and narrative surrounding WWII France. 

Baudrillard, Solomon, Empire

Reading Baudrillard this time, it was striking to me how Baudrillard begins “Simulacra and Simulations” with a description of Borges’ cartography, wherein the detail of the map is thorough enough to cover the space of the territory. The metaphor is prescient for the application of Baudrillard’s theory to expansive gamespaces that would be developed later. Here the simulation is by nature totalizing, and not partial; to see its edges would be to locate the limits of its reproduction of the real. Simulation exceeds and envelopes representation (indeed Baudrillard frequently describes it in terms of circular, recursive imagery: “an uninterrupted circuit,” “exchanging in itself,” a “Moebius strip,” “two ends of a curved mirror”), which maintains an ontological distinction between the sign and the real, however much they are equivalent. Simulation, however, refuses to acknowledge their differences; it denies both. This is the totalizing logic of the simulation.

It is not until later in the essay that Baudrillard approaches to an “outside” to simulation, which is expressed most pointedly through its mourned absence, its historical departure. This, to me, is an interesting break in the Baudrillard’s somewhat exhausting rhetoric. He suggests: “The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject realness and referentiality everywhere, in order to convince us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production.” In other words, Baudrillard reasserts the concrete materiality of real bodies and objects, and this is reaffirmed in the essays he wrote just a few years later, collected in the volume The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. There he critiqued the mediated nature of the Gulf War conflict, precisely the disembodied nature of the conflict, at least the way in which it was represented to the public at large.

Elsewhere he refers to a lost reality that, through its felt lack, is overcompensated through the production of industrial materials and “overdose[d]” political ideologies like fascism that assuage people of their “[m]elancholy for societies without power.” Thus the real exists, but only in phantom form. It is remembered as it perhaps never was (nostalgia), and we are numb to or unaware of its continued presence in physical form. It would counter the logic of a totality, of course, if one could truly see outside the simulacra; at the same time, however, the pressure of reality’s absence is still felt on an indeterminate outside, which might account for the increased militancy that is expressed at those margins: political scandal, pathology, nation (Disney), territory, war. These extremities are precisely where the simulation comes under the most pressure, because that is where it threatens to come undone: in these categories which are already unstable, constructed, and yet taken as real or natural.

*****

As I mentioned above, the cartographic quality of simulacra lends itself readily to videogames, and I wanted to briefly discuss a piece by experimental filmmaker Phil Solomon, who has recently been creating machinima films within the gamespace of the Grand Theft Auto series (I’m writing about these films for another class). This installation, Empire, recreates Warhol’s iconic film within the world of GTA IV’s Liberty City. I believe that when it was on view at the Wexner Center last year, the piece ran uninterrupted for a week (Warhol’s film runs eight and a half hours). To achieve Warhol’s same perspective, Solomon, through his avatar, had to steal a helicopter and then crash into the side of a building. Tellingly, his south-facing skyline is one that does not include the World Trade Center; neither does Warhol’s, since his film was completed in 1964, before the towers’ construction. Throughout the week-long projection, the physics generator within the game begin to loop, indicating a temporal limit to the game’s total (totalizing?) space. And like Baudrillard’s simulacra, the vision of New York presented in Empire is not real, though it still feels like it, particularly for the uncanny sense that “[s]omething has disappeared.” The trace of a real is affecting not despite its departure but precisely because it is phantasmatic.

Phil Solomon, Empire (2008)

Andy Warhol, Empire (1964)

war, simulations, matthew broderick

Censoring and Imagining Medium Specificity

In looking at both Gonzalo Fransca and Ken McAllister’s articles on game culture (“Studying the Game Complex” and “Simulation versus Narrative”), there are some critical parallels that emerge as far as game culture in social (and academic) discourse. I find this notion of “medium specificity” very much at work in both of these articles (perhaps used as more of a critique against a social backlash involving the creation of games operating within a certain system of aesthetic codes and social apparatus). Especially in Fransca’s article, he aligns his argument against this notion of “narrative” and “storytelling” stemming from the modes of literature and drama. Fransca claims, "My goal in this essay is to contribute to this discussion by offering more reasons as to why the storytelling model is not only an inaccurate one by also how it limits our understanding of the medium and our ability to create even more compelling games” (pg. 221). In this desire for more “compelling games” centered within a rhetoric of simulation, a language for understanding and researching video and computer-based game culture centers on a certain model of “behavior” or behavioral rules (pg. 223).  McAllister takes more of a critical stance involving the ethics and social response elicited by videogames as part of a value system within society. In linking videogame culture with definitions surrounding the “popular” and “mass media,” McAllister sets a system in understanding the reception of videogames as part of a “visual metonymy” (pg. 14). Thus, opening up a critical response that attempts to understand videogame research as part of a larger unknown in the field of embodiment and Psychophysicolgical force (noting both “harmful” and “positive” effects).

