This is a critical overview of the emerging field of machinima the use of computer game engines to create movies.
Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey", released in 1968, is perhaps the most scientifically accurate film ever produced. The film presented such a plausible, realistic vision of space flight that many moon hoax proponents believe that Kubrick staged the 1969 moon landing usi…
The world is filling with ever more kinds of media, in ever more contexts and formats. Glowing rectangles have become part of the scene; screens, large and small, appear everywhere. Physical locations are increasingly tagged and digitally augmented. Sensors, processors, and memo…
From the Publisher: World of Warcraft is more than a game. There is no ultimate goal, no winning hard, no princess to be rescued. WoW contains more than 5,000 possible quests, games within the game, and encompasses hundreds of separate parallel realms (computer serves, each of w…
"In 2006, young people were flocking to MySpace, discovering the joys of watching videos of cute animals on YouTube, and playing online games. Not many of them were watching network news on television; they got most of their information online. So when NBC and MIT launched iCue,…
"How has the Internet, a medium that thrives on control, been accepted as a medium of freedom? Why is freedom increasingly indistinguishable from paranoid control? In Control and Freedom, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun explores the current political and technological coupling of freedom w…
The Nintendo Wii, introduced in 2006, helped usher in a moment of retro-reinvention in video game play. This hugely popular console system, codenamed Revolution during development, signaled a turn away from fully immersive, time-consuming MMORPGs or forty-hour FPS games and back…
An investigation of what makes digital games engaging to players and a reexamination of the concept of immersion. Digital games offer a vast range of engaging experiences, from the serene exploration of beautifully rendered landscapes to the deeply cognitive challenges presented…
"Why do we feel insulted or exasperated when our friends and family don't answer their mobile phones? If the Internet has allowed us to broaden our social world into a virtual friend-net, the mobile phone is an instrument of a more intimate social sphere. The mobile phone provid…
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that cycles of obsolescence & renewal result in part from the ways in which new media encapsulates a logic of programmability. In seeking to embody a future based on past data, new media becomes a metaphor for metaphor itself.
Government media making, from official websites to whistleblowers' e-mail, and its sometimes unintended consequences.
Tracing the cultural, material, and discursive history of an early manifestation of media culture in the making. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, huge circular panoramas presented their audiences with resplendent representations that ranged from historic battles to exot…
The first collection of writings on poetry that is composed, disseminated, and read on computers; essays and artist statements explore visually arresting, aurally charged, and dynamic works that are created by a synergy of human beings and intelligent mac.
In recent years, scholarship around media technologies has finally shed the assumption that these technologies are separate from and powerfully determining of social life, looking at them instead as produced by and embedded in distinct social, cultural, and political practices. …
This rich collection of writings by pioneering digital artist Mark Amerika mixes (and remixes) personal memoir, net art theory, fictional narrative, satirical reportage, scholarly history, and network-infused language art. META/DATA is a playful, improvisatory, multitrack "digit…
Movement and gesture are arguably essential aspects of engendering human experience. But rather than taking 'the body' or 'cognition' for granted as conceptual starting points, we attend to the substrate matter in which gesture takes shape and place. An experimental approach to …
"Today almost every aspect of life for which data exists can be rendered as a network. Financial data, social networks, biological ecologies: all are visualized in links and nodes, lines connecting dots. A network visualization of a corporate infrastructure could look remarkably…
The gameful world: approaches, issues, applications
What if every part of our everyday life was turned into a game? The implications of "gamification."
The dominant feature of modern technology is not how productive it makes us, or how it has revolutionized the workplace, but how enjoyable it is. We take pleasure in our devices, from smartphones to personal computers to televisions. Whole classes of leisure activities rely on t…
Review: "How do pervasive digital devices - smartphones, iPods, GPS navigation systems, and cameras, among others - influence the way we use spaces? In The Tuning of Place, Richard Coyne argues that these ubiquitous devices and the networks that support them become the means of …