I recently visited Chicago for the DHCS conference held at Loyola University College. During the second day of the conference, I was able to sneak away for a few hours and visit the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). Their featured exhibition was a dual retrospective/contemporary take on minimalism, but I was more fascinated by a small room devoted to a single piece by Gordon Matta-Clark. The room was filled with photographic documentation, sketches, and preparatory ephemera for 'Circus' ...
When you're in a band on tour, you sit in a van for hours on end, thinking of ways to entertain yourself. When I toured the U.S. with Silent Type back in 2006, we routinely had 5-10 hour drives without the benefit of fancy cellphones or 3G Internet. During one of my passenger seat navigator stints, bassist/driver Billy and I started a word game. We tried to name as many foods as possible that were named after the process that ...
Console Emulation and Platform Plasticity Since the early 1990s, a special subculture of play, called speedruns, has pushed the limits of videogame skill, performance, and technical mastery. The aim of the speedrun is to play a game as quickly as possible, by any means possible, short of cheating, passwords, or other ‘non-diegetic’ exploits. Games that might take an average player tens of hours are reduced to an hour or less, often at the highest possible difficulty. Notoriously difficult Nintendo Entertainment System ...
This paper was originally presented at the Society for Textual Scholarship Conference, Penn State, PA, March 18, 2011. Today I want to speak about videogames as objects of textual scholarship, granting them the same keen eyes, ears, and hands that we are accustomed to giving books and manuscripts. Pac-Man is a particularly interesting specimen, familiar enough to most people to yield surprising insights when we begin to unbind its leaves. Pac-Man was ubiquitous in the arcade heyday of the 1980s and persists, ...
This paper was originally presented at the Converse College conference 'Culturing the Popular' in September 2010. After Shadow of the Colossus was released for the PlayStation 2 in late 2005, I spent dozens of hours exploring its landscape. In comparison to other action/adventure videogames of its kind, these were relatively lonely hours. The geography of Shadow is sparsely populated—there is Wander, the game’s protagonist and player avatar, his horse Agro, the deceased maiden Mono, sixteen colossi, and a few odd birds ...
My 1912 selection is spectacularly strange, but I won't spoil the surprise just yet. First, a plot summary: A restless husband and wife are bored with their day-to-day lives. The husband ventures out to his favorite city bar to visit a dancer who 'understands him.' He vies for her attention as she dances, competing with a rival suitor, who happens to be a cameraman. The husband ultimately prevails through forcibly removing his rival, then proceeds to escort the dancer to a ...
Gaining a 'literacy' in film, both for viewers and creators, involves the recognition (or invention) of certain conventions that apply to the medium. Over time, as a medium is recognized, developed, and matured, more and more of these conventions begin to fall in place. They range from the level of genre (e.g. horror films will have a certain type of music, lighting, etc.) to more subtle aspects of composition, structure, and so forth. The latter types often become so ingrained ...
I chose Wizard of Oz for the specific purpose of comparing it to the much-beloved musical from 1939. Then, while watching the elder version, I realized I didn't remember enough detail from the re-make to contribute any thoughtful or educated comparisons. I'd call my recollection of the Judy Garland classic a bit more iconic and nostalgic than 'accurate', so you'll have to bear with me, since I don't feel like renting and watching it just for the sake ...
While we're still in the realm of public domain, I'll embed the film below: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzvmZAzCF0M (If you find youtube's quality unbearable , try the Internet Archive version instead.) I'm sure you'll agree upon first viewing that the Library of Congress was correct to deem this film 'significant' and preserve it in the National Film Registry. As Wikipedia notes, there's an impressive display of special effects, including the forced perspective technique achieved using a combination of trick mirrors and deep focus, ...
Fantasmagorie was the first fully-animated film. Emile Cohl, a Frenchman, constructed the short over several months by hand-drawing and photographing each frame of animation, eventually assembling around 700 individual drawings. Capitalizing on the popular Vaudeville trend of white-on-black chalk drawings, Cohl drew with black lines on white paper, then reversed the negative of each photographic frame to achieve the desired effect. Even today, it's a brilliant little bit of animation that benefits greatly from its improvisational creation. Eschewing any set ...