            Both articles also touch upon this notion of media response in the form of censorship and censoring bodies in defining videogames as a specific medium of cultural response (the headline focus on violence in this case). Whether focusing on media generated from the Columbine shootings- part of this narrative argument that both McAllister and Fransca are attempting to dispel- the fact that videogames are surrounded within a context of critical response (whether government officials to parent groups) opens up a line of critique extending to a number of various other media forms (especially the Motion picture industry). Fransca makes note of the issue surrounding videogames as a vehicle for speech (something the film industry went through in its formative years). In a sense, videogames have gone through much of what other arts have gone through in finding a placement within a societal framework of public opinion, and part of specific medium with effects that are conceptually different than that of a book, film or painting.

            In a sense, I am also reminded of Jane Gaine’s article entitled “Political Mimesis.” The premise of her work stems from a documentary tradition in defining and finding social and aesthetic patterns in re-articulating a body response to images. Even though her argument is based in the “representational,” I think there are strong elements which connect to this idea of simulation and a critical response/studies conducted around this notion of the human body and the physical “effects” of playing/occupying a game world. Gaine’s discusses the footage from the Rodney King beatings as a primary example of this sort of “political mimesis” in the way people (especially those who “identified” with Rodney King- in South Central LA)- were physically and emotionally “moved” by the images to reproduce a rioting response.  As part of the complexities of video and computer game culture, I wonder if this a helpful framework or notion in exploring a social response in playing games? Could a videogame create a situation- a type of response that moves people to physically react in “reality”? Or is this logic reducing videogames to a simple rhetoric of what is real vs. the imaginary world that the gamer occupies?  

Predator drones and simulation

Jane Mayer's recent New Yorker piece and NPR interview about the US military’s use of remote-controlled Predator drones draws an interesting parallel to this week's readings. Obviously, the object of a Predator mission (actually killing “enemies”) is drastically different than a video game that is entertainment-based, yet the two “simulated” forms not only illustrate how visual technologies have transformed warfare (and vice-versa), but also how these very technologies complicate political, ethical, and economical ideologies (again, vice-versa). For example, what becomes of human rights when killing enemies becomes at once more precise, furtive, and less treacherous to the humans “controlling” the Predator drones? Likewise, from the viewpoint of the military, how can the use of video game technologies, as a popular form of simulation, alleviate certain aspects of warfare (costs, magnitude, etc.)?

While reading “Simulation versus Narrative, ” I wondered how Gonzalo Frasca would classify war simulations with “real” consequences, in regard to the paidia/ludus dichotomy of simulations. In the article, Frasca challenges the notion that video games are extensions of representational narrative; rather, he argues, they function on a different rhetorical structure known as simulation. Whereas established representational media excel at “both descriptions of traits and sequences of events,” (223) or narrative, simulations permit manipulation and modifications and require a certain level of interactivity, opening video games (as structures of simulations) to chance and change. With its looser rules and open-ended structure, paidia simulations, like Sim City, is a game without a goal or end—playing for the sake of playing. Ludus simulation, on the other hand, has clear limitations and rules and is exemplified by traditional, narrative-based games like Mario Bros, Zelda, etc. The Predator drone, albeit not a typical video game but nonetheless a type of “simulation,” rejects Frasca’s dichotomy and the idea that narratives are totally divorced from simulations. As Frasca notes, “games are not free of ideological content,”(233) meaning that as cultural objects, games and the use of games arise out of contextual frameworks, the results of which can be viewed as certain “narratives” themselves. In the case of the drone, its use and “success” is dependent on larger ideological narratives that are the foundations for the nation/state, religion, and war in the first place. Its use as a “simulation” with severe consequences is precisely to perpetuate a narrative.

