Game | World | Architectonics

In its current digital, pictorial and viral ubiquity, architecture no longer has to be bodily present, but has a mediating role. As a medial hinge it folds different disciplines of media and art onto the realm of the everyday. Here, the idea of architectonics can be understood as the architectural implications of computer games in a broader sense to address the matter of architecture in game worlds as well as the architecture of computer games themselves. This anthology bundles transdisciplinary approaches around the topics of space, architecture, perception of and worldbuilding in computer games and their media-specific properties. The aim is to show how and under which aspects digital game worlds are constituted. The contributions depart from the beaten tracks of media and game studies, focusing on spatial, architectural and world-shaped phenomena within current digital media culture.In ihrer aktuellen digitalen, bildlichen wie auch viralen Ubiquität muss Architektur nicht mehr körperlich präsent sein und doch füllt sie eine vermittelnde Rolle aus. Als mediales Scharnier verschränkt sie unterschiedliche Disziplinen der Medien und Künste mit der Alltagswirklichkeit. Das Konzept der Architektonik umschreibt hierbei in weitem Sinne die architektonischen Implikationen der Computerspiele, um Architektur in Spielwelten als auch die Architektur der Computerspiele selbst greifbar zu machen. Dieser Sammelband bündelt transdisziplinäre Zugriffe rund um die Themen Raum, Architektur, Wahrnehmung von und Weltenbau in Computerspielen und deren medienspezifischen Eigenschaften. Ziel ist es aufzuzeigen, wie und unter welchen Aspekten sich digitale Spielwelten konstituieren. Die Beiträge verlassen dabei ausgetretene Pfade von Medienwissenschaft und Game Studies und fokussieren auf die räumlichen, architektonischen und weltförmigen Phänomene aktueller digitaler Medienkultur

VR Storytelling

The question of cinematic VR production has been on the table for several years. This is due to the peculiarity of VR language which, even if it is de ned by an image that surrounds and immerses the viewer rather than placing them, as in the classic cinematic situation, in front of a screen, relies decisively on an audiovisual basis that cannot help but refer to cinematic practices of constructing visual and auditory experience. Despite this, it would be extremely reductive to consider VR as the mere transposition of elements of cinematic language. The VR medium is endowed with its own speci city, which inevitably impacts its forms of narration. We thus need to investigate the narrative forms it uses that are probably related to cinematic language, and draw their strength from the same basis, drink from the same well, but develop according to di erent trajectories, thus displaying di erent links and a nities

Surveying Consumer Understanding & Sentiment Of VR

Since the resurgence of consumer-grade virtual reality (VR), VR has successfully established itself on the consumer market. As with any emerging technology, differences can exist between how industry / academia view the technology and how consumers perceive it. We present results from a survey (N=210) conducted into consumer perception and attitudes towards VR. We report sentiment towards VR is positive. We show the associations linked with VR by our respondents match the defining characteristics of VR identified by experts in the literature (a fully virtual view, immersion, and head-worn technology). We identify 3 additional concepts associated with VR by our respondents: video games, futurism, and price. However, our results also show consumer expectations for VR are fixated around "VR for gaming" and suggest VR has to an extent been pigeonholed as primarily being a gaming device

Displaced voices and accentscapes in French and Francophone Sub-Saharan cinema : recasting, reshaping, and restoring identity (-ies) in transnational films

This study features notions of identity, language, integration, journeys of home seeking and homecoming, and the wanderings of homelessness. It explores displaced voices and the self-coined term "accentscape" in ten films made by either established French film directors or less renowned and/or second-generation African immigrant film directors. Inspired by Arjun Appadurai's term ethnoscape, accentscape refers to how accents construct meaning and social identities for the films' exilic, diasporic, and postcolonial characters. I demonstrate the intervention of "accentscapes" by oral, vocal, and musical means, or in the film narratives as fragmented, emotive, and lyric structures. In relation to Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia, accentscapes appear in linguistic landscapes challenging Eurocentric perceptions of the exilic or diasporic communities in France in Nous, sans papiers de France (Nicolas Philibert et al., 1997), Paris Mon Paradis (Elenore Yameogo, 2011) and Le Point de Vue du Lion (Didier Awadi, 2011). Accentscapes intervene by calligraphic and pictographic means in Fatima (Philippe Faucon, 2015) and L'Esquive (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2004). Thirdly, as versions of Michel Foucault's heterotopia, accentscapes are the counter-spaces that the postcolonial protagonists in L'Esquive (Kechiche, 2004), Adama (Simon Rouby, 2015), and Qu'Allah Benisse la France! (Abd al Malik, 2015) create in France to replace their homelands. Finally, using Michel Chion's concept of sounds and voices that are left "wandering the surface of the screen," this study shows "accentscapes" in Fatima (Faucon, 2015) and Amin (Faucon, 2018) as "wandering" sounds emanating from an interstitial context and negotiating between two sources characterized by the seen and the unseen. [NEEDS DIACRITICS]Includes bibliographical reference

