Archive (Page 2 of 3)

Lexa Walsh: …Which By Their Very Utterance…
Amendment I: Freedom of Religion, Speech, Press, Assembly, Petition

I decid­ed to go to grad­u­ate school and got an MFA in art and social prac­tice. And came out with a way to col­lec­tive­ly describe my prac­tice, which is hos­pitable democ­ra­cy.” And I call it a plat­form for mul­ti­ple voic­es across pow­er struc­tures for peo­ple and objects.”

Latoya Peterson and Cherisse Datu: Contempt
Amendment IV: Unreasonable Search and Seizure, Warrants, Probable Cause

The name Contempt” came from this idea of all the emotions—especially from the death of Breonna Taylor—a lot of the con­tempt we felt for how the sit­u­a­tion was being treat­ed; con­tempt of the law, which many peo­ple of col­or are accused of; and just gen­er­al­ly we decid­ed that this project would be our own way of cop­ing with the trau­ma of that time and what does it means to be American, what does it mean to be a per­son of color. 

Spring 2021 #OSSTA Lecture: Nathalie Lawhead

If you do any­thing gen­er­a­tive on com­put­ers and don’t know what to do with what­ev­er you just made, turn­ing that into a lit­tle tool that peo­ple can use to do stuff like tweak val­ues, play around with some visu­als, and just export what­ev­er they make goes a long way. Coming from more of a game design angle, it’s easy to over­think inter­ac­tiv­i­ty and want to build on the sys­tems in ways that get real­ly com­pli­cat­ed. If you look at tool design, often the oppo­site mind­set is the most rewarding.

In Praise of Discomfort

For an expe­ri­ence to be mem­o­rable let alone trans­for­ma­tive, the human brain has to be pushed out of default auto-pilot mode into con­scious thought. And that push nec­es­sar­i­ly involves some lev­el of discomfort.

Four Myths of Women and Online Gaming

I’m a pro­fes­sor here in com­par­a­tive media stud­ies and I’m codi­rec­tor of an orga­ni­za­tion called AnyKey which I’ll tell you a lit­tle bit about today. We launched 2016 with the help of Intel and ESL. We’re an orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cat­ed to fair­ness, equi­ty, and inclu­siv­i­ty in gam­ing and in par­tic­u­lar esports.

Alternate Futures

The unre­lent­ing pace of tech­nolo­gies is deeply iron­ic, giv­en the orig­i­nal intent of them to make our lives more effi­cient and give us more time. But we can all attest that the actu­al effect of this esca­la­tion of effi­cien­cy has been to increase the pace of work and play in our worlds.

Gay Science

How do we make gay worlds in video games? Well, I can tell you how not to make a gay world. You should not rely on the AAA game indus­try to pity you and leave you some table scraps. I’m tired of being 0.1% of a world, right. Why isn’t Dragon Age 100% gay sex, right?

Critical Computing
Using Computers for Social Awareness and Empowerment

In the real world we can cre­ative­ly rep­re­sent our­selves in dynam­ic ways. So, we can vary our ges­ture, our dis­course, our pos­ture, our fash­ion, life sto­ries, the way we tell our sto­ries. And all of this is with an astound­ing sen­si­tiv­i­ty to social con­text. Computer tech­nolo­gies like com­put­er games, social net­work­ing, and vir­tu­al worlds are much more prim­i­tive than what we do in the real world.

A Network of Sorrows: Small Adversaries and Small Allies

In an envi­ron­ment where every­body can pick up every­body’s tools, we’re all weird­ly empow­ered now. And I mean kind of weird in an almost fey sense like, our pow­ers are weird, they make us weird, and they make our our con­flicts weird. It’s again that idea that our tools are inter­act­ing with our human flaws in real­ly real­ly inter­est­ing ways.

Making/Meaning in the Realm of Anti-Disciplinarity

What does it mean to be antidis­ci­pli­nary? To me, it means strug­gle. Sometimes, work­ing in inter­dis­ci­pli­nary fields, I felt like I’ve maybe tried real­ly hard work­ing and work­ing and work­ing on a project, and I was­n’t see­ing any dif­fer­ence. Sometimes peo­ple would look at me and be like, What are you even doing?” So, to me antidis­ci­pli­nar­i­ty means not only not work­ing in one spe­cif­ic field, but rather instead draw­ing from else­where to imag­ine some­thing new.