McKenzie Wark on developing critical media approaches to confront the computer game as an historically specific form, the form perhaps of our times.
Podcast: Stephen Duncombe, “Art of the Impossible: Utopia, Imagination, and Critical Media Practice”
In an economy of informational abundance, does the traditional truth-revealing role of critical media practice still have any political relevance?
Podcast: Mia Consalvo, “Western Otaku: Games Crossing Cultures”
Through in-depth interviews with such players, this study investigates how transnational fandom operates in the realm of videogame culture, and how a particular group of videogame players interprets their gameplay experience in terms of a global, if hybrid, industry.
Podcast: Angela Ndalianis, “Viva Las Vegas: a Neo-Baroque Conception of the World”
Drawing on Umberto Eco’s concept of ‘pansemiotics’, it will be argued that spectacle cities like Las Vegas operate according to the logic of a giant wunderkammer — relying on an emblematic understanding of the meaning of objects and the interrelationship between them.
Podcast: Siva Vaidhyanathan, “The Googlization of Everything”
Siva Vaidhyanathan suggests ways we might live better with Google once we see it as a mere company rather than as a force for good in the world.
Podcast: “Booklife: The Private and the Public in Transmedia Storytelling and Self-Promotion”
What are the benefits and dangers of a confusion between the private creativity and the public career elements of a writer’s life caused by new media and a proliferation of “open channels”?
Video and podcast: “The Culture Beat and New Media: Arts Journalism in the Internet Era”
Newspapers and magazines are reducing their critical coverage of the arts, but the human appetite to evaluate culture, to debate reactions and opinions, remains as vibrant as ever.
