{"id":595,"date":"2009-12-14T13:49:37","date_gmt":"2009-12-14T18:49:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/?p=595"},"modified":"2009-12-15T14:02:20","modified_gmt":"2009-12-15T19:02:20","slug":"big-day-at-dac-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/2009\/12\/big-day-at-dac-2009\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Day at DAC 2009"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ian Bogost and I just gave our talk “Platform Studies: Frequently Questioned Answers”<\/a> here at Digital Arts and Culture<\/a> in Irvine, California. There were three other talks – fascinating ones – in this day’s opening plenary session. Garnet Hertz took us into circuit bending, tactical media, and the artistic recycling and reuse of electronic waste. Jason Farman spoke on locative media with a focus on geocaching as technologically-enabled, embodied, proprioceptive play. Conor McGarrigle explored, in detail and with reference to several specific projects, the relationship between the practices of the Situationist International and contemporary locative media work.<\/p>\n

Ian and I addressed six misconceptions about platform studies (the concept, the focus) which we’ve already heard a few times. Our talk was an attempt to better invite people to participate in the project and in the book series.<\/a> In brief, the six misconceptions, and our responses, are:<\/p>\n

\n#1 Platform studies entails technological determinism.<\/p>\n

Platform studies is opposed to \u201chard\u201d determinism and invites us to continue to open the black box of technology in productive ways.<\/i><\/p>\n

#2 Platform studies is all about hardware.<\/p>\n

Platform studies includes software platforms as well.<\/i><\/p>\n

#3 Platform studies is all about video games.<\/p>\n

Platform studies extends to all computing platforms on which interesting creative work has been done.<\/i><\/p>\n

#4 Everything these days [in the Web 2.0 era] is a platform.<\/p>\n

We invite a focus on computational platforms, the basis for digital media work.<\/i><\/p>\n

#5 Platform studies is about technical details, not culture.<\/p>\n

Platform studies connects technical details to culture.<\/i><\/p>\n

#6 Platform studies means that everyone in digital media will have to get computer science training or leave the field.<\/p>\n

Platform studies shows how technical understanding can lead to new sorts of insights, but will not evict the many other important sorts of scholars from digital media.<\/i>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The full paper<\/a> is online, too. Since the beginning of the project, we’ve insisted on the embedding of the platform level in culture and other non-technical contexts, and we’re tried to draw connections between the way computing systems work and culture, history, and society. Others, we’re sure, will have new ways to do that; please, join us in taking up the platform as an focus for digital media studies.<\/p>\n

I have one other collaborative paper today, which will be presented by Alex Mitchell: “”Shaping Stories and Building Worlds on Interactive Fiction Platforms.” Then I’ll present “The ppg256 Series of Minimal Poetry Generators.” Finally, I’ll be part of the DAC Literary Arts Extravaganza<\/a> with a reading called “Five Uneasy Pieces.” I’m looking forward to it all, but I’m sure I’ll be glad to be looking back on it when the day’s done.<\/p>\n

You can search Tweetland for #DAC2009<\/a> to see what the cool kids are saying about the conference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ian Bogost and I just gave our talk “Platform Studies: Frequently Questioned Answers” here at Digital Arts and Culture in Irvine, California. There were three other talks – fascinating ones – in this day’s opening plenary session. Garnet Hertz took us into circuit bending, tactical media, and the artistic recycling and reuse of electronic waste. … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Big Day at DAC 2009”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[12,49,17,11,23,48,10],"class_list":["post-595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-art","tag-dac-2009","tag-digital","tag-games","tag-hardware","tag-locative-media","tag-platforms"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=595"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":615,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595\/revisions\/615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}