The Malthusian Paradox: performance in an alternate reality game

The Malthusian Paradox is a transmedia alternate reality game (ARG) created by artists Dominic Shaw and Adam Sporne played by 300 participants over three months. We explore the design of the game, which cast players as agents of a radical organisation attempting to uncover the truth behind a kidnapping and a sinister biotech corporation, and highlight how it redefined performative frames by blurring conventional performer and spectator roles in sometimes discomforting ways. Players participated in the game via a broad spectrum of interaction channels, including performative group spectacles and 1-to-1 engagements with game characters in public settings, making use of low- and high-tech physical and online artefacts including bespoke and third party websites. Players and game characters communicated via telephony and social media in both a designed and an ad-hoc manner. We reflect on the production and orchestration of the game, including the dynamic nature of the strong episodic narrative driven by professionally produced short films that attempted to respond to the actions of players; and the difficulty of designing for engagement across hybrid and temporally expansive performance space. We suggest that an ARG whose boundaries are necessarily unclear affords rich and emergent, but potentially unsanctioned and uncontrolled, opportunities for interactive performance, which raises significant challenges for design

Multi-jurisdictional investigation of interactive fountain-associated cryptosporidiosis and salmonellosis outbreaks

Interactive water fountains are established sources of gastrointestinal infections yet most health codes fail to regulate their design and operation. This report describes multi-agency, concurrent interactive fountain-associated cryptosporidiosis and salmonellosis outbreak investigations and highlights the need for the adoption of appropriate regulations for interactive fountains

Rewriting history: the information age and the knowable past

Does history any longer have meaning in the information age? Baudrillard has described history as ‘our lost referential, that is to say our myth’. History seems to slip away in the precession of simulacra accompanying mass media and digital computing: ever-present if inauthentic versions of the past overwhelm any sense of historical continuity. Arguably we live in an era of timeless time, or time without chronology in which the very patterns of our daily lives are disrupted. Some theorists suggest we have reached the end of history; others that real historical research is no longer either possible or desirable. In the ephemeral spaces of the information society history apparently lacks purchase. As an emerging discipline, information history must take seriously the proposition that information itself possesses historical agency. It must develop ways of understanding the past that address both ‘information as a central theme’ and its ‘impact upon existing historical theses’. This chapter argues that structural transformations in the production and consumption of information accompanying the transition to the information society require us to rethink both the nature of history and our relationship with the past. They do so because of the tendency of mass media and digital computing to undermine the ontological stability that writing was assumed to possess in the modern age. A subtle complicity exists between writing and history. In unpicking that complicity we might uncover new kinds of previously marginalized historicity