Computer games have become ubiquitous in today’s society. Many scholars have speculated on the reasons for their massive success. Yet we haven’t considered the most basic questions: Why do computer games exist? What specific circumstances led to the creation of this entirely new type of game? What sorts of knowledge facilitated the requisite technological and institutional transformations?

With Computer Game Worlds, Claus Pias sets out to answer these questions. Tracing computer games from their earliest forms to the unstoppable commercial and cultural phenomena they have become today, Pias then provides a careful epistemological reconstruction of the process of playing games, both at computers and by computers themselves. The book makes a valuable theoretical contribution to the ongoing discussion about computer games.

 

Media is a kind of gatekeeper, connecting disparate entities and shielding them from one another at the same time. When we speak of media, we often refer to those entities themselves—to persons, organizations, artifacts, signals, and inscriptions—referencing directors, artists, newspapers, films, iPhones, paper, ink, notes, beats, color, and soundwaves. But as the middle or between, the essence of media itself seems to be distributed across the mix of entities involved, and its location and agency are hard to pin down.

This new anthology takes stock of our empirical and historical understanding of the two-sided nature of media and tracks the recent turn in media studies to examining practice itself. A unique discussion of the intersection of media theory and practice theory, Connect and Divide explores how distributions of knowledge, labor, and power may be hidden in what remains untraceable about media, shedding vital light on the social implications of media theory today.

Les chaînes privées allemandes ne sont pas vraiment réputées pour le niveau élevé des débats qu’elles diffusent; la surprise est d’autant plus grande pour le zappeur qui, aux alentours de minuit, tombe sur ce genre de phrases : « La superstition économique est un peu comme l’éventail des vertus bourgeoises » ou « Les solutions se trouvent toujours dans la rue, dans le trafic. » Aucun doute : il s’agit d’une des émissions culturelles les plus remarquables – au sens plein du mot – d’Alexander Kluge. Kluge a trouvé en Joseph Vogl un partenaire idéal pour sa technique d’interview si caractéristique. Le résultat de cette passion commune, ce sont plus de 40 interviews télévisuelles qui renouvellent le genre en profondeur. La digression, maniée avec un talent particulier, n’y est jamais gratuite.

Alberto Giacometti’s 1934 Cube stands apart for many as atypical of the Swiss artist, the only abstract sculptural work in a wide oeuvre that otherwise had as its objective the exploration of reality.
           
With The Cube and the Face, renowned French art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman has conducted a careful analysis of Cube, consulting the artist’s sketches, etchings, texts, and other sculptural works in the years just before and after Cube was created. Cube, he finds, is indeed exceptional—a work without clear stylistic kinship to the works that came before or after it. At the same time, Didi-Huberman shows, Cube marks the transition between the artist’s surrealist and realist phases and contains many elements of Giacometti’s aesthetic consciousness, including his interest in dimensionality, the relation of the body to geometry, and the portrait—or what Didi-Huberman terms “abstract anthropomorphism.” Drawing on Freud, Bataille, Leiris, and others Giacometti counted as influence, Didi-Huberman presents fans and collectors of Giacometti’s art with a new approach to transitional work.

Between 1946 and 1953, the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation sponsored a series of conferences aiming to bring together a diverse, interdisciplinary community of scholars and researchers who would join forces to lay the groundwork for the new science of cybernetics. These conferences, known as the Macy conferences, constituted a landmark for the field. They were the first to grapple with new terms such as information and feedback and to develop a cohesive and broadly applicable theory of systems that would become equally applicable to living beings and machines, economic and cognitive processes, and many scholarly disciplines. The concepts that emerged from the conferences come to permeate thinking in many fields, including biology, neurology, sociology, ecology, economics, politics, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and computer science.

This book contains the complete transcripts of all ten Macy conferences and the guidelines for the conference proceedings. These transcripts are supplemented with an introduction by Claus Pias that charts the significance of the Macy conferences to the history of science.