About
76
Publications
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265
Citations
Introduction
digital culture and media history, secret communications and cultural memory, history & theory of gadgets, games and simulations
http://www.faculty.uci.edu//profile.cfm?faculty_id=5102
Current institution
Additional affiliations
March 2020 - March 2020
September 2019 - January 2020
Position
- Fellow
Description
- Senior Fellow, Institute of Advanced Study on Media Cultures of Computer Simulation (MECS)
April 2018 - April 2018
Education
January 1998 - December 2000
July 1994 - December 1997
August 1991 - July 1994
Publications
Publications (76)
No Comments Printer-Friendly Continuing (and concluding, as far as my Flow TV appearance goes) my concern with how industry forces directly shape the quality and availability of games in particular and game culture in general, I move on from the role of aggregators of criticism like Metacritic and GameRankings, and from real-money trade and seconda...
In the glitches, inefficiencies, and errors that ergonomics and usability engineering strive to surmount, this book identifies creative reservoirs of computer-mediated interaction. Throughout new media cultures, it traces a resistance to the heritage of motion studies, ergonomics, and efficiency; in doing so, it shows how creativity is stirred with...
Jacques Derrida interrogates the concept of communication as part of a campaign against logo-phonocentric tendencies in Western thought, deploying the concept of iterability to demonstrate that a hierarchy of presence over absence is untenable. His idea of deconstruction also became associated with digital media and the promise of computer-mediated...
https://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/43032
Essays discuss the terminology, etymology, and history of key terms, offering a foundation for critical historical studies of games.
Even as the field of game studies has flourished, critical historical studies of games have lagged behind other areas of research. Histories have generally been fact-by-fact chronicles; fundamental terms of game desig...
http://theconversation.com/will-more-dead-actors-be-coming-to-a-theater-near-you-39670
The Recreational Vehicle - emblem of the highway and of the outback, of affordable home-steading as well as unfettered exploration, of connection or escape. Motorhomes play an interesting role in the movies, and their history parallels the history of cinema. These homes on wheels allow projections of desires and distractions, exemplifying the affin...
No Comments Printer-Friendly Continuing (and concluding, as far as my Flow TV appearance goes) my concern with how industry forces directly shape the quality and availability of games in particular and game culture in general, I move on from the role of aggregators of criticism like Metacritic and GameRankings, and from real-money trade and seconda...
When it comes to the complex juxtapositions of literature and (other) media, it seems hard to avoid a sense of competition, from ekphrasis to hyperfiction. Despite all the well-intentioned and meticulously argued interventions at the intersections of older and newer narrative and interactive interfaces, there is always some jostling for position. I...
Kittler was among the first to invite Derrida to lectures in Germany, and to translate
Derrida’s texts into German. Yet a cursory tally in his references does not always do
justice to what Kittler’s media theory owes to deconstruction. Discourse Networks
credits Derrida with a mere ‘rediscovery’ of grammatology, although Wellbery’s foreword
labors...
Proposing different tuition for each University of California campus is shortsighted and ill-considered. The UC Commission on the Future considered the possibility and its potential consequences in 2010 and decided that it was an unwise course of action for a state the size of California. Both population demand and economic proportion make comparis...
Economics and intellectual culture—a timely topic, surely. In the humanities today, money is not everything—it is the only thing, apparently, as budget cuts hit higher education across the United States. Instead of understanding internationally competitive education as an investment into this country's future, politicians abandon long-term planning...
Since media technologies cross time and space with increasing alacrity, the specific titular promise of this volume needs to be unpacked. In English, one calls time-critical an operation that copes with a great amount of data in short order, for instance by compression or encoding, and generally with the aid of computing. Computers provide tools fo...
Chair of the Assembly and the Academic Council Telephone: (510) 987-0711 Faculty Representative to the Board of Regents Fax: Dear Colleagues: I enclose, for your consideration, the "Choices Report," authored by the Academic Senate's University Committee on Planning and Budget (UCPB). The report builds on UCPB's previous well-received "Cuts" and "Fu...
What if research and development in the last decades of the 20th century had emphasized not immersive graphics and virtual worlds, but put the equivalent processing power at the service of narrative structures, plots and genres? What if popular cultural interfaces had congealed not around twitchy buttons and ergonomic controls, but instead had emph...
