Aden Evens: Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience (2005)

As record collectors and file swappers know, the experience of music—making it, marketing it, listening to it—relies heavily on technology. From the viola that amplifies the vibrations of a string to the CD player that turns digital bits into varying voltage, music and technology are deeply intertwined.

What was gained—or lost—when compact discs replaced vinyl as the mass-market medium? What unique creative input does the musician bring to the music, and what contribution is made by the instrument? Do digital synthesizers offer unlimited range of sonic potential, or do their push-button interfaces and acoustical models lead to cookie-cutter productions? Through this interrogation of sound and technology, Aden Evens provides an acute consideration of how music becomes sensible, advancing original variations on the themes of creativity and habit, analog and digital technologies, and improvisation and repetition.

Sound Ideas reinvents the philosophy of music in a way that encompasses traditional aspects of musicology, avant-garde explorations of music’s relation to noise and silence, and the consequences of digitization.

Published by University of Minnesota Press, 2005
ISBN 081664537X, 9780816645374
203 pages

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Doug Ashford + Naeem Mohaiemen: Collectives in Atomised Time (2008)

The endless debates of art vs. politics; reportage vs. agitprop vs. poetics; what is and isn’t art. My feeling is that the specific reality within which our Visible Collective project formed, operated, and ended, were very specific to the 00’s. Even the way in which we quickly became commodified within an uber-category of “collective art practices” is specific to an over-heated market. The context within which Group Material worked was different, and the results were….?

Published by: IDENSITAT Contemporary Art Association, Spain, 2008
Cover image by Fred Askew

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Hilde Corneliussen, Jill Walker Rettberg (eds.): Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader (2008)

World of Warcraft is the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), with (as of March 2007) more than eight million active subscribers across Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia, who play the game an astonishing average of twenty hours a week. This book examines the complexity of World of Warcraft from a variety of perspectives, exploring the cultural and social implications of the proliferation of ever more complex digital gameworlds. The contributors have immersed themselves in the World of Warcraft universe, spending hundreds of hours as players (leading guilds and raids, exploring moneymaking possibilities in the in-game auction house, playing different factions, races, and classes), conducting interviews, and studying the game design–as created by Blizzard Entertainment, the game’s developer, and as modified by player-created user interfaces. The analyses they offer are based on both the firsthand experience of being a resident of Azeroth and the data they have gathered and interpreted.

The contributors examine the ways that gameworlds reflect the real world–exploring such topics as World of Warcraft as a “capitalist fairytale” and the game’s construction of gender; the cohesiveness of the gameworld in terms of geography, mythology, narrative, and the treatment of death as a temporary state; aspects of play, including “deviant strategies” perhaps not in line with the intentions of the designers; and character–both players’ identification with their characters and the game’s culture of naming characters. The varied perspectives of the contributors–who come from such fields as game studies, textual analysis, gender studies, and postcolonial studies–reflect the breadth and vitality of current interest in MMOGs.

Contributors: Espen Aarseth, Hilde G. Corneliussen, Charlotte Hagstrom, Lisbeth Klastrup, Tanya Krzywinska, Jessica Langer, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Torill Elvira Mortensen, Jill Walker Rettberg, Scott Rettberg, T. L. Taylor, Ragnhild Tronstad.

Published by MIT Press, 2008
ISBN 0262033704, 9780262033701
336 pages

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