Monthly Archives: June 2011

free game

Posted on by October 14, 2012
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Like movies or novels, computer games are media. In accordance to the intentions of its authors, designers, and developers, a computer game mediates experiences to the players. The malleability and potential of the medium allows the mediation of a vast range of experiences. In the case of Max Payne [Remedy 2001] it is the experience of living through a crime story, rather than the experience of some kind of contest. Besides being a medium, a computer game first of all is a piece of software, a complex piece of program code […] While I was writing these sentences—their German equivalents, … Continue reading →

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consuming androids

Posted on by July 14, 2011
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At ↑Best of Behind-the-Scenes I just stumbled over the above still of German actress Brigitte Helm (1906/08-1996) on the set of ‘Metropolis’ (Lang 1927). Obviously it was quite hot inside the costume of the Maschinenmensch, which rendered the actress more or less helpless. Half a century later British actor Anthony Daniels suffered similar hardships as ↑C3P-O on the set of ‘Star Wars’ (Lucas 1977), as the following stills show, which I collected from somewhere on the Net ages ago:  It may or may not be that the designs of Lord Vader and C3P-O were inspired by ↵vintage firefighters’ equipment, but … Continue reading →

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guy headroom

Posted on by October 14, 2012
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The screenshot above I grabbed from ‘↑A Message from Anonymous—12/16/2010‘ on YouTube. No, I won’t really comment on ↑Anonymous for now—my esteemed colleague ↑Biella Coleman already covers it nicely from an anthropological vantage point: ‘↑Anonymous: From the Lulz to Collective Action.’ What I am driving at are the remix-æsthetics of the video, and the sources it draws on, which stem from 1980s British cyberpunk.     The ↑Guy Fawkes mask is part of Anonymous’ corporate identity from the beginning on. Of course they had the idea from a motion picture produced by the ↑Wachowski brothers of ↑Matrix-fame: ‘V for Vendetta’ … Continue reading →

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wells & welles

Posted on by June 18, 2011
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↑Awesome people hanging out together collects photographies of … well, awesome people hanging out together. In the picture above you can see ↑H. G. Wells and ↑Orson Welles together—to be honest, until today I was not aware that the two of them ever met. Presumably the picture was taken in San Antonio in 1940, when the two gave a ↑radio interview together. via entry at mosaikum … Continue reading →

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