[Image: Superstruct video] Resetting Theory — Empire@Play: Virtual Games and Global Capitalism by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, C-THEORY.NET:

Our argument, need we say, is not that “games make you kill,” in the sense asserted in moral panics about the play of “Doom” or “Grand Theft Auto”. It is that digital games are systemically incorporated in the war-fighting apparatus of Empire, in ways that render developers and players material partners in military technoculture, and Defense Departments’ systemic cullers of gamer subjectivities: this is what makes virtual play integral to “banal war,” the normalized state of perpetual conflict Empire’s global control demands.

Amidst the current convulsions, global capitalism has one consolation left for its increasingly desperate subjects: you may have lost your job (or will never be able to retire from it), you can’t afford to go out, but you can always stay home (if you still have one) and play a video game. Continue reading

Dorkbot Vienna: nOtbOt - Walter Langelaar (NL) :: May 3, 2009; 7:00 - 10:00 pm :: Metalab Vienna, Rathausstraße 6, 1010 Wien, Vienna, Austria.

nOtbOt is an automated game-player which is controlled and deranged by reactions to it’s own virtual environment, caught in a vicious force-feedback loop… The installation consists of a hacked up human-computer interface in which the feedback system, originally intended to provide tangible interaction for a human player, is now used as input data to control a ‘first-person’ videogame. Human interaction with the game/controller becomes obsolete, resulting in a completely erratic form of [art]ificial intelligence. The observer of the installation, however, can literally try to ‘get a grip’ on taking control of the system… Continue reading

Floating Points 6: Games of Culture | Art of Games — A Film Screening, Symposium and Workshops with Asi Burak, Anita Fontaine, Jesper Juul, Friedrich Kirschner, Marcin Ramocki, Jason Rohrer, Adriana de Souza Silva, Mushon Zer-Aviv :: March 20-21, 2009 :: Emerson College, Boston + streamed live on the web and in Second Life.

Video games extend beyond the gaming console into nearly every aspect of contemporary life. They are fun. They drive innovation, consumer engagement and employee productivity. Is our culture turning everything into a game? Continue reading

Cyberculture and New Media, edited by Francisco J. Ricardo, Amsterdam/ New York, NY 2009.

In the extension of digital media from optional means to central site of activity, the domains of language, art, learning, play, film, and politics have been subject to radical reconfigurations as mediating structures. This book examines how this changed relationship has in each case shaped a new form of discourse between self and culture and illustrates explicitly the character of mediated agency beyond the formal separateness from lived experience that was once conveniently termed the virtual and which has come to influence common assumptions about creative expression itself. Continue reading

Playable Media: A New Research Focus at UC Santa Cruz Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) MFA Program; under the direction of Noah Wardrip-Fruin :: Applications Due February 15 for Fall 2009 Admission.

UC Santa Cruz is pleased to announce an MFA for artists working with computer games, software toys, interactive fictions, rhetorical simulations, and related playable forms. The university’s Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) MFA program has added Playable Media as a research focus for its collaborative faculty-student projects. Applications to the DANM MFA program for Fall 2009 are being accepted through February 15, and are encouraged from the broad diversity of artists who create work that invites and structures play. Continue reading

Pervasive Games: Interfaces, Strategies and Moves by Thomas Dreher :: English :: German:

Pervasive Games: Interfaces, Strategies and Moves reviews the actual state of the discourse about the fundamentals of this kind of games. Terms like the “immersion“ and “magic circle“ are transferred from theories on computer games in nearly all articles on the subject. The transferences lead to contradictory arguments in the authors’ efforts to explain the relations between the play actions and the playing field. An ‘interface-model’ is proposed as an alternative to these contradictions. The ‘world-interface’ constitutes the bodily and cognitive access of the gamers to the world. The ‘game-interface’ constitute the participants’ ways to comprehend and to use the elements creating the game´s requirements: the rules and the technical equipment. Continue reading

Second Nature :: Issue #2: Mobile Gaming and Haptic Screen Cultures :: Call for Papers — Deadline: December 30, 2008.

This special issue of Second Nature journal aims to stimulate discussion, debate and research into the burgeoning area of mobile gaming, with a particular focus on extending discourses around “screen cultures” into the realm of the haptic. In particular, the issue seeks to counter the notion that our experience of screens (and digital media more generally), is largely “virtual” and disembodied — or at most exclusively audiovisual. From location aware gaming (using GPS) to casual games accessed on the mobile phone, the arena of mobile gaming is becoming increasingly widespread in contemporary culture, dynamically redefining perceptions of mobility, place, play and embodiment. Continue reading

Playground - Live Art Festival :: October 31 - November 7, 2008 :: STUK Artscentre, Naamsestraat 96, 3000 Leuven, Belgium.

For the second edition of Playground STUK once again focuses on artists exploring the boundaries between various art disciplines. This international live art festival presents performances, installations and live actions. Many of these performances are new productions, often produced in collaboration with other institutions. The program consists of two closely linked and overlapping parts: a series of performances and an exhibition.

The Playground exhibition brings together several installations and films that investigate the notion of play, movement, performance and theatricality. Continue reading

Northern Lights presents Experimenting with Art in Public Places :: October 10-11, 2008 :: Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Minneapolis, MN.

Experimenting with Art in Public Places is a symposium free and open to the public, presented by Northern Lights with the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, which will explore ways to support and present experimental art practices in public places, including in the virtual realm, outside the traditional white cubes and black boxes of cultural institutions. It brings together local and out-of-town artists, curators, producers, and presenters for a collaborative conversation about the public sphere as a site for works of art and art practices that spark the imagination but also challenge perceptions - artistic, cultural, social, political. Continue reading

Urban Space, Time to Play - “Urbanized Landscape” Shanghai eArts Festival 2008 International Workshop w/V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media :: October 19 - 22, 2008 :: No.395, Shilong Rd, Xuhui District, Shanghai :: Number of participants: 30.

The city is no longer a clearly localizable spatial unit, but has transformed into an “urban field”, a collection of activities instead of a material structure. V2_ presents a four-day workshop dedicated to DIY design of urban games, art activism and playful interventions organized in cooperation with the Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde and the German artist Aram Bartholl who lived for many years in Rotterdam. During the workshop the participants will conceptualize and develop two interactive games in urban space, which will be publicly presented at the end of the workshop. Continue reading