Embedded papercraft objects are better than embedded digital objects
Responsibility has yet to be claimed for the beautiful papercraft sculptures that have mysteriously popped…
Inscrutability and data visualization: the lost language of the khipu
While it has long been understood that the Inca khipu was an advanced thread/cord-based numerical accounting…
Posting Anonymously: The Talking Statues of Rome
Anonymity affords a kind of honesty and directness that isn’t always possible when people know who’s…
The Particle Physics Wind Chime
Earlier this year, physicist Matt Bellis helped Jen Stein, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz and me to put together…
Serendipity, ubicomp, and “over-coded smart cities”: an interview with Mark Shepard, creator of Serendipitor
Mark Shepard is an artist, architect and researcher whose post-disciplinary practice addresses new social…
Radiation cats and atomic priesthoods: the Human Interference Task Force
The question of how to mark the places where we store nuclear waste such that people in the distant future won’t…
Revel: a geolocative app with an emphasis on play and public space – call for participation
PEG-LA co-conspirator Sarah Brin is one of the coordinators of Revel, “a public invitation to participate…
Trionfi.com: a massive, rambling archive of playing and fortune cards
Trionfi.com has got to be one of the most confusing and messy websites on the whole internet. It’s also…
When games break (beautifully): the 1994 Caribbean Cup anomaly
One little change in a complex system can lead to a cascade of unpredictable outcomes. This is why play testing…
News canisters
Once upon a time, news was delivered by ship. It was a piece of cargo like any other. It took up space. It weighed…
Serendipity with an edge: A chat with Benrik about Situationist App
Situationist is an iPhone app that injects surprise and serendipity into everyday life. The app uses geolocation…
The Fluxus Performance Workbook
This collection (.pdf) of Fluxus “event scores” — instructions for performances, happenings,…
16 June 2014: Tunisian transmedia campaign
16 Juin 2014 is a participatory transmedia event that took place in February of 2011. The project engaged the…
The Lion Man of the Hohlenstein Stadel is 32,000 years old
Everything that has happened since the time of Augustus Caesar takes up only 6.25% of the time that the Lion man…
AR Drone @uscmeml
MEML got an AR Drone over the holidays… Here we are testing it in front of curious students and passersby…
Dokobots: findable, sharable virtual playthings embedded in real space
Dokobots looks to be a great little geogame, with clever mechanics that push pervasive location-based participatory…
Jeff Hull on The Games of Nonchalance: a guerrilla street war against banality and routine
In the Games of Nonchalance, participants experience a vast transmedia interactive narrative woven into the fabric of the Bay Area, following threads of story and mystery through city streets and a wide array of on- and offline media artifacts. I caught up with Jeff Hull shortly after his appearance at IndieCade.
The Antikythera Mechanism in Lego
Filmmaker John Pavlus:
This is a 2000-year-old analog computing device reconstructed out of Lego. It predicts…
Exam Area III: Interaction Design for Social Media and Pervasive Computing
This post is a part of a series covering my qualifying exam research areas. Scroll to the bottom of this post for…
Exam Area II: History and Theories of Participatory Culture and Art Practice
This post is a part of a series covering my qualifying exam research areas. Scroll to the bottom of this post for…
Exam Area I: New media spaces, or: Alternate Realities, Database Aesthetics, and the Poetics of Space
[This post is a part of a series covering my qualifying exam research areas. Scroll to the bottom of this post…
Building a database of research artifacts
This post is a part of a series covering my qualifying exam research areas. Scroll to the bottom of this post for…
Progress Report: Qualifying Examination
[TL;DR: it’s been a whole lot of reading. Skip down to Qualifying Exam Areas for a description of exactly what…
Spontaneous transmedia combustion: collaborative storytelling, Cooks Source, and the Talking Dead
Online collaborative storytelling is an idea that people seem to get excited about in waves. At the peak of a…
Transmedia: New Platforms – The Games of Nonchalance
[This post originally appeared at In Media Res as a part of the Transmedia: New Platforms theme week.]
This video…
Subtlemob creator Duncan Speakman on “framing everyday realities”
Duncan Speakman’s Subtlemob project, “As if it were the last time,” will be taking place…
Transforming space with play: an interview with David Fono of Atmosphere Industries
Atmosphere Industries is a Toronto-based cross-media design collective whose projects “combine…
Fandom Squared
My paper, “Fandom Squared,” was published this month in Transformative Works and Cultures.…
Super Mario Sidewalk Speedrun
Whoever plays such a speedrun knows the levels by heart it’s safe to say. A clear challenge in a game like this is that the frame doesn’t show you what’s a bit to the right until you’re close to it (danger). What’s nice about this piece is that it actualizes the expert player’s memorized map of these levels – laid out on a sidewalk.