Browsing by Author "Seaman, William"

Aftermarket, a Game Design Philosophy documents the community histories and material practices of players who, over the last decade, have transformed videogames from “entertainment systems” into instruments, equipment, tools, and toys for playing, thinking, and making in the aftermarket of the videogame industry. Through a close investigation of the hardware, software, and code enabling tool-assisted speedruns, real time attacks, and ROM hacks, Aftermarket explores how play can become a form of game design located between human experience and the speeds and scales of digital media. Beyond documenting how these different groups convert packaged products into open platforms for critical making, Aftermarket both argues for and enacts a model of game design as a critical practice in which playing, making, and thinking about videogames occurs within the same act—a true game design philosophy. Focusing on the material properties, technical capacities, and social play around a single game, Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros., this “close playing” and “platformer study” does not seek to reify Miyamoto, Tezuka, Kondo, and Nagako’s game, but appropriates, manipulates, duplicates, perforates, aggregates, and dissipates Super Mario Bros. into a different kind of “Mario Paint”—a medium for making art.

In the context of today's global mobility, information, bodies and goods are circulating across the globe, and even further into outer space. However, we face a paradox: the more we move, the more we become sedentary. The modes of transportation that enable our global mobility are working against us, insidiously dwindling our psycho-physical mobility. Globalization is thus not the world becoming bigger (or too big), but the world becoming immobile. Taking the body as the central non-place of political space, Architectures of Aliveness: Building Beyond Gravity interrogates the possibility of inhabiting circulation as a pragmatic form of resistance to the contemporary immobilization of life. In an era in which bodies and goods are ever more constantly in global circulation, architectures of aliveness ask, what would an experience of weightlessness do for us?

Biotechnology serves as the current dominant model for enlivening architecture and the mobility of its inhabitants. Architectures of aliveness invert the inquiry to look instead at outer space's modules of inhabitation. In questioning the possibility of making circulation inhabitable --as opposed to only inhabiting what is stationary--architectures of aliveness problematize architecture as a form of biomedia production in order to examine its capacity to impact psychic and bodily modalities toward an intensification of health. Problematized synchretically within life's mental and physical polarization, health is understood politically as an accretion of our capacity for action instead of essentially as an optimization of the biological body. The inquiry emerges at the intersection of biotechnology, neurosciences, outer space science and technology, and architecture. The analysis oscillates between historical and contemporary case studies toward an articulation that concentrates on contemporary phenomena while maintaining an historical perspective. The methodology combines archival research, interviews, and artistic and literary analysis. The analysis is informed by scientific research. More precisely, the objective is to construct an innovative mode of thinking about the fields of exchangeability between arts and sciences beyond a critique of instrumentality.

The outcomes suggest that architectures of aliveness are architectures that invite modes of inhabitation that deviate from habitualized everyday spatial engagements. It also finds that the feeling of aliveness emerges out of the production of analog or continuous space where the body is in relation with space as opposed to be represented in it. The analysis concludes that the impact of architecture on our sense of wellbeing is conditioned by proprioceptive experiences that are at once between vision and movement and yet at the same time in neither mode, suggesting an aesthetic of inhabitation based on our sense of weightedness and weightlessness.

These outcomes are thus transduced to the field of media studies to enchant biomediatic inquiry. Proposing a renewed definition of biomedia that interprets life as a form of aesthetic relation, architectures of aliveness also formulate a critique of the contemporary imperialism of visualization techniques. Architectures of aliveness conclude by questioning the political implications of its own method to suggest opacity and agonistic spaces as the biomediatic forms of political space.

This dissertation is an attempt to explain art in the 21st century by an artist/researcher. It is a theoretical writing on art informed by current discourses that influence art such as science and technology. There are two goals of this project. The first one is to understand art’s cultural role in the age of the anthropocene. What is the anthropocene? How does art’s role in society change in this particular geological epoch (following Crutzen’s definition), compared to for instance Holocene? This brings us to the second goal of my project. To better understand art’s role in society, can we benefit from a theory of art, that could present an insight on the dynamics within an artistic experience? What are the current tools and tendencies that can help form such a theory of art? Which fields can contribute to such an understanding?

