Last 28.10 saw the passing of Kathleen Booth. She was a mathematician and a computer scientist who wrote the very first assembly language for computer systems (for the ARC computer).
She started collaborating with a small team of researchers, which included Andrew Booth, who would later develop one of the first rotating storage devices, preceding computer disks. What is interesting to notice in my view is that part of their groundbreaking work was developed in two 6-month research visits at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, where they had the chance to work with John von Neumann on his machine architecture, which enabled programs to be stored through a memory function. This experience led Andrew to redesign the ARC, repurposing the relay part of the machine (developing what is referred sometimes as the ARC2). In 1947, while still at the IAS, Kathleen and Andrew wrote two reports about such experiences, General considerations in the design of an all-purpose electronic digital computer and Coding for ARC. The first of those reports outlines several different options for the memory function of the von Neumann architecture machine, describing how to develop it. The second report explains how the instructions are represented in machine language and can be loaded into a storage device. Kathleen would later also turn to research in natural language processing and neural networks.
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In collaboration with Sonia Fizek (Cologne GameLab), Camila de Ávila (Unisinos), and Emmanoel Ferreira (Federal Fluminense University), I am organising a Special Issue for the Convergências Journal on the history of ecogames and game-like simulations of climate behaviour. Please spread the word around. The call goes like this:
It is very easy to find in discussions of computer games and ecology, especially in times when green games seem to consolidate as a genre within computer game typology, the assumption that gaming can help (if not directly “save”) the environment, by making use of climate change communication, or even by prompting the direct climate action of individuals through gamification strategies. We should not disregard such a drive for change, especially if one considers how urgent and porous the challenges regarding the current environmental crisis are. If biodiversity and ecosystems as we know them are at stake as we venture through the Anthropocene (Dirzo et al. 2014), the voluntary efforts from a diverse set of scientific disciplines and sectors of contemporary society in mitigating the effects of anthropogenic climate change are expected and desirable. It is also not strange that today such impulses for active intervention embody the prospects of gamification, that is, the process of permeation of our society with methods, metaphors, values, and attributes of games (Fuchs 2011), more often than not surrounded by streams of enthusiasm and sheer optimism. Yet, as fresh as they might seem under a presentist perspective, the motivations and utopias to ‘save the planet’ through gaming are not at all new. Methods such as media archaeology (Ferreira 2020, Parikka & Huhtamo 2011) provide us with an opportunity, among other things, to rescue forgotten artefacts which have been erased by the canonical history written over a determinate subject or which were simply forgotten by the constant drive of contemporary societies for novelty. This of course strikes a highly sensitive nerve in the case of computer games, as in discourses surrounding digital media and the information technology industry more broadly, considering the economic and political prominence that technological innovations have in these sectors. Therefore it is no surprise that the past of technical media as such has to be constantly retrieved through careful historical or media-archaeological examination (Reinhardt 2018, Guins 2014, Fischer 2013, Krapp 2011). In this sense, the history of ecological games should not work that differently from the cyclical history of ecological thought, which has been renewed over past decades, and -- not by accident -- re-enacted with much more intensity in recent years throughout different disciplines (Veiga 2019). With this call, we do not wish to merely point with a nostalgic verve to preceding educational ecological games, nor to simply point towards a historical recurrence. Instead, we seek to highlight more specifically how discussions concerning ecogames from the past (as well as their potential and promises for change) are missing from current perspectives on green gaming. By retrieving them, it should also be possible to better evaluate what are the assumptions, as well as the promises, successes and limitations in motivating players to engage with ecological perspectives and environmental action through games. Moreover, this exercise should probe what else can be learned by digging up the forgotten artefacts and histories of educational ecological games and gaming materials oriented toward climate action. For this Special Issue of the Convergências Journal, we are particularly interested in proposals dedicated to discussing the following topics: * Histories of the development of ecological games. * Intersections between the history of games and ecological thinking. * Intersections between the history of ecology and playfulness. * Media archaeological accounts of forgotten ecological games. * Archaeogaming approaches to ecological games from the recent and long past. * History on the role of play in climate change communication. * History of games in campaigning for climate action. * History of in-game ecocriticism. * Deep-times of gaming and natural histories of digital games. * History of resource management associated with game production, distribution and consumption. * History of the relationship of the games industry with regulations and policies toward sustainability. * Material dimensions of game technology as technofossils of the Anthropocene. * Sociotechnical approaches to games as a form of ecological knowledge and of knowing. Deadlines: Article submissions: 30.11.2022 Confirmation of acceptance/rejection: 15.01.2023 Publication: Early 2023 You can find more details of the CFP, as well as the author guidelines for submitting a paper, on the website of the journal: https://revistas.unasp.edu.br/converg.../announcement/view/6 From October to November we will have UCI Professor Peter Krapp as a Senior Fellow at the Zukunftskolleg. During this time, we will work on several mutual collaborations regarding my current project on cloud gaming infrastructures in particular (and networked computing in general). I am currently reviewing a contribution by Peter to the recent CfP I am organising to a Special Issue of Convergências Journal on the history of so-called 'ecogames', and we are also in conversation for a co-written piece on the intersections between the history of climate simulations and in-game weather modelling.
Besides articles, Peter will contribute to the Zukunftskolleg and the department of Literature, Art, and Media Studies of the university by giving a lecture about his current project on museums of computing and internet history. The lecture, which is happening on November 3, should provide researchers with an opportunity to observe and weave together theoretical and curatorial approaches to media history, with a particular focus on the properties of networked computing as an archival medium. In commonplace imagery, computing is constantly leaning towards the future, so it is unusual that inquiries regarding the past of computers rise up to the centre of public perception. Nevertheless, in recent years the history of digital media, software systems, and computer architecture became more and more an object of interest to several museums, with a growing number of institutions aiming to archive and memorialize the past of computing and especially of the internet. Indeed, with computers and digital telecommunication infrastructures continuously permeating more dimensions of social life since the late twentieth century, one could also claim that developing museums of computing, as much as exhibitions of particular digital media by-products, was an inevitable, impending outcome. Whether museums offer the more appropriate possibilities to grasp and present such histories is a different question. Just as institutions and other spaces developed with the purpose of memorializing the past of human civilization, the internet spurs from a plethora of material marks and software traces which are left for narrativization, also bearing a great proliferation of in-situ and virtual museums to account for the early days of networked computation. As far as curatorial approaches go, one can find a proliferation of nodes and indexes which tell their own curated versions of their past. Therefore, the places of memory on the internet, as venues to represent the past, end up facing challenges analogous to those of cultural institutions with regards to the selection of their objects of interest, also performing acts of remembrance, celebration, reinforcement, forgetting and erasure. Through its truly interdisciplinary body of collaborators, which currently also spans researchers with history, memory studies, and computer sciences backgrounds, the Zukunftskolleg will surely also provide an interesting platform for gathering different perspectives on the history of networked computing for Peter's ongoing project on the theme. |
AuthorThis blog is meant to provide a space for discussing the geophysical as well as the the imaginary entanglements between media infrastructures and organic environments. In the coming months, it will be dedicated to my current project, Cloud Gaming Atlas, which is particularly interested in observing and interrogating the infrastructures developed for cloud gaming initiatives in regard to their environmental implications. Additionally, it should also gather information about events and publications related to my project at the Zukunftskolleg and the Department of Literature, Art and Media of the University of Konstanz. Archives
January 2024
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