The use of Predator drones shows that video game technologies, or Frasca’s “simulations,” are not solely entertainment or educational vehicles. Rather, their practice and popularity in popular cultures can be capitalized on and used for devastating purposes. That is not to say games are responsible for the atrocities at Columbine or any other tragedy, but following Ken McAllister, they represent, literally and figuratively, an ideological struggle as “a medium through which these values are articulated and re-produced” (26).

Train

Brenda Brathwaite's Train is a tabletop game, one of six that the veteran designer is pursuing in a series on difficult subjects.

Train's game surface is a window, some panes broken, with additional broken glass scattered atop the surface of the play area. Three railway tracks extend at oblique angles across the width of the window.

The object of the game is to load yellow people tokens into boxcars and to move them from one end of the track to the other. Players roll dice to add passengers and move trains forward, and they draw cards to execute other actions, such as switching tracks, damaging a train, and derailing. Terminus cards on each track reveal each train's destination at the end of the game: Auschwitz, or another Nazi concentration camp. (Gamasutra/Ian Bogost)

[This game was played at Indiecade -- I missed it but word has it the experience was quite intense...]

YouTube comments or lines from E.E. Cummings?

a fun game. can you tell who wrote, "this i bad sorry to saY"? (via McSweeney's)

Game Week readings?

Hey, Gamer dudes!  Got readings for this week?  Other assignments?

Nowcasting: video or audio available?

I'm feeling like I missed a heck of a conference, but thankfully there are plenty of posts and tweets covering what went down there to give me a sense of what was discussed and where I can look to find out more. Like, for instance:

• The #nowcasting hashtag on Twitter - a good stream of coverage from both attendees and presenters.


• Liz Losh has written some very detailed blog posts about several of the presentations.

What I really want, though, is some video or audio. Anyone know of other places to look for coverage of the conference?

moms on the net!

more maternal (body) stuff (from Everything Is Terrible):

Nowcasting Conference - LiveBlog!

12:13 And with that Nowcasting Conference 2009 takes a break for lunch.

12:10 The critique is directed towards data as a model for directing humanistic research. But these models will be modified by the specificity of the individual. Drucker is challenging the holistic adoption of empirical knowledge for doing humanistic work in graph presentation and not the practice of consensual agreement of interpretation by humanists.

12:05 Great presentation from Drucker. Last Q + A before break.

12:00 Twitter: lulabrad How do we map the "human experience"? What is the terrain of psycho-geography that Drucker describes? #ctcs677

11:58 Addressing the problem of scale and reading (i.e. the need to move from a space of a page to file, folder, collection, archive). It doesn't need to be put into a structure to be moved through. Reading is performative and the process is transformative of the text.

11:50 Temporarily is relational and not standard and fixed. We need to look at affect. It phenomenological and experiential.

11:48 Twitter: lulabrad the mapping of subjectivity...ah, i'm reminded of our discussion on phenomenology from last week #ctcs677
itchybramble Drucker's humanistic ethics: rather than assuming it’s a given (data), it’s a taken (capta). #ctcs677

11:43 Drucker letting lose and throwing the gauntlet. The idea of data representing is problematic because it assumes form follows data. Data is a construct of empirical methods that suggests there is an existing phenomena that can be taken by mechanical means. Any metric of perception of any phenomena is according to an agenda. It assumes there are user independent. WRONG!

11:41 Twitter: DiegoSemerene "The humanities can never be grounded in certainty" #ctcs677

11:40 Change the perspective of entities of the object of knowledge to knowing of events and the interpretation of it.

11:40 Twitter: joshuams Finally got http://tinyurl.com/yzeohzc (Real Media) video stream working w/ a newer intel-mac friendly version of VLC. #ctcs677

11:36 The latest developments in digital humanities: from approaching the problems that arise from the digital in the humanities to the shift of creating humanities with and within the digital environment.

11:35 Before the conference heads out to lunch here is Johanna Drucker FROM DATA TO CAPTA: DIAGRAMMING INTERPRETATION

11:33 Despite that the presentation is over here is the wikipedia page for the Medium is the Massage.

11:30 Even with the massive success of Medium is the Massage, it didn't create the transformation and the graphic norms that were being experimented with did not happen. the more conventional models of publishing sustained afterward.

11:25 Very dense presentation from Schnapp. Q + A begins.

