[image: mccmicb]

The power of such lists is apparent in the fact that the kings of Mesopotamia regarded leaving a list inscribed on a tablet, after death, as insurance for an everlasting legacy. The Sumerian king list, a chronology of dynasties of Mesopotamian kings, is just such a document. It indicated a smooth succession of rulers, a successive rolling out of seamless historical epochs, but leaves out the bumpy bits of history, when rival Mesopotamian cities vied for control. In this way, lists can be a way of sanitizing and simplifying knowledge. As Geoffrey Bowker and Sudsan Leigh Star attest, there is always a tension between attempts at universal standardization via lists and the local circumstances of their their use.

List-making is often seen as a fundamental activity of modern society. Indeed Michel Foucault and Patrick Tort claim that the production of lists (e.g., classification of geological specimens, languages, races, animals and so on) is a defining feature of modern science. Latour argues that the main job of the bureaucrat is to construct lists that can then be shuffled around and compared. The bureaucratization of science in the nineteenth century is an important move away from science as the province of the gentleman amateur to science as bureaucratic control in the service of the empire. We can then see the connection between the nineteenth-century scientific taxonomists, collecting and organizing and measuring and ordering the world, and the ancient cuneiform lists. Both tell us what the world is and how we are to behave, therefore they tell us how to order the world and how to organize work and labour.

– Alison Adam, "Lists" in Software Studies: A Lexicon. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008. Pg. 175.

[UBERMORGEN.COM / Chinese Gold / 2005-6]

I recently received a missive from the Netherlands Media Art Institute (NIMk) regarding Space Invaders, a group exhibition exploring the "increasingly blurred boundaries between video-game space and real space" that will be opening next week. The show pulls together a range of works addressing immersion, experience and perception in gaming by Riley Harmon, Aram Bartholl, Jeremy Bailey, Yuichiro Katsumoto and many others. I don't have too much to say about the show (other than I'd like to see it) but I thought that the link to the exhibition microsite was worth passing along – it is a handy switchboard for connecting to numerous exciting art practices. An excerpt from the curatorial statement by Heather Corcoran (of FACT, Liverpool) and NIMk:

From minimalistic adventure games based on text to the detailed cities of Grand Theft Auto, which are based on the actual street plan of New York, the world of the computer game is developing to ever more realistic levels. In addition, games are presently no longer defined by progress in a literal sense—beating a field—but increasingly concentrate on creating an environment in which the player has the freedom to set out on his or her own explorations: an environment that looks and feels like the real world. Moreover, the internet has created conditions for on-line gaming, which often has still less to do with winning and losing and more with the cultivation of social communities and human networks that extend into 'real' life, like Farmville. Equipped with wireless technologies and GPS, games have abandoned a stationary existence to make their way through physical space as mobile and other available applications

The show has been framed quite cleverly, in simply addressing 'space' the curators have been able to program diverse work including Julian Oliver's tangible puzzle box levelHead, Michael Johansson's Tetris-inspired sculptures and a project on parkour-platforming by the Ludic Society. It is also fantastic to see Will Crowther and Don Woods' Colossal Cave Adventure (1977) alongside Malfunction, a new piece by indie game-artist Mark Essen – the juxtaposition highlights how the DIY origins of game development have really come full circle.

Space and gaming is a popular subject in game studies and art practices, for those interested in a general survey of this field, I'd recommend SPACE TIME PLAY (2007), undoubtedly the most comprehensive text on the subject.