I'm Giving a Talk at DHSI, University of Victoria, Tomorrow Please come if you can! (ELO welcome of course!) http://www.alansondheim.org/lastus051.jpg Azure and I drove across country (from Providence, RI, through Atlanta, GA, to Victoria BC); we arrived a few days ago. I'm speaking at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, at U. Vic, tomorrow, Thursday, at 5:00-5:30 - details of the (heavily illustrated) talk below: Thursday, June 9th, 5:00 to 5:30 Event: Alan Sondheim, "Language, Accident, and the Virtual" (MacLaurin Building, Room A144) Abstract: This talk engages concepts of blankness, geography, gamespace in virtual worlds, and what I term edgespace - the limits of the gamespace, where language occurs and seethes. I argue that the phenomenology of the real comes into play when living spaces are abandoned, where broken geographies are signs of a future already present. I present instances of digital language production in such spaces, working through virtual worlds such as Second Life and the Macgrid, as well as self-contained Open Sim software that can be run on most computers. The edgespace is always uneasy, tottering, catastrophic; it is the space of the unalloyed digital, where things no longer operate within a classical or modernist tradition. Increasingly, this space characterizes our current place in the world, with its fractured media histories and environments of scorched earth, environmental depredation, and slaughter. We can work through and within such spaces, developing (as perhaps Occupy did) new forms of production, resistance, and digital culture. Thank you! - Alan _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
