A cooperative initiative between the Media Lab, the GameLab, the Binational Center for Qualitative Methods and the department of Literature, Art and Media at the University of Konstanz proposes to discuss neglected aspects of gaming practices in game history and theory. I participated of the two first days of the in-person activities, which are being held in the format of a Summer Schools, bringing together students, gamers, scholars, and/or developers. Before that, participants had a self-study and three recorded gameplay sessions between April and June. This is a particularly interesting statement because such previous involvement between participants plays a key role in the observational study that is currently being conducted. In order to observe neglected aspects of gaming in history and theory, a particular auto-ethnographic method was developed. Players should record (video and audio) all their game sessions in order to produce the materials that would then be analysed at the Summer School in-person encounters. The particular focus of this study is in the cooperative and interactional aspects of gaming together. What in fact does it mean, after all, when we say we are playing "together"? What such togetherness implies? Before that: who are "we" in such gameplay activities?
Drawing from Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Science and Technology Studies (STS), scholars Beate Ochsner and Markus Spöhr explored the entanglements between players and non-human processes in the act of gaming, with a special concern for what they call 'the gaming situation': the particular sets of actions, movements, materials and processes that define what we understand as the practice of gaming as such. A particularly 'tricky' question for the study of the social dimension of gaming through this perspective is how researchers should engage with digital ethnography. Originally developed as a method for the centuries-old discipline of ethnology, ethnography is widely known as a method oriented towards providing a description of human societies through a less impersonal approach than other research methods -- in fact, the consequential methodological corollary of ethnographic research is that the describer cannot withdraw her/himself from the description, and that the means of describing also interfere in the final observation. The knowledge produced by ethnographic methods does not mean to be generalisable, so we should definitely take into account how it differs in nature from scientific methods adopted in other fields: it is a different form or genre of knowledge, we should keep in mind. Furthermore, we should bear in mind how such observations are not meant to produce a self-identification with the researchers, but in the spirit of old ethologist, it tries to describe and explain a previously unknown world or process to people who are not aware of it -- it voluntarily looks for difference and interpretation instead of identity and representation. We should not think, though, that digital ethnography simply means ethnography performed digitally. From the previous short note on the epistemological quality of the knowledge produced through ethnography, we can infer that the very performance of the computer, as well as that of the observed machine-mediated subjects, impact on how digital ethnography is conducted, as well of course as on its results. Trying to grasp the gaming situation with its endemic contingencies, students at the workshop were invited to observe the recording of their game sessions while trying to describe of the practices, things, relationships, social encounters, movements, and all sorts of strange phenomena that unravel from gamers playing together in digital environments. You can check the full schedule of the Summer School here: https://seriousgamingkn.wordpress.com/summer-school/
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Another interesting workshop was held in the beginning of this month, organised by the Media of Cooperation initiative.
The event gathered scholars from media studies, the history of science and mathematics, and science and technology studies (STS) to ask what a grand narrative of the history of computing would look like if told from other perspectives. I attended the event online. The program was interest to anyone with a keen eye to digital media infrastructures and their histories: July 4 13:30-13:45 Introduction by Erhard Schüttpelz (Siegen University) 13:45-14:00 Remarks by Paul Ceruzzi 14:00-15:30 Could we structure a big story around the materialities of data, computation and networks? Roundtable discussion featuring Cyrus Mody (Maastricht University), Moritz Feichtinger (University of Bern), Axel Volmar (Siegen University) & Valérie Schafer (C2DH, University of Luxembourg). 16:00-17:30 What if we don’t center the United States? Roundtable discussion featuring Ksenia Tatarchenko (Singapore Management University). Pierre Mounier-Kuhn (CNRS & Université Paris-Sorbonne), Petri Paju (University of Turku), Elisabetta Mori (Middlesex University) & Gerard Alberts (University of Amsterdam). 18:00-19:00 Chances Seized and Opportunities Squandered: Writing A New History of Modern Computing , Thomas Haigh (University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee & Siegen University). July 5 12:00-13:30 What can we gain by reconnecting the history of computing with the histories of computer science and mathematics? Roundtable discussion featuring Ulf Hashagen (Deutsches Museum), Helena Durnova (Masaryk University, Brno), Mark Priestley (National Museum of Computing, UK) & Liesbeth de Mol (Université de Lille). 14:00-15:30 How could media theory and STS underpin new historical ways of understanding the story of the computer? Roundtable discussion, convened by Sebastian Giessmann and Tatjana Seitz. Featuring Ben Peters (Tulsa University), Till Heilmann (Bochum), Elisa Linseisen (Vienna/Paderborn), Sebastian Giessmann (University of Siegen) & Tatjana Seitz (University of Siegen, moderator) 16:00-17:30 Can we integrate issues of gender, justice and embodiment into the story of the computer itself or must these narratives remain separate and particular? Roundtable discussion featuring Elizabeth Petrick (Rice University), Valérie Schafer (C2DH, University of Luxembourg), Jeffrey Yost (Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota). 18:00-19:30 Where did the dominant scholarly narratives in the history of computing come from, and how well have they held up? Roundtable discussion with William Aspray & Martin Campbell-Kelly (authors of Computer: A History of the Information Machine) and Paul Ceruzzi (author of A History of Modern Computing) moderated by JoAnne Yates (author of Structuring the Information Age). -- The discussions dealt with updating the master narrative of computing history by drawing on new generations of studies. The panels approached subjects as diverse as digital media devices, videogames, home computing, computer networking, smartphones, cloud computing, and the evolution of the IBM PC standard. As an important aspect of contemporary historiographic approaches, the panellists asked what the grand narrative of computing tells as much as what it silences, inquiring the potential to tell other stories on a similar scale about computers and their relationship with contemporary societies. Some interesting prospects for the events happening this week and the next.