The Art of Adaptation in Film and Video Games

This Special Issue of Arts explores the art and practice of adaptation in several different mediums with a focus on film and video games. The topics covered include experimental game design, narrative design, film and trauma, games adapted from literature, video game cinema, film and the pandemic, film and the environment, film and immigration, and film and culture

Creation, Resistance, and Refacement: Postfuturist Storytelling, Cultural Flows, and the Remix

Constitutive of my dissertation is an exploration of contemporary literature and culture. Vital to my research is the notion and practice of the remix. Originating in music, it is perceived and deployed as a hybrid expressive mode combining textual, audio, and visual components. The text of the dissertation, accompanying photographs, and supplementary video files demonstrate this principal aspect. Focusing on the fusion of quest narratives and social activism, the dissertation looks at critical and creative vernaculars as forms of peaceful/peaceable resistance against multiple oppression. Reflecting some of the permeating modernist and postmodernist concerns, it emphasizes an understanding of postfuturist storytelling as cultural exchange in the intersection of the time axes. Reading the works of Stewart Home, Jeff Noon, and Kathy Acker, alongside critical insights of Terry Eagleton, Richard Rorty, Fredric Jameson, and McKenzie Wark, contextualizes contemporary idiosyncrasies historically, thereby rendering tradition remixable, rather than radically abandoning it. The remix investigates alternating cycles of noise and silence in the communication channel as a basis for the disambiguation of the misconception about the totality of discourse. The approach delineates vision of refacement: rebirth through subtonic solidarity of selfless, yet reindividualized, fellow humans engaged in enduring the hindrances to patient, persistent creation of a free culture based on love and trust

THE BODY (RE)PUBLIC: WOMEN ON/AS THE LANDSCAPE OF MODERNITY, FROM ZOLA’S AU BONHEUR DES DAMES TO VARDA’S CLÉO DE 5 À 7

This dissertation explores the ways in which questions of gender, space and mobility intersect in a selection of fin-de-siècle French novels and 1960s French New Wave films in an effort to discern how the representational interplay of these three elements gives allegorical form to the sociopolitical anxieties of the times in which the works were produced. Using the Paris Commune of 1871 and the protests of May ’68 as anchoring points for the two periodizations underlying my inquiry, I examine how women in the novels of Emile Zola (Au Bonheur des Dames, Nana) and Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (L’Ève future) and the films of Jean-Luc Godard (2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle), Agnès Varda (Cléo de 5 à 7) and Alain Resnais (Je t’aime, je t’aime) are subject to a complex representational framework which alternately figures, transfigures and disfigures them to embody surrounding anxieties. We encounter female characters in the works of Zola and Villiers who inhabit the extremes of this continuum, conjuring the images of two antithetical women-myths central to the mythology of the burgeoning Third Republic: Marianne (the mother-nation) and the pétroleuse (the revolutionary force of its destruction). Yet others, particularly the female protagonists of the films I analyze, elude such Manichean, ideologically charged representations, offering instead a more nuanced—indeed, ultimately indeterminate—and self-realized model of woman. In addition to exploring how these female protagonists subversively navigate between public and domestic space, and how they delimit, transgress and even embody milieux, I identify a parallel trend of male protagonists retreating, retiring, looking back: a reactionary mode with classist resonances that is coded as a kind of revolt against the shocks of modernity, a solitary form of (in)activism that anticipates/recalls the alienated dreamers of modernism, from Proust to Kafka, and bespeaks a broader crisis of masculinity. I conclude by a consideration of how these tropes and representational strategies have continued to be deployed in French films well beyond the ’68 era as elements of the tumultuous, alienating sociopolitical climate depicted by Zola, Godard et al have persisted to this day

The internet of ontological things: On symmetries between ubiquitous problems and their computational solutions in the age of smart objects

This dissertation is about an abstract form of computer network that has recently earned a new physical incarnation called “the Internet of Things.” It surveys the ontological transformations that have occurred over recent decades to the computational components of this network, objects—initially designed as abstract algorithmic agents in a source code of computer programming but now transplanted into real-world objects. Embodying the ideal of modularity, objects have provided computer programmers with more intuitive means to construct a software application with lots of simple and reusable functional building blocks. Their capability of being reassembled into many different networks for a variety of applications has also embodied another ideal of computing machines, namely general-purposiveness. In the algorithmic cultures of the past century, these objects existed as mere abstractions to help humans to understand electromagnetic signals that had infiltrated every corner of automatized spaces from private to public. As an instrumental means to domesticate these elusive signals into programmable architectures according to the goals imposed by professional programmers and amateur end-users, objects promised a universal language for any computable human activities. This utopian vision for the object-oriented domestication of the digital has had enough traction for the growth of the software industry as it has provided an alibi to hide another process of colonization occurring on the flipside of their interfacing between humans and machines: making programmable the highest number of online and offline human activities possible. A more recent media age, which this dissertation calls the age of the Internet of Things, refers to the second phase of this colonization of human cultures by the algorithmic objects, no longer trapped in the hard-wired circuit boards of personal computer, but now residing in real-life objects with new wireless communicability. Chapters of this dissertation examine each different computer application—a navigation system in a smart car, smart home, open-world video games, and neuro-prosthetics—as each particular case of this object-oriented redefinition of human cultures