[…]you navigate that, negotiate that? I love it that way! That’s part of what motivates you to keep working with it. Rob Wittig What are your thoughts about how Netprov and its platforms have changed in the past ten years or so? Talan Memmott I gave a talk at the Electronic Literature Organization conference in Montreal in 2018 called “Dank Memes and Tactical Media” and I mentioned Netprov. I was talking about Twitter and how it’s become this overwhelming troll culture, how it’s a post-truth platform. It has been since day one, in my mind, way before Trump. All these […]
[…]or destroy the territories of the uniquely human frequently demonstrate the degree to which our working models of the uniquely human are already entirely conditioned by these technologies.” (Kirkwood 172) Digital media, like cinema, requires on/off logic, synthesizing binary signals into perceptual unities. A web page composed of text, images, and video is transmitted as packets of binary data, traveling across multiple internet paths to arrive at its destination, where a browser reassembles the parts into a cohesive whole. The “magic” of digital media, reminiscent of early cinema’s spectral phenomena, now raises similar public concerns about its impact on human […]
[…]investigation. My final point concerns the understanding of capitalism, which Duncan (similarly to critical animal studies scholars) invokes to explain modern farming practices. I highlight this because the industrialization of animal farming did not occur exclusively within Western capitalism; similar developments also took place in socialist countries during the latter half of the 20th century—a fact often overlooked. Of course, when analyzing mass industrial meat production, its capitalist roots cannot be ignored. Industrial farms and modern slaughterhouses, operating under the logic of disassembly lines, are quintessential expressions of capitalism. They are driven by principles of scientific management (Taylorism) that govern […]
[…]the breadth of topics discussed. Although we had fiery discussions, I’d always experienced the group as supportive and inclusive. It came as a surprise, then, when someone posted an accusation that our group was white supremacist. She had seen us discuss Russia’s attack on Ukraine with emotion and support for Ukranians, whereas the more recent posts about Israel’s attack on Palestine received hardly any comments. The screenshots of posts she found using the search function of the Facebook group were all new to me, I had not seen the posts in support of Palestine in the feed. Neither had other […]
[…]work, bridging the gap between cultural studies, history and sociology, is focused on critical animal studies and environmental humanities. In her PhD thesis she analyzed cultural and ideological ramifications of rat control programs. Currently she works on changes in breeding practices in rural Poland before 1989, in order to understand conceptual and material relations between animals, socialism, agriculture and modernity. Her book “Species Cleansing. The Cultural Practice of Rat Control” was published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlag (Imprint of BRILL Deutschland) in 2024. Other publications: “Unveiling Dark Sites: Urbex/Rurex as a Method in Critical Animal History”, Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, […]
[…]games and militaristic games is almost a subgenre of research in itself, both in terms of the more critical studies that—the industrial or, as you were saying, the military complex, the societal relationship between those. You asked if first person shooters are a transgressive genre, but if you could just ask another question, whether militaristic shooters are a transgressive genre, and in some respects, they can be seen as transgressive because they deal with militaristic things and deal with war; that is obviously a transgressive topic in many ways. But in other words, you see that the commercial developers, when […]
[…]and artists using language as the material of their artwork; what it was called language art, with groups such as Art and Language as well as independent artists and writers working using language but without a PhD. In the ‘90s, as a visual artist with a background in English Philology, I was interested in different art forms including sound art, installations, performance, and videoart. I explored the use of phonetics, alphabets, visual language, and interaction through performances like Speaking in Tongues (1995) and videos, such as From A to Z (1995), Social Interaction (1996), and Learning a Language (1999). I […]
[…]but a reflection of a deeper, psychological landscape where the social glue that binds such groups dissolves. This interpretation resonates with the ‘megadungeon’ model proposed in recent media studies, which conceptualizes digital spaces as vast, procedurally generated networks where the inherent repetition and absence of clear navigation evoke both complexity and disconnection (Berti, De Vincentis, & de Seta 2023). The repetitive, unremarkable corridors in The Backrooms – lacking distinct markers or any sense of human existence – can be understood as a visual metaphor for modern societal fragmentation. These unvarying, almost mechanical passages mirror a condition in which communities become […]
[…]of the first chapter. This project came from a real interest of the intersection between black studies and game studies and media theory. It came initially from this idea that so many people in game studies talk about choice, but not necessarily about freedom, right? Choice is this often binary thing, or at least this limited movement and so many decision trees and things that we do in games come down to choice, and sometimes choice and freedom are treated as being similar to one another, especially in places like the United States, where getting to make consumer decisions is […]
[…]can be ambiguous and evolving. A well-known example is Nick Montfort’s Taroko Gorge, the source code of which is easily accessible and that has inspired many others to make their own generators by modifying the code. For this reason, the work’s authorship has been described as “a hybrid body of human and synthetic writers and readers” (Marques da Silva & Bettencourt 47). The authorship of the works in the research material could also be regarded as much more complicated than the paratexts are letting on. ChatGPT produces text based on probabilities and patterns from large quantities of data, and its […]