11:23 Twitter: lulubrad Massaging of messages initiates change surrounding identity and the public- the you. #ctcs677

11:17 Medium is the massage is a hybrid of new and older materials. The bulk of textual materials is reworked and the massaging projected shifts to the public and concludes by proposing the question "who are you with respects to the electronic age." Medium as the massage is a McLuhan mash-up by impacting the public impact by popularization repackaging and re-approriating McLuhan.

11:15 Twitter: lulubrad ...turning message into massage...#ctcs677

11:00 Schnapp on Jerome Agel - The book producer was not the traditional editor but rather like a music producer and involved in all phases of the creation of a book. "Book were hits and not bestsellers."

10:52 Future Shock

10:50 Onward to Jeffrey Schnapp MAKERS OF THE 1960S: QUENTIN FIORE + JEROME AGEL

10:42 Twitter: DiegoSemerene Paglen's "production of outer space" echoes Curtis Wong's World Wide Telescope project? http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/Home.aspx #ctcs677

10:40 It's a shame Paglin didn't get a chance address the legal framework that encases this issue. Definitely something to look further into.

10:38 During the Cold War and the 90s space was militarized but it was silently agreed that it would never be weaponized. Though there may be war from space there would never be a war spot in space. However, this has now drastically changed.

10:35 We are interrogating the symbolic issue of space travel that are absent in the presentation. Paglin thinks that's spectacle for the military. What defines the "now" are the current developments and approach politics has towards the GSO.

10:33 Fascinating presentation by Paglin. Now onto the Q + A.

10:30 SATCOM has dramatically altered the ways on how outer space is viewable. Defact military occupation of orbit. Unlike other sources of occupation, this is invisible, undetectable, and deniable. It represents the closing of a frontier.

10:25 Twitter: ironmanx28 Trevor Paglen is extending his work mapping terrestrial manifestations of the MIC into space #ctcs677

10:23 MiTEx was to inspect and deactivate satellites with the goal of making them look like these spacecraft had simply broken down. MiTEx was subtle, stealth and deniable. It has an informal sovereignty over the GSO. This is a new ideology the military has projected onto agendas concerning US presence in air and space.

10:15 The anxiety is a response to the perceived territorialization, military occupation, of the orbits from the origins of these broken and rogue satellites. Now onto MiTEx.

10:10 Paglin has a very interesting take on the idea of anxiety concerning this subject of satellites, their orbits, and their relation to actual human interaction.

10:08 The rogue satellite DSP-F23 is the trajectory of Paglin's presentation. For more information visit here.

10:00 For anyone interested in Trevor Paglin's work visit http://www.paglen.com His presentation THE OTHER NIGHT SKY: SECRET SATELLITES AND ‘GEOGRAPHIES’ OF ORBIT begins now.

9:58 Anne states she is largely influenced by Jay David Bolter's Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, Second Edition, but she responds that this digital writing space is no longer about words and more about conditions and situations now.

9:53 Twitter: itchybramble never before considered the book as a time-based medium, e.g. its frozen temporality as opposed to the "nowness" of a website. #ctcs677

9:50 Anne Burdick is now taking Q + A.

9:50 More interesting however is Design speculative mode - is propostional, provocative, investigative, and optimistic.

9:46 Design is more than issues of more than representative but also it is operational. It can also be used to create and structural logics, schema, information hierarchy, cultural strategies, narrative structure. Design can re-contextualize, critic, and deconstruct.

9:38 Visualization of footnotes that also have no departure note.

9:34 Discussing notions of authorship, hypertext, collaboration, and mediation.

9:25 Anne is introducing newecologyofthings.net

9:20 Twitter: tmcphers i'm here (there?) virtually but the streaming hasn't started yet. are folks already talking? #ctcs677

9:20 Turning things over to Anne Burdick, DESIGNING KNOWLEDGE. The conference now begins.

9:18: not everything is digital humanities, but the digital humanities are about everything---> design theory + digital humanities = designed theory

9:15 Defining design theory and thinking about design in all its manifestations: human centric, solution-oriented, and technical. Now moving on to the digital humanities...

9:10 Defining Nowcasting as defined by Rivka Galchen. There is more data points to get a fix for the present than trying to forecast the future. Now to combine that with design theory...

9:05 Introductions for Nowcasting Conference: Design Theory + Digital Humanities 2009 begins.

Nowcasting

Tomorrow.  UCLA.  Info here.

