Weighty Papers: Generative Biomedia Art

An axe wielding executioner in a movie once said: "There's always room for one more!" Now, that's a rule I live by. It doesn't matter if your talking about drinks at the pub, prison tattoos or body kits for my car, there's always room for one more. It also counts for posting papers to my blog, obviously. This one's a bit arty and full of talk about biomedia, generative art and the conceptual notion that everything is made of information.


Do you like snippets? Here, have one:

Biomedia explores the convergence of digital and biotechnology, leading to a world where eventually the concepts and materiality of either can be applied to the other. Generative art is often inspired by biological phenomenon, yet the execution is often purely digital. This equates itself to one side of the biomedia coin where the biological is recontextualized using digital technology. The other side of the coin, where digital concepts are fully applied to the biological, are less prevalent. Though artists are conceptually exploring this space, practical biotechnology is not yet advanced enough for easy artistic application.

Not satisfied by tiny biomedia morsels? Then bite down in that big juicy biomedia burger here. It's okay. There's always room for one more.

Weighty Papers: Fully Immersed

I'm on a roll. Like a lizard shedding its skin and prancing around with it for the world to see, I'm unleashing another one of my papers into the Internet jungle. This time I wrote about how different aspects of game design influence a player's sense of immersion. Here's me saying that very same thing, only with more and bigger words:

Many different aspects of a game’s design can have a big impact on the immersive qualities of the playing experience. Some of these rely on embodiment and physicality while others are more focused on the psychological and social involvement of the player. The remainder of this paper is dedicated to highlighting various game design aspects and to examining how all of them together influence a player’s overall sense of immersion.

Using many examples, I discuss how world building and storytelling can influence a player's sense of place by tusing (meta-)narrative techniques. I also look at how a player's sense embodiment is influenced by interface design and player perspective, paying attention to the artificiality of some interfaces versus ones that are integrated into the game world. Lastly, I look at the differences between singleplayer and multiplayer games. In some cases the presence of other people can greatly enhance the immersive qualities of a game, in other cases it completely obliterates them.

Game scholar predators can devour my work here.

Weighty Papers: Anonymous Politics

Having come across this article on the political dimensions of Anonymous, I thought why not throw my own two cents out there. Back in December 2010 I wrote a paper about Anonymous, triggered by their retaliatory attacks against Mastercard and PayPal for denying their services to WikiLeaks. This being an assignment for my Digital Methods class at the UvA, I set about investigating the history of Anonymous by analyzing the content of the Wikipedia article about the group. In particular I looked at the nature of the operations Anonymous involved itself in, the amount of vandalism inflicted on the article (for the lulz, obviously) and the users doing the editing.

Here's a snippet:

Based on the collected information, it does seem like Anonymous has adopted more of an activist mentality lately, especially in comparison to the earlier years. While serious issues related to the Church of Scientology were dealt with as Project Chanology, cases of harassment and trolling continued as evidenced by the defacement of websites dedicated to epilepsy support and hip-hop music. The turning point seems to have been Anonymous’ involvement with the 2009 Iran election protests. Following this event, all of their actions have been related to free speech, censorship, net neutrality and the opposition of copyright enforcement. However, it must be said that their methods have remained largely the same, still revolving around the DDoS attack, and that the curious sense of humor and inside jokes remain.

You can find the article here.