Boring lizards:Ludic management, affect and ambivalence

This article utilises Game Studies, Animal Studies and Affect Studies approaches to explore how videogame adaptation Jurassic World: Evolution (Frontier 2018) mediates Jurassic World’s (2015) themes of captivity, anxiety and boredom in a time of routinised risk and perpetual crisis management (Bhattacharyya 2015; Beck 1992). Critically, the game has been denigrated as boring and repetitious (Stapleton 2018; Freeman 2018); dinosaurs sleep more than fight; and players balance variables to meet minimum thresholds of dinosaur contentment and their own enjoyment. If the film’s hybrid dinosaur signals the increasing banality of ‘terrible lizards,’ I argue that Evolution explores boredom systemically through simulations of banal park maintenance where the speculative animal might ‘respond’ to the player through shared affects and constraints. As W.J.T. Mitchell asks of the dinosaur’s ambivalent meanings of power and extinction, “Are we to scream or to yawn?” (1998:69). This is not a break with games of exploitation and manipulation of the animal, but rather an articulation of our complicity and enmeshment in loops of captivity that embrace human and animal but neither completely. Unable to see the animal itself, filled with tantalising contradictions and distance, we instead become-bored-with the animal

Material memory: the work of late Sickert 1927-42

This thesis argues that late Sickert was as significant and complex as the Sickert of Camden Town, and explores the richness of the historically specific ways a major British artist’s hitherto neglected corpus functioned. In particular, I investigate the mediation of time and material memory in Sickert's paintings of 1927-42. These works mix responses to contemporary press photography with Victorian imagery from a century earlier at a time when both were loaded with problematic political and cultural meanings. Late Sickert appropriated both past and contemporary mass culture, but I stress the importance of the material conversion of memory. The thesis argues that in his work 'time' is played with in various material ways – from speed to delay and from the time of historiography to the time of painting itself. Spectacle and remembrance were critically negotiated in the space where the materiality of paint meets the different temporal qualities of its source images. These paintings used the material thingness of paint to reflect sceptically on narratives of Englishness in the 1930s