It happened at the Fighternight #5. At some indefinite moment during nighttime I took my headphones off, leaned back in my chair, and allowed my gaze to wander around aimlessly. Suddenly my eyes locked on the screen of a guy sitting behind me. There was ↑Q3A-gamespace, not uncommon, but an avatar cruised along a wall, through midair, following an unbelievable trajectory, the latter marked by a blue-glowing sequence of blasts from the plasma-gun—for the first time in my life I watched a tricking movie. My reflections on tricking are already jotted down (↵piling up—playful appropriation of gamespace and ↵appropriation … Continue reading
Monthly Archives: January 2006
Within every human individual there is a personal eclectic conglomeration of ambiences and narrative content built from a lifetime of experience, assimilating information, and digesting popular culture. When this conglomerations are shared by a group of people, we deal with the metaphorical and symbolical web which we call ‘culture’. The latter is constituted, built and rebuilt by ever-changing, interlocking feedback loops of the associative kind. William Gibson not only “has tapped right into our collective cultural mainline”, but delivers a personal account of how ‘culture’ is generated within the individual. Here’s a quote from his essay ↑time machine cuba—I … Continue reading
The picture above is a “photo montage featuring a dancer with body mounted sensors controlling real-time animation on the ANIMAC, 1962, Denver.”—another pre-cyberpunk cyberpunk-image. Weird coincidence—provoked by my entries on Tron and the interaction with SFAM, I remembered that there was a student-project in gamedesign which culminated in writing a full-fledged 3D-engine. The final product was a racing-game based on the solar sailor seen in the movie Tron. Unfortunately I couldn’t find anything about it on my HDD, so I went on searching the Internet. During the search I stumbled over ↑A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation, … Continue reading
SFAM ↵reacted at the speed of light, and moved his ↑review of the 1982 movie Tron up at ↑cyberpunkreview. And as I already mused on the ↵recycling of cybercultural topoi … if you are more deeply interested in the computergame ↑Tron 2.0, have a look at ↑Gamasutra’s ↑Postmortem: Monolith’s TRON 2.0 by Frank Rooke. Here are two quotes from it: From the start, it didn’t take long for many of us at Monolith to recognize that a TRON project was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, not simply because we believed the film would lend itself to great gameplay, but also because … Continue reading
… today is ↵machinima! Be sure to get ↑the other movies by ↑Snoken Productions, like Battlefield Double Dash, The Biggest and the Best, and Ya Rayah. They simply are hilarious. I hereby award the ↑Tex-Avery medal for outstanding accomplishments in the art and science of cartoonesque-absurdity and -stunts to Noken and friends. … Continue reading
This piece of ↵machinima features insane surreal humour inspired by Monty Python, Finding Nemo, Madagascar … creatively and congenially staged in ↑BF2: Snoken Productions’ (↑Official Forums) ↑Mine [12:05min | .wmv | 68MB—many other sizes and formats scattered all around the net]. I mean, like, that’s cyberculture! And ↑there’s more by producer, director, stuntman, and clan leader Marcus “Noken” Johansson [who obviously has gathered quite a team around him] … even things to come—the screencap above was taken from the ↑Mine 2 trailer [01:41min | .avi | 21MB]. With all this development of the machinima-scene—who still wants to go to … Continue reading
No, that’s neither ↵Teh_Masterer, nor ↵him—it’s a character out of ↑Mamoru Oshii’s 2001 movie Avalon. I took the screencap from ↑cyberpunkreview.com, a blog and “The most complete cyberpunk movie site on the net”. It’s nicely organised, decently looking, and the reviews are in-depth. Everyone with an inclination towards cyberpunk will find movies there s/he desperately wants to watch. And there’s more—beyond reviews—there. Cyberpunkreview.com goes directly into my blogroll. … Continue reading
↑The Information Society ↑21(↑4) is a special issue guest-edited by ↑Nancy K. Baym and dedicated to: “ICT research and disciplinary boundaries—is ‘Internet research’ a virtual field, a proto-discipline, or something else?” via entry at digital genres … Continue reading
Yesterday the students of ‘my’ institute, the ↑Institute for Sociocultural Anthropology at the ↑Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München launched a weblog called ↑protest. The blog is meant to be a platform for the organisation of measures against the current state of teaching at ‘my’ institute. To set matters straight: The students are not protesting against the teaching of my colleagues and me ;-) but against the structural ‘weaknesses’ concerning number of personnel and finances. Good luck gals’n’guys! … Continue reading
Well, ↑Jan Chipchase‘s twin weblogs ↑future perfect (work) and ↑present imperfect (play) aren’t a chaotic information’n’media dumpster like cyberpunk-luminary ↑Bruce Sterling’s weblog is, but I didn’t really get their gist yet, though. Nevertheless the blogs mediate the ambience and feeling of a distinctively different perspective upon technology and its appropriation in Asia. Beware: picture heavy. ↑about future perfect: Future Perfect is about the collision of people, society and technology, drawing on issues related to the user research that I conduct on behalf of my employer—Nokia. ↑[…] ↑about present imperfect: Present Imperfect is a real web site detailing the lives of … Continue reading