Abstract: This article sketches a genealogy and typology of the split screen in mainstream film, identifying three distinct phases in the integration of this device since the 1950s, each relating to broader cultural shifts ushered in by media advances and transitions: telephone in the 1950s, television in the 1960s and 1970s, and the computer since the 1990s. I argue that the emphasis upon fragmented and multiplied display relates largely to the cinema’s demonstrated capacity for negotiating the meaning and significance of media change to a wider audience. Through its variegated split screens, the cinema functions as a guide to and user manual of the dangers and possibilities of technological transformation. Continue Reading »

Abstract: Douglas Brown’s Rez: An Evolving Analysis dives into Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s ‘trance shooter’ to reveal how the game’s recursive dynamics – between sight and sound, rhythm and novelty, abstraction and representation – work to construct the player’s spatial and temporal experience.

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Abstract: As a way of envisioning futuristically appropriate player experiences, this paper speculates on the emergence of participatory virtual environments as a metamaterial phenomena resulting from the confluence of aleatory, tribal playspaces and human-computer interaction (HCI). Using a set of revolutionary influences from 1960s, namely Thomas Kuhn, Marshall McLuhan, Victor Turner, and John Cage, the stage is set for virtual playspaces and postulations are made about the ability of these influences to affect theatre’s core axioms. Reflections are made on the resistance that might occur, notably in the form of audience reticence, and requisite conditions are laid out for the emergence of a new paradigm in the landscape of theatre.

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Abstract: In this exploratory essay the author describes the shared context of Sculptor turned Games Designer Keita Takahashi, best known for his PS2 title Katamari Damacy, and superstar contemporary artist Takashi Murakami. The author argues that Takahashi’s videogame is an expression of the technical, aesthetic and cultural values Murakami describes as SuperFlat, and as such expresses continuity between the popular culture and contemporary art of two of Japan’s best-known international creative practitioners.

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Abstract: Exploring the notion of the literary imagination, Holly Wills examines how several major works of videogame art invite the viewer/participant to imagine the world differently through their deployment of gamic tropes. Relations open up and expand under some aesthetic conditions; contract and distort under others. Wills offers a compelling trajectory of aesthetic concern over digitality itself, the site of a persistent anxiety of being which underscores the artists surveyed.

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Abstract: Eugénie Shinkle’s piece Digital Games and the Anamorphic Subject reassesses the visual lineages that prefigure contemporary gaming forms. Games, in the process of locating gamers in space, draw on the tradition of anamorphic art exemplified by Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Recasting the regimes of vision and attention in these terms facilitates new insights into gaming subjectivity.

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Abstract:In Santo, el Enmascarado de Plata Álvaron A. Fernández Reyes notes that within the immense cultural productions of modern Mexico, the ritual and myths that revolve around the heroic figure of Santo, are peculiarly diverse, embodying the creation of new traditions and the recuperation of old ones. Continue Reading »

I existed independently of time and matter, I felt myself departing from my body as I imagined a spirit would depart -emanating into the cockpit, extending through the fuselage as though no frame of fabric walls were there, angling upward, outward, until I reformed in an awareness far distant from the human form I left in a fast-flying transatlantic plane. But I remained connected to my body through a long extended strand, a strand so tenuous that it could have been severed by a breath.
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