Kiss and Tweet

Apparently 40-percent of people (i.e. Americans) under 35 tweet/text/check-Facebook while driving. And 36 percent use new media as a kind of post-coital ritual of dissemination, right after sex. Men (i.e. socially heterosexual males) are twice as likely to spread "the news" than women (i.e. straight biological women). The website IJustMadeLove.com is an archive for people around the world (i.e. mostly Americans) to upload when/where they had sex and what positions they engaged in. If one were to read the site's interactive map at face value, one would conclude that no one has had sex in Botswana or Zambia for the past 24 hours. Ironically, 23.9-percent of Botswana inhabitants and 15-percent of Zambians are HIV-positive. With barebacking running rampant in queer circles and always already normalized in straight circles, could we envision a IJustSeroConverted.com? Is consequence also Tweetable, or just immediate action?

Did You Know...

... that October is not just National Coming Out Month but also Cybersecurity Awareness Month? Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, in an attempt to commemorate the latter, stopped by the Cyber Crimes Center in suburban Virginia this week. The 12-year-old center, known as C3, mostly combats online child pornography, but also money laundering, arms trafficking and fraud. C3 also buys a lot of video games, because apparently Play Station 3s have a great capacity "for mathematical calculations and generating numbers, which makes them cost-efficient password-breakers". The game consoles are connected to servers called "decryption silos". In perhaps unrelated news Joy Behar wonders if Secretary Napolitano is gay, to which sex columnist Dan Savage answers "I haven't slept with her."

Digital, Watch Your Back?

Polaroid cameras and film (color and black-and-white) will make a comeback in 2010. The 1948 instant photography invention will be relaunched next year by The Impossible Project and Polapremium. The Huffington Post just ran the news along with a fun feature ranking non-digital objects we miss the most, including pens: "Remember the day writing didn't mean typing? ... Not really!".

In the meantime, Brazilian print newspapers are celebrating a RISE of 12 percent in circulation. Brazil may be the exception that proves the rule (of the demise of print media), as it only recently saw the proliferation of populist and sensationalist free dailies distributed in metro stations and other public spaces. But for a lot of what used to be called "the third world" this may be true: Internet connections are still slow, hardware is still expensive, driving a very very small percentage of the population to produce and consume most of what is "used" online. Plus, is it perverse or even more necessary to think of "digital literacy" in places where a great part of the population is illiterate in general (many Brazilians "sign" their Government-issued I.D.s using their fingerprints because they don't know how to sign their names)? About 15-percent of Brazilians, 20-percent of Hondurans, 30-percent of Egyptians, 40-percent of Indians, 61-percent of Senegalese and 76-percent of Malians are 100-percent illiterate. How to make sense of the need to learn code and the need to learn how to spell one's first name?

Oh, and Miley Cyrus quit Twitter citing excessive self-exposure!

OVERHEARD

"HTML isn't even code."

shouted by a handful of students at the Zemeckis Center when someone suggested HTML's status as code. Not that Tara's husbands hadn't already told us that. But here the tone seemed tinged with "Are you kidding me?" astonishment or "HTML is sooo not code."

Meggy Jr RGB

Perhaps we need one of these for the games week....? 

Doing, Re-doing, Un-doing

How can we speak about embodiment without speaking of Louise Bourgeois? The sculpture work speaks for itself, but in thinking about reproduction, the digital and the haptic it's interesting to think of her installation called "I do, I re-do, I un-do" (2000), which also became a theater play that explored this notion of constant morphing. In the Tate Modern installation the visitors (users?) were invited to climb staircases to platforms, which could be "stages for intimate and revelatory encounters between strangers and friends alike" .

This first photo below I snapped not because of the Bourgeois' artwork itself but because the notion that a mother would drop off her 9-year-old alone at the Centre Pompidou and tell him to "meet her later" seemed beautiful and urgent. Maybe something Tara might do, even if Chuck E. Cheese is scholarship too.

Reverse Astroturfing?

with the Yes Men...

The WoW Pod

Artist Cati Vaucelle's WoW Pod -- "an immersive architectural solution for the advanced WoW (World of Warcraft) player that provides and anticipates all life needs.

Inside, the gamer finds him/herself comfortable seated in front of the computer screen with easy-to-reach water, pre-packaged food, and a toilet conveniently placed underneath his/her custom-built throne.

