Emulation at the Residual Media Depot
An emulator is hardware or software that enables one computer system to behave like another. At the Depot, we're interested in emulation for a variety of reasons.
The Platformization of Nostalgia
This is how business is done in the age of the Stack. On a global scale, Nintendo is concentrating decades of public interactions with its games and game systems into the narrowest possible channel, in order to shut down cultural practices that they don't like, and to extract maximum profit.
Reflection: Playful Encounters in the Depot
Before I came to media studies or media archaeology, I trained as a theater artist. The word "train" weighs heavily in that sentence. Over our week-long course, we talked a fair amount about "training": how disciplination emerges from the various ways that scholars are trained into practices, and how we code those various ways with residues of geography, culture, language, and tactics.
The Video Game Archaeologist
Darren Wershler dusts off old consoles that say a lot about our culture
Reflections on the experience of building an arcade table
During my week at the Residual Media Depot, I participated in a group of two teams, with 2-3 members each, and transformed an IKEA coffee table into an arcade table using after-market arcade parts and a raspberry pi emulator. In this post, I discuss some of the ideas that emerged from the experience.
Notes from the Media Archaeology Summer Class: working with Action Max and Pong Sports IV
If media archaeology can be defined as a militant approach to the study of media in its privileging non-canonical history, by taking this class, I have been primarily interested in the meanings that a practical, hands-on, approach on media objects add to the traditional framework of a graduate seminar.
Re-versioning as a cultural technique of nostalgia? – Final Presentation
Who or what creates the cultural neo-production process? Is becoming a classic the result of simultaneous acts from both the producer and the users who by their own longing create the process, or is nostalgia something that is created on its own and it then creates the whole process?
Press START: Reflections on the Making of the Arcade Table
Just as it is problematic to focus solely on an object’s narrative history, it is equally problematic to read objects as entirely independent of their cultural contexts and the ways they have been narrativized. The arcade table project ultimately allows us to to think through both aspects of a cultural object simultaneously.
Action Max: Notes on a Deictic Dispositif
The slogan for the Action Max is not so much a sales pitch as a finger pointed at the console’s own pitfall. It wants to be so real that it can’t be a game.
ghosts ; replicants ; parasites — Excavating the Spectravideo CompuMate
The CompuMate is starting to challenge some of my thinking, or at least provide some new territories to expand beyond a dialectic of living and dead that ghosts seems to traffic in. Particularly, as I’ve repeatedly suggested, I’m getting interested in the figure of the parasite.