“Before a videogame can ever be played […] there must be a metagame.” Patrick LeMieux and Stephanie Lobuk In my experience with playing games, I realize I was always a player. I allowed myself to be deluded, I thought I was an active actor deciding what step to do next. All lies! Without realizing it, Read More
Flaubert: 20 rutas consists of a series of performances made by Alejandra Jiménez in Colombia, where she delivered speeches based on texts by Gustave Flaubert to random users of the Bogotan public transport system. It is an intervention in the sense that it gets to an audience without it knowing or even wanting to experience Read More
Web writing or moving our works on the internet means never relinquishing while there exists this universe of expressions that appear and disappear, that are created and erased. The web is a riddle to write. (Melchy 2011, 35). The subtitle of this chapter from Lisa Gitelman’s book Paper Knowledge attracted my attention since I skimmed through the Read More
In an effort to unpack the notion of the Chinese typewriter as emblematic of an unassailably perverse difference in ontological positioning, it is essential to consider the manner in which the threat that the typewriter represents is situated (where, in other words, the discourse machine-gun is pointing). Rather than simply limit the Chinese typewriter’s cultural Read More
Since the obsession with the Orient began, western civilization has created many misconceptions about the culture it has worked so hard to imitate. Edward Said describes the Orient as “an integral part of European material civilization and culture” (2), as it not only expresses but also represents a cultural and ideological mode of discourse. Said’s Read More
Demonstrating Gender Navigating gender/gendered discourse in the context of typewriter history is problematised by the extreme degree of uncertainty and ambiguity which prevents any neat demarcation of the subject. We might hurtle down several (roughly) parallel paths, considering a history of gendered writing (Kittler 186), of gender-coding machines (Keep 405), of the variance between popular Read More
The orchestral piece “Briony,” part of the score composed by Dario Marianelli for the 2007 film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, is fundamentally a recent addition to the cultural landscape of typewriting. Despite its recency, the piece at its core makes a large-scale, conscious return to the “basics” of early media theory, fusing together Read More
Analog or digital? Fingers or digits? When NEO rings a bell, do you RETURN or ENTER? Is the Final Frontier, or the Pen-Ultimate? Writing with-out a page? Will this save autonomy from automation, belt chastity from rhythmic autofeedback excess? Or…did you not see this as the impetus for a radicalized aesthetic practice? Predating the release Read More