When hungry, the gamer selects a food item (‘Crunchy Spider Surprise’, ‘Beer Basted Ribs’, etc.) and a seasoning pack. By scanning in the food items, the video game physically adjusts a hot plate to cook the item for the correct amount of time. The virtual character then jubilantly announces the status of the meal to both the gamer and the other individuals playing online: “Vorcon’s meal is about to be done!” “Better eat the ribs while they’re hot!” etc.

When the food is ready, the system automatically puts the character in AFK (‘Away From Keyboard’) mode to provide the gamer a moment to eat. When the player resumes playing, he/she might just discover his/her character’s behavior is affected by the food consumed in real life — sluggish from overeating or alternately exuberant and energetic.

The exterior of the WoW Pod mimics the look of authentic WOW architectural structures, whose swaths of flat, pixellated surfaces digitally recreate the built environment of an imagined past. But upon crossing the threshold and entering into the WOW Pod’s interior, the player finds the digitized look actually becomes the real life experience that World of Warcraft simulates. (Cati Vaucelle)

virtual white house

thinking of wayfinding and relationality, what fantasies of civic engagement are scaffolded here?

a bit more on american apparel

some context on why i'm having a hard time taking dov seriously....

and another.  And for fun.

dance, bad mothers, remash

Just wanted to post a quick link to the Martha Graham Dance Company Clytemnestra ReMash Challenge, which was a contest held earlier this year to encourage people to submit video dance reinterpretations of the classic 1950s Graham ballet, Clytemnestra. Clytemnestra, of course, is one of the worst mothers of ancient Greek tragedy: scheming against her husband, sleeping with his enemy, and eventually murdering him. She also got her due when her outraged son, Orestes, decided to avenge his father's death and commit matricide. With Clytemnestra, motherhood and the logic of generational reproduction is disrupted; rather than being the catalyst for enlarging the family, Clytemnestra is responsible for making it smaller.

It seems that this notion of remaking or remashing* the dance, taking it out of the hands of professional dancers and into the general public by encouraging new interpretations (making the Martha Graham company act as viewers rather than performers), in some ways relates to the inverted motherhood of Clytemnestra, and it's interesting that the Internet would be solicited as the medium by which this process occurs.

On an unrelated note, motherhood figured prominently on last week's episode of Dollhouse (which is such a great, great show!). I won't go too deep into the show's premise here, but it's enough to know that the show features a group of people who are regularly "imprinted" with other personalities, for varying ends. The imprint of a "mother" persona this week caused one of the most deepest and lasting impressions, because this particular imprint affected not only the mind, but caused the recipient to begin lactating. So motherhood here, or the bond between mother and baby, is figured in this show, at least, as the most profound "identity" that can be acquired, one that is specifically enacted through the body against or autonomously of the mind (the episode is entitled "Instinct").

*William Safire was baffled by the use of the word remash. From the Times, Feb 15, 2009: "In re re-mash: This could be a remix of a remix, or a remix of a mashup or a mash-up of a remix; it seems to be a coinage in process. The word was disseminated worldwide in January 2009 in an AP article by Verena Dobnik: "The Martha Graham Dance Company is launching a global competition challenging anyone who's cybersavvy" to enter "the Clytemnestra ReMash Challenge." To interest a new generation in a cultural classic, contestants are invited to create four-minute online videos comparing the vengeful Greek mythical heroine to a present-day celebrity. The contest submissions are to creatively transform short video dance excerpts into a ReMash online spot. The intent is to call the attention of today's cutting edge to an art form they might otherwise overlook by capitalizing on, and perhaps satirizing, the current dash to mash."

Mothers and Daughters, Mother-Daughters

When Laura Marks argues haptic cinema as always erotic -- as it puts "the object into question" and pulls the viewer "too close to see properly" -- she likens it to a child's gradual realization of separateness from its mother. This relationship of "perception of alterity" (and the problematics of its refusal) is present in Maud Mannoni's work on the "backwards child": the child who believes she is an extension of her mother's body for "too long". This belief of non-autonomy (material continuity) is created by both parent and child in a (ultimately unhealthy) partnership work of subjectivation and estrangement, identification and immersion, that also recalls the dialogic relationship between viewer and (haptic) image. It's true that the backwardness of this child who refuses autonomy via an impression of material extension (collapsing self and other) is most obvious, at least in Mannoni's work, in autistic and mentally disabled children. When the mother takes advantage of the pathological vulnerability of her child to exacerbate the child's condition so that it embodies the mother's own anxieties and lack. Yet its logic is also pertinent in thinking about 'queer' children in general and queer bodies, which is the kind of body "the digital" has, according to Marks.