This chapter considers the argument about creative expression under the conditions of computer games, with particular emphasis on glitches in the human-computer interfaces that come to the fore in gaming. Computing culture is predicated on communication and control to an extent that can obscure the domain of the error. Whether one sees the graphic...
The inaccessibility of the North and South Pole makes them a crucible for persistent questions of access and data visualization that characterize the information age. Arctic and Antarctic have become increasingly topical in popular cinema as well as in media arts. As representations of polar regions grapple with the fictions that mark representatio...
Maschinelle Systeme öffnen neue Perspektiven nicht nur für die Präsentation, sondern auch für die Produktion von Sinnzusammenhängen. Akzeptiert man dies, so mag die Annahme, Literatur sei die höchste Form dessen, was ein Mensch mit Sprache tun kann, ins Wanken geraten: doch einen Turing-Test für Literatur gibt es nicht. Trotz Kittlers Spott, seit d...
The sheer inaccessibility of the North and South Pole makes them a crucible for the persistent questions of access and data visualization that characterize the information age. As Robinson's novel Antarctica (1998) grapples with fictions that characterize representations of science, his South Pole exhibits what Jameson calls the properly utopian st...
Seit Diderot gilt als interessant das, was sich den Vorerwartungen entzieht. Dieser Begriff des Interessanten eröffnet eine Geschichte der Unberechenbarkeit, des Unvorhersehbaren, des Unmöglichen. Das Bestreben der Geisteswissenschaften um ein Denken, das nicht kalkulierbar ist, sondern die Erfahrung des Unmöglichen erlaubt, hält fest an den besond...
»Abwehr« ist gegenwärtig ein Schlagwort mit Konjunktur. Nicht nur politisch stellt sich die Frage, was eigentlich abgewehrt und was verteidigt wird - und welche unterschiedlichen Optionen hierfür existieren. Der Band widmet sich daher dem Begriff in der Breite seiner Bedeutungen und Kontexte: als militärische Defensivtaktik, als sicherheitspolitisc...
Cultural Critique 60 (2005) 245-258
The case of Max Brod versus Franz Kafka has been closed for a good while, and the verdict passed in the late twenties of the past century is only vaguely remembered: a kind of acquittal on the grounds of a guilty verdict. A mediocre but highly productive writer and journalist had been stricken, as it were, with t...
Given the remarkable consistency in Jacques Derrida's work over several decades, it is not hard to draw a line from “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’” to his last seminars, on pardon and forgiveness. The aporias of forgiveness are analogous to those of the gift and of justice he had analyzed in detail in previous decades, as Der...
Property law codiWes the claims of economic life: custody or control of things, freedom of industry and contract, claims to promised advantages, and claims to be insured against interference. Civilized society is expected to secure your control of your labor, your discov-ery, your acquisition. On the other hand, Roman jurists had already recognized...
The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.3 (2002) 589-607
Gift and duel go unto death.
—Jacques Derrida, Signéponge/Signsponge
Global mass media focus increasingly on the notion of witnessing an event from a distance, and thus on surviving it, be it a violent confrontation or a meteorological danger. These events are repeated relentlessly, always presented...
Medium Cool is an international research collaboration that includes Australian, American, German & English scholars addressing the topic of the media, or medium. Today the question of the medium is almost totally subsumed within discussions of the mass media. In this context, it is always regarded as plural. The fact that the mass media constitute...
With the evolution of the ''new media,'' the question of a specific epistemic place of the media has undeniably gained in urgency for the history of the discipline. 1 But it was only the ubiquity of computers in almost every area of society that made it possible to talk about an inclusive ''universal medium'' that could inte-grate all media in one...
The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.3 (2002) 609-623
It might seem self-evident that literary studies and philology provide the experts when it comes to questions of media; when it comes to the questions of communication—who else? Where else is relevant historical knowledge collected and assembled in an appropriately compact form? So we might think; s...
Zusammenfassung
Die literaturtheoretische Aneignung von Hypertext oszilliert zwischen dem Schock, der Literatur unter den Bedingungen des Computers als etwas radikal Neues empfindet, und der utopischen Hoffnung, eine geschichtliche Vollendung der Medien zu erkennen. Die entsprechenden Konsequenzen, Texte entweder so zu lesen, als seien sie bereits...
