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.
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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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