First-Person Shooters, Tunnel Warfare, and the Racial Infrastructures of the US–Mexico Bordere

Digital networked media actively participate in the nation-state’s and tech entrepreneurs’ efforts to imagine and manage the borderlands. These media facilitate virtual forms of thinking about the border both by offering popular reference points for the new technology being developed (e.g. Google Maps, Pokémon Go, Call of Duty) and by providing the actual tools through which these ideas can become actionable. This article analyzes one such reference point within the first-person shooter (FPS) console game Call of Juarez: The Cartel (Ubisoft, 2011). Like other border-themed video games, The Cartel borrows on colonial tropes and ideologies by creating playable narratives that invoke the untamable frontier and position racialized subjects as Other. Through its virtual modes of representation and interaction, the game encodes the racialization processes that continue to shape popular imaginings of the border. While its digital aesthetics animate a dynamic space of possibility, the logic of the first-person shooter reins in the expansiveness of animated space by restricting it to an interactive experience of tunnel warfare, an ideological orientation to the border underground that channels the players’ purposive motion into a space of direct confrontation and racial violence. Analyzing the narrative and procedural work of this ostensibly reactionary video game demonstrates how border infrastructures structure and shape specific forms of racial and colonial violence.

Fore to Form

<p>Designing for sports equipment demands excellence. The sheer nature of competition drives athletes to achieve the unachievable. This obsession to improve shifts from the athlete to the designer. The continual development and availability of materials, technologies and processes makes the role of the designer more critical than ever. Though the one real opportunity for innovation lies in how the designer interprets and utilizes these technologies. The question that this research asks is: Can the integration and synchronisation of contemporary digital tools reshape the design process of golf clubs? This investigation predominantly uses an experimental ‘research through design’ approach based on the ideas and methods derived from a number of professional design projects and theoretical design approaches. It argues that the unique combination and application of emerging digital tools can expose a breadth of creative design opportunities for golf club design. Golf clubs, like any other sports equipment must be designed with the underlying, crucial theme of performance improvement. The term performance can be broken down into two aspects; mental (visual) and physical (functional). The criteria for these aspects changes with each individual and demands a new level of customisation. This thesis investigates how this could be achieved and proposes innovative pathways to integrate individual performance data as form defining inputs. It also explores the potential of new digital aesthetics to enhance functional criteria yet preserving critical features of traditional club design.</p>

Fore to Form

<p>Designing for sports equipment demands excellence. The sheer nature of competition drives athletes to achieve the unachievable. This obsession to improve shifts from the athlete to the designer. The continual development and availability of materials, technologies and processes makes the role of the designer more critical than ever. Though the one real opportunity for innovation lies in how the designer interprets and utilizes these technologies. The question that this research asks is: Can the integration and synchronisation of contemporary digital tools reshape the design process of golf clubs? This investigation predominantly uses an experimental ‘research through design’ approach based on the ideas and methods derived from a number of professional design projects and theoretical design approaches. It argues that the unique combination and application of emerging digital tools can expose a breadth of creative design opportunities for golf club design. Golf clubs, like any other sports equipment must be designed with the underlying, crucial theme of performance improvement. The term performance can be broken down into two aspects; mental (visual) and physical (functional). The criteria for these aspects changes with each individual and demands a new level of customisation. This thesis investigates how this could be achieved and proposes innovative pathways to integrate individual performance data as form defining inputs. It also explores the potential of new digital aesthetics to enhance functional criteria yet preserving critical features of traditional club design.</p>

Annotating Colonialism

This exhibition review essay compares three recent interventions into historic cultural representations at the American Museum of Natural History: the Digital Totem that was placed in the Northwest Coast Hall in 2016 to partially modernize its content, the 2018 reconsideration of the Old New York Diorama, which attempts to correct its stereotypical representations of Native North American peoples, and the 2019 exhibition Addressing the Statue providing context for the Theodore Roosevelt statue. Paying attention to visual and textual strategies, I characterize these three interventions as temporary annotations to what have been remarkably static, long-term cultural representations. I argue that, through these annotations, the museum acknowledges the misrepresentations but does not resolve them. The case studies show varying degrees of critical historical reflection expressing the complexities of negotiating different approaches and agendas to engaging with the museum’s past. I also comment on the pervasiveness of a digital aesthetics in all three projects, even though only the Digital Totem was produced as a digital, interactive intervention into the museum space. The invocation of a digital design vocabulary enhances the impression of annotation.

