invisible belfast was a research-driven indie alternate reality game (ARG) that ran for 6 weeks during the spring of 2011 in Belfast and was subsequently adapted, 5 years later into a fictional ...documentary for BBC Radio 4. The ARG is a participatory and dispersed narrative, which the audience play through. The text expands outward across both physical and digital platforms to create a mystery for the players using everyday platforms. The ARG is a product of media convergence and at its heart transmedial, defined by its complexity and modes of participation. The fictional radio documentary which remediated the ARG into a more simple linear structure, but possibly a more complex narrative form, retells parts of the story for new audiences. The premise of invisible belfast – the game and later the documentary – is itself an adaptation of writer Ciaran Carson’s novel The Star Factory (1997): a postmodern adventure through the complex psychogeography of Belfast. A trail through the labyrinthine text, which paints the history of Belfast in poetic prose. This article will map the concept’s journey from novel to game to radio, contextualising its development within its political and urban landscape and charting the remediation of the narratives as they fold out across multiple media and complex story arches. The article will draw together ideas from previous publications on ARG, transmediality and complex textualities from the authors and reflect on the textual trajectories that the remediation of the narrative has taken from the original book, through the ARG, into the radio documentary. Building upon recent approaches from environmental philosopher Tim Morton and games theorist Ian Bogost, the authors argue that Belfast’s history propels medial adaptations of a particular kind, characterised by a ‘flat’ ontology of space and time and a sort of diffuse and dark urban experience for designers/producers and players/listeners.
The lurker in the object Rose, Alexander S.
Consumption, markets and culture,
20/5/3/, Letnik:
23, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
A peculiar note from a neighbor of a consumer culture theorist stationed at Miskatonic University who has gone missing arrives for you. The Arkham police have tasked the neighbor with sorting out ...some seemingly-incoherent academic notes left behind by the professor. In particular, they have tasked him with reaching out to you in order to determine the meaning of a peculiar phrase, "the lurker waits in the object" scrawled into the missing professor's desk. The notes concern several topics, but seem, in the neighbor's opinion, to revolve around object-oriented ontology, horror reality, genre horror, and information by allusion. The neighbor emphasizes that the missing professor may have suffered some mental illness or other tragedy, but has no other viable leads aside from the phrase and notes and begs your expert advice on the topic.
This article covers three objections I have to Hilan Bensusan's otherwise interesting book Indexicalism: Realism and the Metaphysics of Paradox. First, I assess Bensusan's fruitful combination of the ...philosophies of Whitehead and Levinas and point to some small problems with the way this is done. Second, I respond to his critique of my own philosophical position, object-oriented ontology (OOO). Third, I review his allegiance to the "multinaturalist" position of Bruno Latour, Philippe Descola, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, challenging the idea that specific ontologies can be correlated with particular political results. KEYWORDS: Bensusan; Object-oriented ontology (OOO); Multinaturalism
This paper examines visual texts by the Sri Lankan artist S. P. Pushpakanthan, whose art is positioned at the intersection between the effects of war and its material effect on objects. Two research ...questions frame this paper: what knowledge(s) about violence do Pushpakanthan's texts produce as reflecting, reflected objects? how do these texts challenge anthropocentric views of objects and violence and create an esthetics of the "democracy of objects," as Levi Bryant would put it? To answer the first, I turn to what Steven Miller has called "violence worse than death." Miller proposes that violence targets more than the death of a single, delimited life, and sees violence as being directed toward the totality of the living and non-living world. To answer the second, I draw on Object-Oriented Ontology, implied closely by the artist's own description of his work as being about the "ontology of the object." In Pushpakanthan's art, objects function as a visual coda for violence; they are traces, not only of the immediacy of killing, but the totality of the violence against all things. The esthetics of such an ontology is a formal reflection of the affective effects of violence of war that destroys much more than mere life.
