Category: Research
The Politics of the Archive
by Jaime Kirtz I begin with the question: what are the politics of space (i.e. public and private) and how do they emerge in the university? How is it related to the archive? The politics of space have long been discussed throughout different academic displicines from political economy to architecture to visual arts. The history of the politics of space is established in the book, The Politics of Space and Play, with the first sentence through which the authors state: “in a world characterized by deep-seated, growing inequalities and highly asymmetrical concentrations of wealth and power, it hardly seems necessary to insist that the spaces through which we move and the places in which we live are thoroughly political, if...
Ingress as a Media Archaeology Artifact
by Kaitlin O’Brien After my initial decision to pursue death imagery in older games, I have decided to shift in a different direction and to instead focus my blogs on the augmented reality game (ARG), Ingress. Yesterday’s discussion left me with a lot to think about, and I realized that in many ways, components of Ingress are rooted heavily in media archaeology. Over the next week, I aim to delve into Ingress and explore its manifestations of socio-cultural imagery within the game. Ingress is a mobile game rich, with a narrative that heavily supports its gameplay mechanics. How does embodiment relate to Ingress? Game players, known in this game as agents, are applying their physical bodies to this augmented reality...
Cinema and the SNES
By Ashlee Bird After a brief conversation with Professor Boluk yesterday, I have made the decision to change the research topic that I will pursue this week. While I do wish to pursue a study of education based games and the relationship between the communities that produce them and the communities that they successfully reach, I believe that particular topic does not adequately utilize the resources at hand during this workshop. Therefore, I got to thinking about to types of games and tech that I will have access to this week, and I started thinking about the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). A particular genre of games for the SNES that I remember having in abundance when I was a...
Digital Recipe Curation
by Bailey Kelley While cookbooks or celebrity chefs may seem like obvious places to start in an exploration of culinary media, I have been interested in producing scholarly work that takes up the more ephemeral, but arguably more useful, recipe card. In a seminar titled Media & Modernity, I analyzed the ways individual recipes have historically been recorded, produced, and circulated, identifying three distinct epochs in the domestic culture of the United States*: 19th-century handwritten cards that indexed the housewife’s domestic prowess; 20th-century printed cards produced by large food corporations; and 21st-century digital recipe cards, like those found on food blogs or Pinterest. A subsequent research project brought me back to the culinary archives at the University of Iowa where...
Sounds and videogames
By Aurelio Meza Through a basic search on Google and Worldcat I came across an article on chiptune music by Israel Márquez (curiously, it’s in Spanish, meaning there seems to be an interest in this movement in Spanish-speaking academia), as well as a book called Playing with sounds: a theory of interacting with sound and music in video games by Karen Collins. That sounds more like my field of interest, but I’m afraid I won’t finish the book before the course ends. Tomorrow I’ll have a look at these texts, but for the time being I can start exploring some of the topics suggested by Darren, Stephanie, and Patrick. First, there’s the consideration about indexical association (one of the main...
Expiration Date
This is not a sustainable practice, and that's okay.