Month: June 2017

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.

/ June 19, 2017

The Video Game Archaeologist

Darren Wershler dusts off old consoles that say a lot about our culture

/ June 8, 2017

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.

/ June 7, 2017

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.

/ June 5, 2017

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?

/ June 2, 2017

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.

/ June 1, 2017

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.

/ June 1, 2017