As an instance of artistic research practice which involves both academic research and art practice, I will be using art projects as case studies to reach these goals. Case studies will consist of my own projects as well as projects by other artists who had been working on similar topics such as Edward Burtynsky, Chris Jordan, Louis Bec, Trevor Paglen, Patricia Piccinini and Lynn Hershmann to name a few. From Timothy Morton to Mackenzie Wark to Donna Haraway cultural theorists of our time, highlight the fact that there is a need for a cultural theory that can attend to what we might call the anthropocene. What is the contribution of art for such a theory? Or can art be instrumental in building a cultural theory at all? My dissertation offers a multi-disciplinary argument for the need to address such questions . Starting from art’s roots in biology and extending to what we might call our biological imagination, the dissertation focuses on art’s connection to biology to initiate a formula for art in the age of the anthropocene.

Digital platforms play an increasingly prevalent role in 21st century capitalism. They shape our search results, facilitate our communication habits, structure our workdays, reinforce our communities, and increasingly impact cultural life in ways that extend beyond mere communications. Their interfaces influence decisions about what films to watch, their algorithms recommend what songs and podcasts we enjoy, and their agreements with distributors frequently determine even the most basic access to digital media today. The current largest music streaming service in the world, Spotify plays an important role in cultural life today, asserting itself as a networked intermediary between users, advertisers, and the music industry in an effort to capitalize on the infrastructural aspects of cultural access through ad-supported and subscription- based music streaming options.

This thesis explores what Anne Helmond has called the “platformization” of digital media, with a specific focus on the Swedish music platform Spotify. Building on Jeremy Wade Morris’ notion of the “digital music commodity,” I argue that Spotify’s efforts to situate digital music within their own software system align with recent trends in the technical and intermediary structures known as platforms. The stack, the software scaffolding present beneath nearly all of today’s major platforms, offers a useful lens into discussions of such software intermediaries at scale, providing insight. into the material basis that platforms rely on in daily operation. Each chapter focuses on a single aspect of the organizing logic of Spotify, tracing the broad superstructure of the platform to its source in software tools. Across chapters on machine listening, recommendation algorithms, and digital platforms in totality, the work stresses the ways platforms have become “a new business model capable of extracting and controlling immense amounts of data” with the rise of these large, economy-shaping intermediaries.

This M.A. thesis in Computational Media is an exploration of how artificial neural networks could be used by an artist; it is a transdisciplinary study of topics in computer science, light art and installation art. The study culminates in the design and production of two installations that attempt to respond to the question: how does one draw on high-level Artificial Intelligence algorithms and human aesthetic intuition informed by contemporary and historical research of art history, to generate a new hybrid art form?

In our capitalist world-economy, fear has become the primary source material for wealth production. Fear underwrites regimes of limited access and various systems of occupation. Occupation as a strategic operational paradigm extends into civilian life of the dark and unresolved colonial, imperial and totalitarian legacies. The domestic and international exclusion of certain populations is grounded in age-old, mostly violent self/other distinctions that have been re-activated from their latent state and again made into viral political discourse material. An array of complex infrastructures, which include legal architectures and the built environment, have acquired operational importance. Such infrastructures are characterized by a built-in violence designed to control, contain, and redirect the massive population flows created by the globally destabilizing and denaturalizing affects of contemporary capital. Access to opportunity, vital resources, and security have become the crucial equity that populations compete for in the early 21st century. The very nature of capital has been transformed into actual economies of fear. Whereas parts of the world’s population will have the chance to live a dignified life, other parts will be indefinitely deprived of such fortunes and left to perish. The end result of such economies is the death-world.

The analysis proposed by this dissertation blurs the disciplinary boundaries between art, cultural anthropology, sociology, military history, economics, political science, psychology, architecture, urban studies, philosophy. This transdisciplinary methodology originates from the understanding that an effective critique of global capital as the dominant economic world-system can no longer be explained via a single knowledge field or academic specialty. Moving a step beyond interdisciplinary studies to bona fide informational crossovers between textual and visual archives allows for a more encompassing and thick investigation. The multi-sited approach of this study examines the visual traces found in the built environment and the controversial social realities expressed in current global geopolitics. The resulting synthesis between theory and practice offers new pathways for citizen participation and for potential solutions to collective grievances and global risks. This transdisciplinary approach gives art a leading role in establishing a new sense of place in which people are empowered to articulate their ideas—a new place built from a rehabilitated understanding of trust in self, trust in collective institutions, and trust in reality and truth. Above all, this new place holds the promise of a future worth living and fighting for.