A Synergistic Symposium for the Cybernetic Age
HASTAC’s mission is to promote expansive models for thinking, teaching, and research. http://www.hastac.org/
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This week I've been reading in Platform Studies, focusing on "Racing the Beam" by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost. Their work has inspired a whole host of conversations with the programmers at my office, my husband and my friends, most of whom are Generation Xers like myself; raised on Pong, Centipede, Asteroids and Pac-Man. I used this week as an opportunity to not only revisit the games of my youth, but to also compare them with the latest and greatest gaming addictions in our house, the PSP and the Wii.
>verbose
>maximum verbosity.
The platform has been around for as long as computing, and computer gaming, has existed, underneath, and underpinning, our video games, digital art, electronic literature, and other forms of expressive computing. Digital media researchers are starting to see that code is a way to learn more about how computers are used in culture, but there have been few attempts to go even deeper, to investigate the basic hardware and software systems upon which programming takes place, that are the foundation for computational expression and that define our interaction in digital contexts...
Doing some reading over the past week, I was prompted to think about, then comment on, a chapter by Friedrich Kittler on Cold War computing technology and the implicit (and explicit) ways in which an examination of so-called "defense technology" comes into direct contact with, and within the purview of, media studies, information studies and labor studies. Specifically, I am interested in uncovering the history of these technologies and their development, particularly when the when many defense technologies have been considered value-neutral or even as beneficial (and perhaps were, particularly when they moved from the province of military applications to consumer or mass-market ones). Additionally, the process of uncovering the hidden labor embedded in digital and computing technologies and processes, is inextricalbly tied to the critically important task of uncovering their hidden agendas, applications and roots within the military-academic-industrial complex...
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Posted by Mechelle De Craene on January 26, 2010 at 8:00pm

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