visuality

Video games have been a central feature of the cultural landscape for over twenty years and now rival older media like movies, television, and music in popularity and cultural influence. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to understand the video game as an independent medium. Most such efforts focus on the earliest generation of text-based adventures (Zork, for example) and have little to say about such visually and conceptually sophisticated games as Final Fantasy X, Shenmue, Grand Theft Auto, Halo, and The Sims, in which players inhabit elaborately detailed worlds and manipulate digital avatars with a vast—and in some cases, almost unlimited—array of actions and choices. In Gaming, Alexander Galloway instead considers the video game as a distinct cultural form that demands a new and unique interpretive framework. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, particularly critical theory and media studies, he analyzes video games as something to be played rather than as texts to be read, and traces in five concise chapters how the “algorithmic culture” created by video games intersects with theories of visuality, realism, allegory, and the avant-garde. If photographs are images and films are moving images, then, Galloway asserts, video games are best defined as actions. Using examples from more than fifty video games, Galloway constructs a classification system of action in video games, incorporating standard elements of gameplay as well as software crashes, network lags, and the use of cheats and game hacks. In subsequent chapters, he explores the overlap between the conventions of film and video games, the political and cultural implications of gaming practices, the visual environment of video games, and the status of games as an emerging cultural form. Together, these essays offer a new conception of gaming and, more broadly, of electronic culture as a whole, one that celebrates and does not lament the qualities of the digital age. (Source: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/gaming)

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the theoretical relevance of kinetic poetry for studying the interaction between language, digital media, and signifying processes. Several writers have been using digital poetry to investigate meaning production as a function of formal operations upon linguistic, computational, and other cultural codes. Interactive kinaesthesia, the main algorithmic trope examined here, enacts the temporality of writing and the temporality of reading in medium-specific forms and genres that call attention to the way their machine and human processing happens. The cinematic enactment of time in the combined motions of computer-executed code and human-activated display will be seen in digital poems by Jim Andrews. His scripts are analysed as models for specific semiotic and interpretive processes. Computer performance and reader performance become co-dependent and intertwined as an entangled field. (Source: Author's abstract at MIT Tech TV)

The essay analyzes the phenomenon of digital poems representative of the use of a visually “busy” and typographically dense aesthetic. The essay focuses on digital works, such as Spawn by Andy Campbell, Diagram Series 6 by Jim Rosenberg, and Leaved Life by Anne Frances Wysocki. The author argues that a dominant aesthetic technique of these works, which is called “visual noise,” is generated by a tactilely responsive surface in combination with visual excess. This in turn requires an physical engagement from the reader/user in order for a reading to take place.