Abstract
De-anthropocentrism is the leitmotif of philosophy in the twenty-first century, encouraging diverse and competing thoughts as to how this goal may be achieved. This article argues that the ...method by which we may achieve de-anthropocentrism is ethical rather than metaphysical – it must involve a creation of the self, rather than an interpretation of the given human conditions. Through engagements with the thought of Nietzsche, Levinas, and Foucault, and a close reading of Baudelaire’s poem “La Beauté,” I will illustrate three ethical commitments essential to de-anthropocentrism: to abandon the claim to knowledge associated with human reason, to remain in perpetual quest of an object, and to transgress the given perceptual structure through aesthetic experience. In contrast to Kantian philosophy built upon universal human reason, art is the ethical arena where each artist creates their own way to relate to the object, while de-anthropocentrism occurs – this article argues – when the artist includes the self as the field of creation. Object-Oriented Ontology in my assessment is the only branch of philosophy that truly achieves de-anthropocentrism.
Religion is often taught as a topic within culture and scholars have increasingly argued alongside J. Z. Smith's position that religion cannot be taught as a thing-in-itself. This essay not only ...challenges that assumption, but it also addresses how religion can be taught and understood as a nonhuman entity outside of thought and in-itself. Within the developing literature about material religion, this essay will use Graham Harman's object-oriented ontology to theorize about learning how one might teach religion as an agentic thing-in-itself. Harman's unique speculative philosophy enables teaching to embrace material religion and things as agents, while creating a framework of assemblages and a social ontology to express the modern academic nature of "religion." This is an argument for teaching religion as religion, while emphasizing diversity, pluralism, and the nonhuman world of religion.
This brief paper has basically two aims. First, it intends to introduce object-oriented ontology (OOO), a branch of contemporary thought which regards everything as an individual “object” of equal ...standing, as a potentially effective theoretical framework to examine a literary text, especially in order to explore the complexity of interactions between/among both human and nonhuman objects on a horizontal plane. Second, it analyzes how the narrator of A Tour on the Prairies, one of the long-neglected texts of Washington Irving, gradually begins to question the naive human/object binary and broadens his horizons through an encounter with another object. Specifically, I examined a series of the contacts which the narrator makes with buffaloes, and then demonstrated how he, though taking a naïve, human-centered schema in the beginning, gradually attains the liberal perspective through the recognition that the object before him is a being that is ontologically equal with him. I concluded the argument by attesting that the text, albeit in a gentle manner, invited us to see the world and existences in it with a more liberal—i.e. object-oriented—perspective.
The main idea of the article is to show how the concept of faith could resolve problem, which is created in modern ontologies. Under the term «modern ontologies» we understand concepts of Latour ...(ANT), Harman and Meillassoux (speculative realism), Kerimov and Krasavin (heterology). Within the framework of these ontologies, the world is described as a field of unexpected connections between equivalent entities. New participants and relationships are produced and changed by the process of that interaction. The world and its laws are contingent, they can change, and change at any time. Modern ontologies put us in front of an absolutely unknown future and deny certainty in predictions or calculations. Science is no longer able to predict the changes taking place in the world, society, and our identities due to the process of the world's permanent creation from the connections between a multitude of equal participants. As a result, we have a practical problem: it is not clear how to act reasonably in the world, which constantly gets out of control. Therefore, it is necessary to find ways of correlating our actions or our way of living with being given as «any being». The concept of faith brings us closer to the solution of this problem. Based on model of faith of Kierkegaard, James, Derrida, and Bishop, we can treat faith as practical attitude to any future. Faith is an act or activity, which correlate with the object of faith. Faith has a practical nature. And in the same time, faith implies acceptance of any future as a value and a blessing.
In this essay I scrutinize the non-anthropocentric discourses used by the social sciences and humanities narratives and critiques of the Anthropocene. Although not always predominant within the ...academic Anthropocene debate, such discursive strands remain politically and ethically inspiring and influential in that debate and for the public discourse concerning the epoch. I stress that these discourses inherit the hope for human progress that characterizes critical theory of the Frankfurt school, i.e. ‘critical hope’, a type of hope that renders the non-anthropocentric discourses self-contradictory. Even when they manage to escape the hold of critical hope, these discourses, I argue, suffer from ethical and political failings due to their inherent lack of focus on human–human relations and largely ahistorical nature. I conclude the essay by advocating an Anthropocene archaeology that remains critical of and learns from the ethical and political shortcomings of non-anthropocentric perspectives and making a related call for a slow archaeology of the Anthropocene.
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