You are browsing the archive for February 2009.
In this month’s Journal of Virtual World Research, Tom Boellstorff, author of the much-praised Coming of age in Second Life: An anthropologist explores the virtually human, makes an important observation about theories of culture in virtual worlds. To concretize my concerns, it will prove helpful to consider the example of some recent work of the [...]
It’s one thing to give a TED talk, and quite another to conduct further research during the very TED talk you’re giving. In a recent, thought-provoking post, Jan Chipchase, the well-known Nokia design anthropologist, confessed to just how disingenuous he found the applause that greeted him two years earlier. You might think that such an [...]
In his September 2008 keynote address for the Networks of Design meeting of the Design History Society, Bruno Latour described, with typical circumspection, the implications of the on-going expansion of design. The sheer range of things now subject to it — objects, cities, and everything in between — shows just how momentous, and total, this [...]
From all that’s written on the military and virtual reality, you might think that the equipment and apparatus we have come to associate with VR are exclusively military inventions, when, in fact, artists have played a much more profound role than traditionally credited. As Margot Lovejoy put it in her 2004 Digital Currents: Art in [...]
It’s not too often that you see a Baudrillard-influenced paper published in a legal journal, but perhaps our time calls for it. Money, no doubt, has never seemed so abstract, imaginary, and, yet, hard to come by. The abstract to John J. Chung’s timely “Money as Simulacrum: The Legal Nature and Reality of Money” explains: [...]
In a post on Robert Fisk’s recent talk on Obama, Palestine, and the Middle East, Maximilian Forte picks-up on the widening gap between the neo-luddite old guard left and the emerging tech-savvy leftist blogger-journalist. I’ve always been a fan of Fisk — he’s one of only a few able to describe the Palestine-Israel conflict accurately [...]
Setting-off a deliciously entertaining exchange between the infinitely pompous Alain de Botton and Nina of Infinite ThØught, in February 18 post, she wrote, with inspiration, before being forced to remove (and eventually re-publish) her post: Occasionally I have to get people to review books like this. Now I don’t know about you, but I find [...]
Thanks to a post by Chris Cagle of Category D, we now know we have one week left to submit a paper proposal for the Quotation, Sampling, and Appropriation in Audiovisual Production panel, which will “address film and other media’s formal strategies of quotation, appropriation, sampling, version, remixing, etc. as methods of critique.” 250-word proposals [...]
In a post praising Flicker Alley’s continual release of otherwise unavailable films, Kristin Thompson reminds us that Abel Gance’s 1922 epic, La roue, long overdue on DVD, was released last year. Though Gance is most well-known for his Napoleon, La roue is often thought of as his greatest picture. A case in point is the [...]
In an article entitled “Looking Differently at ADHD,” Julie Hail Flory reframes so-called attention deficit in terms of “memory retrieval”, or the “failure of active maintenance.” It happens to us all – you walk to the refrigerator, open the door, then stand there, unable to remember why you went to the kitchen in the first [...]
Documents & Studies