Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) is an interdisciplinary centre for research/ creation in game studies and design, digital culture and interactive art
So I finally got to spend a good solid eight hours or so with the HTC Vive at home. My fieldnotes are flowing and that is a good thing and while I have not yet caught up on the literature and commentary on our current VR moment I thought I would sketch a few tension points, which may be old tension points, but they are good tension points. Low hanging fruit first.
1. The first thing …
Due to a confluence of fortuitous events we declare a spontaneous mini-symposium/happening that I will call, “adventures in algorithmic culture” or “what happens when the machines want to play too?”. This event features speakers Nicolas Nova, Ben Samuel, James Ryan and Jonathan Lessard in an all out tussle of research-creation, intellectual curiosity and edginess.
Drop everything and we’ll see you:
Tuesday, March 21, 2:00-5:00 PM
Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology
EV Building, Resource Room 11.705
Concordia University SGW, 1515 …
I ordered an Amazon Echo for the Milieux nerve centre. For a while I have been dancing around projects, presentations, and tinkerish writing on non-human and machine agencies in contexts of play and as fond as I am about thinking about video games, consumer robots and toys, this hype cycle around “intelligent personal assistants (IPAs)” like Alexa, Siri, and Cortana is intriguing. Right now, it’s a think-thing but I’d welcome projects that could push this …
Advanced Arduino workshop with Massimo Banzi in Montreal on Sept 29
We are extremely thrilled to announce that Massimo Banzi, interaction designer and co-founder of the Arduino Project, will be our guest at the Milieux Institute at Concordia University in Montreal on September 29th from 1-4pm at the Technoculture, Art and Games research Centre in EV 11.435 (see https://tag.hexagram.ca/contact-tag for a map)
As part of his visit, Massimo will lead a hands-on Arduino workshop for makers and …
I am also doing the No Man’s Sky thing. I’ve only been at it for a week now. I’ve been to about 14 planets in 4 star systems, and catalogued and uploaded an huge amount of flora, fauna and alien waypoints. I have pulled in over $2million mostly from mining huge deposits of gold and emeril in a space pirate infested system and have finally traded in my starter clunker of a ship for a …
This commentary piece by Emma Vossen at First Person Scholar is excellent. Her SSHRC video is also right on the mark. It’s a brave reflection on graduate student precarity, academic responsibility and the idea of middle-state publication. That Emma is doing this in the context of game studies and in the spirit of inclusiveness and positive change is even better. I am a faculty member. I read it… and I want to honour the valuable …