Archivi tag: literature
paolo ruffino: “future gaming. creative interventions in video game culture”
Sandro Ricaldone
PAOLO RUFFINO
Future Gaming
Creative Interventions in Video Game Culture
Goldsmith Press, 2018
This book is not about the future of video games. It is not an attempt to predict the moods of the market, the changing profile of gamers, the benevolence or malevolence of the medium. This book is about those predictions. It is about the ways in which the past, present, and future notions of games are narrated and negotiated by a small group of producers, journalists, and gamers, and about how invested these narrators are in telling the story of tomorrow.
This new title from Goldsmiths Press by Paolo Ruffino suggests the story could be told another way. Considering game culture, from the gamification of self-improvement to GamerGate’s sexism and violence, Ruffino lays out an alternative, creative mode of thinking about the medium: a sophisticated critical take that blurs the distinctions among studying, playing, making, and living with video games. Offering a series of stories that provide alternative narratives of digital gaming, Ruffino aims to encourage all of us who study and play (with) games to raise ethical questions, both about our own role in shaping the objects of research, and about our involvement in the discourses we produce as gamers and scholars. For researchers and students seeking a fresh approach to game studies, and for anyone with an interest in breaking open the current locked-box discourse, Future Gaming offers a radical lens with which to view the future.
william burroughs interviewed by kathy acker (1988)
post “esiste la ricerca?” (la ricerca esiste)
L’incontro del 16 giugno allo Studio Campo Boario, ESISTE LA RICERCA?, è stato – a detta di chi ha assistito – un effettivo successo. Si può dire come presa d’atto, senza alzare la voce. Interventi densi e carichi di suggerimenti. Sala piena, a tratti assai piena, con picchi di una cinquantina di persone.
Alla fine, un po’ prima delle 20, il pubblico ha affollato la sala grande dello Studio, dove c’erano banchetti e banconi di libri. E le vendite, i dialoghi e gli scambi sono andati decisamente bene.
Chi vuole può continuare a seguire la pagina dell’evento, dove per qualche tempo ancora segnalerò materiali e link.
Altro modo per rimanere aggiornati sui passi e passaggi della ricerca letteraria, è visitare gli spazi web degli editori che erano e sono coinvolti nell’incontro, tra cui Tic, IkonaLìber, Diaforia, Blonk, il verri, oltre a consultare i materiali del folder pubblico che di volta in volta potrà essere aggiornato. E logicamente seguire https://gammm.org e slowforward.
Restate connessi, in pentola bolle molto altro
MG
charles bernstein: “content’s dream”
A digital edition (pdf) of Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984, by Charles Bernstein, has just been made available by Douglas Messerli, working with Pablo Capra, for Green Integer. Sun & Moon Press published this near 500-page collection thirty-five years ago (in 1986). Northwestern republished it, but that edition is out of print. The book is on line as a pdf, for a nominal charge, which will help support this great independent press. Get it at —>
https://www.greeninteger.com/book-digital.cfm?–&BookID=437
cover by Susan Bee
glitch and outstitution
Differx has not disappeared. On the contrary, it wants to go on trying to study and use the margins and the ever-expanding core of the glitch(ed) art, literature, language, sound; and make the pathologies of the Western logos grow. This is the reason why it launches the trans-cultural word “OUTSTITUTION”: to focus on what this will (maybe) mean.
Let’s wiki: the word “institution” comes from Middle English “institucioun”, from Old French “institution”, from Latin “institūtiō”, from “instituō” (“to set up”), from “in-” (“in, on”) + “statuō” (“to set up, establish”). So my intent —and the aim of differx as a site— is clear:
OUT OF THE INSTITUTION.
Any kind of cultural, literary, artistic initiative is constantly under the control of the authorities through bureaucracy. Any meeting, independent structure, event, must necessarily interact with the corruption and the surrounding wall of the “city”. Perhaps the word corruption is not right. In cities like Rome the dark side of the Middle Ages has never been affected by anything. It never ended. The families who actually own the territory also rule the game. It seems a bad & kitsch distopian conspiracy remark but the sad truth is that —at least in Rome— the nobles and the high clergy are still the backbone of power today, with la haute et la grossière bourgeoisie.
So a policy of temporary autonomous zones is still the only way to play outside the chessboard. (Which hosts only kings and queens).
Ideas for and in and outside Rome are welcome.
algorithmic poetry: speculative imagination, machine learning, code studies
da Rhizome
https://rhizome.org/community/50921/ :
How do we integrate machine learning algorithms into our poetic practice?
/ Five-week Live* Online class begins 26 April, ends 24 May
/ Every Monday, 8pm-10pm, CET
/ Small class of participants
Course Description
The class aims to merge three different universes: code, literature, and machine learning. We will descend into this Bermuda Triangle of disciplines with a poetic, speculative, and conceptual approach, as well as a technical perspective.
What is the difference between writing with code and writing with text? Is code a new material? What is electronic literature and code poetry? How far the-rabbit-hole can computers take us?
At the beginning of our voyage, we will gain a poetic perspective on how to write code by submerging ourselves into the technical and speculative aspects of creative programming. We will then explore the conceptual cornerstones to think about lite rary texts as perception distorting machines. And finally, we will dwell into the dark territory of pre-trained Machine Learning models to enhance our imagination and generate new forms of writing textual organisms.
In summary, this poetic interpretation of computational logic in creative coding and machine learning will allow us to review concepts and engage with tools to convey new meanings to our writing experiences.
In this course, you will be introduced to: Continua a leggere
modernism in venice: “killing the moonlight”, by jennifer scappettone
As a city that seems to float between Europe and Asia, removed by a lagoon from the tempos of terra firma, Venice has long seduced the Western imagination. Since the 1797 fall of the Venetian Republic, fantasies about the sinking city have engendered an elaborate series of romantic clichés, provoking modern artists and intellectuals to construct conflicting responses: some embrace the resistance to modernity manifest in Venice’s labyrinthine premodern form and temporality, while others aspire to modernize by “killing the moonlight” of Venice, in the Futurists’ notorious phrase.
Spanning the history of literature, art, and architecture—from John Ruskin, Henry James, and Ezra Pound to Manfredo Tafuri, Italo Calvino, Jeanette Winterson, and Robert Coover—Killing the Moonlight tracks the pressures that modernity has placed on the legacy of romantic Venice, and the distinctive strains of aesthetic invention that resulted from the clash. Whether seduced or repulsed by literary clichés of Venetian decadence, post-Romantic artists found a motive for innovation in Venice. In Venetian incarnations of modernism, the anachronistic urban fabric and vestigial sentiment that both the nation-state of Italy and the historical avant-garde would cast off become incompletely assimilated parts of the new.
Killing the Moonlight brings Venice into the geography of modernity as a living city rather than a metaphor for death, and presents the archipelago as a crucible for those seeking to define and transgress the conceptual limits of modernism. In strategic detours from the capitals of modernity, Scappettone charts an elusive “extraterritorial” modernism that compels us to redraft the confines of modernist culture in both geographical and historical terms.
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-16432-0/killing-the-moonlight
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