This question of "where does my body begin and where does my mother's body end?", I suppose a universal "stage" of infancy, reminds me of Gregor Podgorski's photographic series "Mères & Filles", which features images of mother and daughters' naked bodies interacting with each other. In a gallery space the work is accompanied by verbal accounts of the mothers and daughters recounting the experience of being captured "together" in the same frame. The theme of "mirror, mirror" is constant, the uncanny sense of "a(n)other me" (a "me" resembling the past?) for the mother and the sense of staring at the materialized future for the daughter ("I will look like her"). Which seems to link reproduction and continuity to a kind of database of memories and expectations that get passed on from generation to generation. A kind of archive inevitably psychosomatized into subjects that can only "be" in this constant negotiation between autonomous, discrete personhood and a continued embodied history that one just cannot "shake off" or disavow.

Don't Worry Vivian, the World is Really Real

I agree with Vivian Sobchack that "within the dominant cultural and techno-logic of the electronic there are those out there who prefer the simulated body and a virtual world..." and that these people are, well, basically nuts. The nanotech immortality fantasies of Ray Kurzweil et al notwithstanding, I think this perspective is increasingly a minority one, and I can't accept that there are many serious people out there who would argue for a completely disembodied, brain-in-a-vat/brain-in-the-machine cyberfuture. Indeed, I believe such thoughts basically emerge from an early wave of naive techno-utopianism and catastrophe theory, and have been propagated largely via non-technical and somewhat dim-witted (vaguely new age, often times stoner burnout) quarters. It all smacks of mediocre 50s sci-fi and its derivatives in Scientology and other tech/alien cult manifestations, and yet Sobchack talks about it as if this motive is at the dark heart of our culture.

All this is to say that the whole argument in "The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic, and Electronic 'Presence'" is a bit of a straw-man kind of thing. Yes, definitely -- "an insubstantial electronic presence can ignore [all the] ills the flesh is heir to outside the image and the datascape," and that would suck, but are we really moving deeper into the screen and disembodiment, full stop, end of story? Sobchack says yes, and I can understand how she got there.

At the time of her writing, the notion that we (or at least those of us who will be able to afford it) are all going to live our futures through our brainstems in an all-encompassing, "jacked-in" Virtual Reality was at its zenith, particularly in popular culture. The fear was that people would become so wrapped up in their disembodied virtual existences (foisted upon them by their robot overlords) that they would fail to notice that the were, phenomenologically speaking, sitting in a tub of goo far away from the site of their action. But while the Matrix films provided the culture with an outlet for various anxieties about technology, identity and control, they were, at bottom, kind of vacant, semi-obvious entertainments that recycled ideas and story figures that have been around since the 50s. Their cause was putatively a noble one, but the films themselves were little more than the pop finales to the initial gasps of fear and anxiety that accompanied the birth of "the electronic."

I would argue that our future can't be plotted on a phenomenological continuum that has "embodied" at one end and "disembodied" at the other. Blade Runner and the Matrix trilogy tell us more about the fears and conceits of the early 1980s and late 1990s than they do about the future we are actually confronting in the here and now. And yes, I know -- sure, there's something to be harvested there about the "techno-logic" of late capitalism and of course, yes, it's all valuable, all of it. But Sobchack spends a lot of intellectual capital worrying about the phenomenological effects of a theoretical reality that increasingly bears little resemblence to what's actually happening on the ground. No one outside of the most moronic and outmoded subcultures of misguided paranoid technoenthusiasm uses the words "meat" or "wetware" to refer to their bodies. Indeed, highly embodied cultural manifestations like DIY, networked public play and mobility are arguably emerging as the dominant paradigms. While screens continue to proliferate, they are arguably becoming less central to our "lifeworld" (while computation nonetheless continues its ascent behind the scenes). The once easily-drawn line between the Virtual and the Real is now revealed to be a grand fallacy, a product of the very fears and ignorances that produced Sobchack's essay in the first place.

Put away Neuromancer and pick up Pattern Recognition or Spook Country. Blade Runner and La Jetee are great -- so is Denno Coil.