The first one is organised by the Centre for Cultural Inquiry (ZkF) of the University of Konstanz, where there are at this point several research agendas interested in approaching the topic of infrastructure (apparently through very diverse perspectives). The core topic of the Rethinking Infrastructure conference seems to converge in several ways with the agenda of the Cloud Gaming Atlas: It is stated that “while infrastructure constitutes a basic dimension of human life, it is widely taken as a matter of course. In a sense, this is what makes it infrastructure in the first place: if it works, it no longer has to be reflected upon but retreats to a deeper level of human consciousness and social organization. The major crises of recent years, however, suggest that infrastructure needs to be taken into consideration, and what is more: that it needs to be fundamentally rethought. Streets and bridges that are swept away by floods; health care and social security systems that collapse in the face of a pandemic; social orders that change within weeks because of a military offensive: these are all examples of infrastructure crises. Mere technical improvements to existing infrastructures will not suffice to meet such crises. Rather, we need to question on a fundamental level what we mean when we speak of infrastructures, what role we assign to them, and how we can handle them more flexibly”. Thinking through these infrastructure crises appears to be one important direction for research in the Humanities in the coming years. Bruce Robbins (Columbia University, New York) will make the opening talk of the Rethinking Infrastructure conference, entitled Elevator Pitch. Gratitude for Infrastructure, and Beyond. The event will be held at the Sigismundsaal of the Konzilgebäude Konstanz, next Wednesday at 18h30. Furthermore, from 30.06 to 01.07, the initiative will provide a workshop on cultural perspectives to rethink infrastructure. After quite some time preparing (and some more time self-isolating), I was finally able to move to Konstanz to start my new research project at the Zukunftskolleg. The first weeks in Germany were (of course) dedicated to administrative paperwork. Fortunately I had help from many supportive people from the central office of the institute, the human resources department, the welcome centre, my neighbours, and many other friendly folks. Although the paperwork still seems far from over, I was finally able to meet some of my colleagues, take part in events, and start digging into my research agenda.
Speaking of which, here is a brief description of what I will be pursuing in the next years: the project “Cloud gaming atlas: from Earth’s metabolism to the longing for radiant infrastructures” is aimed at the transnational telecommunication infrastructures development to support cloud gaming platforms. What interests me more specifically is observing how these infrastructures are intertwined with the management of natural resources in local and wider environmental settings. With the project, I am seeking to explore to what extent media are ingrained within Earth systems, while questioning at the same time the regimes of visibility/invisibility of these material infrastructures. I believe these questions are important not only for their epistemological value. It might be particularly significant to assess how the environmental and aesthetic dimensions of media phenomena intermingle in a time when the so-called creative industries are migrating to a platform model based on high energy-demanding streaming services. The project is divided into three stages: the first part of the research will be dedicated to the analysis of reports concerning the environmental implications of cloud gaming and to a theoretical discussion on the continuities between media technology and the living environment that stem from remote gaming infrastructure (in the power supplies and energy grids that feed it, for instance); the second step encompasses field visits to the facilities of cloud infrastructure providers in Germany, where I aim to learn more about the developed, implemented, (and also the imagined) technologies that relate to sustainability in key aspects such as energy efficiency and waste management. The third stage of the research will be dedicated to providing a visual output to the research developed during the first stages of the project, with the sketching of a visual-textual catalog on the infrastructure assembled for cloud gaming, its environmental interdependencies, and imageries of sustainability. The project is kickstarting its activities at the University of Konstanz next week in a joint session of the Jour Fixe meetings. On July 31, researchers from the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study (WIAS) and the Zukunftskolleg will participate in a round table to discuss the role of Humanities in the Anthropocene.
I will be providing some impulse in the event together with scholars Udith Dematagoda, Susumu Annaka, and Alexander Etkind. My short talk will begin with a discussion on Technofossils, highlighting how the concept can be useful to bridge the scientific knowledge of geology and the geophysical properties of telematic media. Through this perspective, I seek to highlight Information and Communication Technologies as anthropogenic vectors of energy, and therefore of geophysical alterations in the earthly metabolism, particularly since the so-called Great Acceleration of the mid-1950’s. This proposal is not meant to insist on outmoded distinctions between nature and culture, or the organic and the technological, but instead it seeks to probe how can we better understand the role of widely geodistributed telematics in the Anthropocene. In an epoch marked at the same time by anthropogenically generated environmental upheavals and by renewed promises of sustainable development, it might be necessary to re-frame our questions concerning technological development. In the face of planetary-scale infrastructures developed for pervasive cloud computing facilities, it is advisable to delve into the fringes between natural sciences and technocultural systems, in order to find where is Media within the Earth and where is the Earth within Media. |
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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