Eccentric Spaces and Filmic Traces: Portals in Aperture Science and NYC
co-authored by Stephanie Boluk
presented at DAC '09, December 12 - 15, 2009
published in the peer-reviewed DAC '09 Proceedings
This paper examines the way in which time and space are figured within a new genre of what we are calling "eccentric games" and a site-specific video sharing application called Trover by Dan Provost. Taking Valve's Portal as our case study, a chiasmatic relationship emerges between these different modes of eccentric media. In order to access eccentric space the video games we examine appropriate the logic of film whereas Provost's video application Trover is informed by an eccentric logic of games.
Pipe Bomb: Exploding Code in the Work of Jodi and René Magritte
presented at SLSA '09, November 5 - 8, 2009
runner-up for the Bruns Graduate Essay Prize presented by N. Katherine Hayles and judged by Eugene Thacker
This paper begins by examining some examples of visual works by both artists and theorists working through René Magritte. Ending the survey with Michel Foucault's brief work of art criticism, This is Not a Pipe (1971), this essay will attempt to carve out an interpretive zone in which to better understand the semiotic play at work between different orders of textuality in digital media production, specifically wwwwwwwww.jodi.org.
wwwwwwwww.jodi.org is a frequently discussed digital media artwork by Joan Heemskirk and Dirk Paysmens (collectively known as Jodi) in which meaning is produced specifically through the dynamic interplay between code and output. A large body of new media scholars have adopted a similar critical framework for reading Jodi's website. This essay picks up where Alan Sondheim, Peter Lunenfeld, John Cayley, McKenzie Wark, Alan Liu, and Chris Funkhouser each end his criticism of Jodi. Instead of reading narrative or ironic causality between code and output, I perform a kind of Foucauldian reading which emphasizes the disconnect between these two orders. Rather than reading various windows of a web browser sequentially in order to construct narrative frames, the linguistic signs and plastic elements collapse into simultaneous and, more importantly, discontinuous arrays.
Critical Expression
Set in contrast to traditional argumentation, Critical Expression suggests a third option within typical debate structure. Kant's Third Critique positions aesthetics between institutions of knowledge (science) and institutions of belief (faith.) Here I am searching for this aesthetic mode of knowing. The addition of a third voice hopes to lubricate abstract argument through practice and resist typical impasse between incompatible apparatuses.
However, the goal of the experiment is not to win or solve debate, but rather, to find energy &mdash an active force which motivates, propels one toward action. The experience of conatus is a pathway into the future. It is an active joy, an opening up or widening, which motivates action.
Using ethics, screenwriting, and visual linguistics to analyze a US public policy, a Hollywood film, and the English Discipline, the first part of Critical Expression, entitled My Guide, works to locate personal conatus through the parallelism invoked by Gregory Ulmer's CATTt Generator. The second part, entitled My Poem, further extrudes conatus from that specified location.
The Logic of Sensuality
This work of electronic writing attempts a close reading technique which promotes ethical viewership in response to Anna Kell's paintings. Working through both Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze's ethics, I map a pattern from Marcel Duchamp to Kell and produce an artwork (this essay) emblematic of my subject position.