Tag Archives: theory

Justin Erik Halldór Smith on the Badiou Studies Hoax

Posted on 04/14/2016 by

I would normally excerpt something here so that you could get a sense of what’s happening in the piece, but Smith’s short essay is really well put together and I had a hard time choosing a paragraph that made sense … Continue reading →

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Far Cry Primal Essay at Paste

Posted on 03/08/2016 by

When we write about the past we’re always writing about the present. That writing can take a personal tone, showing how a person got to the place that they are through the person that they’ve been. Ben Carson stabs a … Continue reading →

Posted in Video Games | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

On Jessa Crispin’s “The Dead Ladies Project”

Posted on 02/11/2016 by

The Dead Ladies Project is a collection of essays centered around Jessa Crispin’s travels in the shadows of the writers she’s fascinated with. The subtitle, “Exiles, Expats, & Ex-Countries,” almost doesn’t manage to touch what’s actually going on in the volume, … Continue reading →

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Constance Penley on Fan Fiction and NASA

Posted on 02/08/2016 by

I got back into space and its fictions in the mid-1980s by hanging out with some very interesting women from around the country who write homoerotic, pornographic, utopian romances that take place in the Star Trek universe. Fellow academics have suggested that … Continue reading →

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Animals, Drones, and the Police

Posted on 02/03/2016 by

We love when animals destroy drones. The compilation videos and their buzzf’diggification on Facebook has drawn together a very clear contemporary fascination with watching animals of all kinds destroy the most annoying objects of modern life. Animals fighting with flying … Continue reading →

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Andrew Pilsch on Pour-Over Coffee

Posted on 01/28/2016 by

To choose pour-over coffee instead of Keurig, then, isn’t entirely a choice of human craft over machine labor. It’s more an issue of priorities—craft depends on processes that are beholden to people, creating an intimate relationship in which the human … Continue reading →

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On Chloe Howl – “Rumour”

Posted on 11/18/2015 by

1. “Rumour” is predicated on Chlöe Howl’s gaze returning back to us. I don’t mean this in a familiar register — this isn’t warmed over Laura Mulvey with a reflective moment stapled on. There might be fertile fields here to understand … Continue reading →

Posted in Critical Riff Raff Studies, Music, Theory, Video | Tagged , , ,

On Bruns’ On Ceasing To Be Human

Posted on 10/20/2015 by

I recently finished Gerald Bruns’ On Ceasing To Be Human, and I just wanted to jot down a few notes about it. I’m going to put those notes here because why not?! 1. Ceasing is a wonderful summation of a particular strain of … Continue reading →

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Taussig on Calling from Two Sides

Posted on 09/22/2015 by

Months later at night, drinking the strong medicine which makes your head swim, singing the while in ebbs and flows of pictures, the topic of these kids came up. I strongly doubt that the healer and I would have talked … Continue reading →

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Wark on Manovich

Posted on 09/16/2015 by

The genius of Alan Kay was to realize that the barriers to entry of the computer into culture were not just computational but also cultural. Computers had to do things that people wanted to do, and in ways that they … Continue reading →

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