We’re All Infected: Legal Personhood, Bare Life and The Walking Dead

This article argues that greater theoretical attention should be paid to the figure of the zombie in the fields of law, cultural studies and philosophy. Using The Walking Dead as a point of critical departure concepts of legal personhood are interrogated in relation to permanent vegetative states, bare life and the notion of the third person. Ultimately, the paper recommends a rejection of personhood; instead favouring a legal and philosophical engagement with humanity and embodiment. Personhood, it is suggested, creates a barrier in law allowing individuals in certain contexts (and in certain embodied states) to be rendered non-persons and thus outside the scope of legal rights. An approach that rejects personhood in favour of embodiment would allow individuals to enjoy their rights without being subject to such discrimination. It is also suggested that the concept of the human, itself complicated by the figure of the zombie, allows for legal engagement with a greater number of putative rights claimants including admixed embryos, cyborgs and the zombie

Seriality, the Literary and Database in Homestar Runner: Some Old Issues in New Media

At the intersection between concepts of the literary and emergent forms of database aesthetics lies a contemporary model for theorizing serial production. This paper investigates the underexamined concept of seriality and the way it has been reconfigured in digital media. Using Homestar Runner as the central case study, I provide a survey of these issues surrounding the literary, database and seriality and the way they figure in this Flash website. I will then trace the propensity of electronic literature for what has been described as a technologically conditioned melancholia and relate this to the serial constructs within Homestar Runner

Seriality, the Literary and Database in Homestar Runner: Some Old Issues in New Media

At the intersection between concepts of the literary and emergent forms of database aesthetics lies a contemporary model for theorizing serial production. This paper investigates the underexamined concept of seriality and the way it has been reconfigured in digital media. Using Homestar Runner as the central case study, I provide a survey of these issues surrounding the literary, database and seriality and the way they figure in this Flash website. I will then trace the propensity of electronic literature for what has been described as a technologically conditioned melancholia and relate this to the serial constructs within Homestar Runner

The voyager and the visionary : the self as history in Palestine and Louis Riel

Joe Sacco and Chester Brown are two artists who emerged out of a vibrant tradition of autobiographical comics in the eighties and nineties. This paper argues that Sacco's Palestine and Brown's Louis Riel announce a new way of writing the self rejuvenating the autobiographical genre in comic books which has been lamented for having become overused and excessively solipsistic. Sacco's flamboyant expressionism opposes Brown's aesthetic of silence. Brown's silence is configured so that it is not an absence of speech, but a suppression of it in which attention is continually being drawn to the unspoken. A close analysis of Sacco and Brown's comics reveals the different ways in which their complementary aesthetics construct different subject positions for the reader. Sacco simulates a sense of being there and uses his subjectivity as a vehicle for drawing a reader in, while Brown's Louis Riel collapses these distinctions between absence and presence such that there is no point of entry into the work with which a reader can sustain illusory bonds of identification

Hundred Thousand Billion Fingers: Seriality and Critical Game Practices

The title of this essay borrows from Raymond Queneau’s iconic Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, a sonnet generator capable of producing 10^14 unique texts – a quantity that no one reader (or even a million readers) could parse in a lifetime. While Hundred Thousand Billion Poems gestures towards the impossibility of ever accessing the totality of its many reading paths, computer games such as Super Mario Bros. limit the player to one isolated, incomplete perspective among an enormous (but finite) set of possible playthroughs. Despite this single-player experience, collective patterns of play emerge from the repetitive, procedural, and discrete elements – what Ian Bogost calls “unit operations” – that drive computational media. Following Mary Flanagan’s approach to game criticism and Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of seriality framed in terms of contemporary theories of network culture, this essay examines two categories of “metagames” which “critically play” the serial logics intrinsic to computational media. Metagames are games about games and the examples in this essay are built inside, outside, or alongside Super Mario Bros., inscribing twenty-five years of procedural play. From remakes of ROM hacks to speedruns of sequencers, this eclectic collection of player-created modifications documents an alternative history of computer games defined not by the production of software but by play. Whether reading Queneau’s book or playing computer games, the constraints of the poem or program produce a range of repetitions. Rather than subjecting the player to the mechanisms of control as defined by the rules of the game, the techniques documented in this essay successfully metagame their own serial conditions to model the movements of a hundred thousand billion fingers

Eccentric Spaces and Filmic Traces: Portals in Aperture Laboratories and New York City

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