The dance of the hand: Len Lye’s direct films

Len Lye’s animation has a special relationship with physical materials and the body because of the ways he drew and scratched his images directly onto film. This article considers what is unusual about his aesthetic, with its emphasis on kinaesthetic styles of viewing and on ‘physical empathy’. Tracking Lye’s film work from the 1930s through the 1950s, it draws connections with the body-oriented aspects of abstract expressionist art. It also relates the films to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ‘embodied’ approach to phenomenology. Today Lye’s films need to be digitized, and that transfer raises interesting questions about the differences between analogue and digital aesthetics. What happens when his films move from the ‘black box’ of the cinema to the ‘white cube’ of the gallery or museum where they are digitally presented? The article also considers Lye’s kinetic sculpture as another body-oriented form of animation, in which the motor replaces the projector. His sculpture again raises questions about mixing the analogue with the digital.

“Ecoações”

The chapter title comes from the fusion of concepts “echo” and “equations.” “Ecoações” contains, from the traditions, the Algarve handmade textiles, the regional pottery, and the characteristic sounds of the customs associated with these activities; from the theater, scenography and costumes; from the fine arts, the sculpture (of the human figure) and the murals in low relief; from digital media art, soundscape, digital interaction, and video projection. In Ecoações, the scenic space invites spectators to immerse themselves in the theme and to visit another dimension of heritage traditions, presented here under a contemporary aesthetic. The installation as scenography space implies all the theatricality of the visual narrative, hearing and tactile, giving the public the opportunity to explore tradition through the various senses. This article discusses the characteristics of the installation “echoes” that bring it closer to post-digital aesthetics and heritage expression, and the challenges of combining the scenic space, the traditions, and the digital media art.

Bio-digital aesthetics as value system of post-Anthropocene architecture

It is timely within the Anthropocene era, more than ever before, to search for a non-anthropocentric mode of reasoning, and consequently designing. The PhotoSynthetica Consortium, established in 2018 and including London-based ecoLogicStudio, the Urban Morphogenesis Lab (Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London) and the Synthetic Landscape Lab (University of Innsbruck, Austria), has therefore been pursuing architecture as a research-based practice, exploring the interdependence of digital and biological intelligence in design by working directly with non-human living organisms. The research focuses on the diagrammatic capacity of these organisms in the process of growing and becoming part of complex bio-digital architectures. A key remit is training architects’ sensibility at recognising patterns of reasoning across disciplines, materialities and technological regimes, thus expanding the practice’s repertoire of aesthetic qualities. Recent developments in evolutionary psychology demonstrate that the human sense of beauty and pleasure is part of a co-evolutionary system of mind and surrounding environment. In these terms, human senses of beauty and pleasure have evolved as selection mechanisms. Cultivating and enhancing them compensate and integrate the functions of logical thinking to gain a systemic view on the planet Earth and the dramatic changes it is currently undergoing. This article seeks to illustrate, through a series of recent research projects, how a renewed appreciation of beauty in architecture has evolved into an operational tool to design and measure its actual ecological intelligence.

In and Out of Digital Humanities

This introductory chapter provides a general context for this collection, starting with the anecdotal inception of the project. It provides a list of some of the important titles in the field of digital humanities that figure prominently as academic predecessors and ponders on the consequences and implications of the digital turn in the humanities for the study of Latinx and Latin American culture. In response to the cultural hegemony of Anglocentric circles in the digital humanities, it provides ample evidence of the development and existence of the field in Latin America. Finally, it provides a brief overview of the four sections into which the book is divided: digital nations, transnational networks, digital aesthetics and practices, and interviews with Latin American DH scholars.

Code Painting in the Digital Age

Our encompassing digital world imposes a new digital aesthetics. Applied visual software, printers, etc. offer a new imagery of plastic arts. Digital possibilities lead to the delusion that they can dethrone the classical arts. Painting has brought its adaptability to the new media over time, but the modern digital era puts it under a new set of problems. Extremely material (painting) against non-material (virtual), war in territory.