serial consign

The last week has been quite hectic! I'm in the midst of rebuilding Vague Terrain in Drupal, exploring some exciting new opportunities and knuckling down for an impending crunch at my day job. Despite all this activity, I've been diligently working through some great writing and media. Please note the following:

• _Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_, a new blogging project by the prolific poet/theorist Mez Breeze. Mez launched Augmentology this past April and she has quickly amassed an (expectedly) idiosyncratic series of posts which explore notions of presence, identity and play across a variety of gaming and social media platforms. Mez is in the midst of expanding the scope of Augmentology by inviting a number of guest contributors to provide content for the project - these will tentatively include: Joseph Delappe, Howard Rheingold, Azdel Slade, Trevor Dodge and Shane Hilton. I've also been invited into the fold, and I am excited at the prospect of further exploring some of the themes I've touched on in my previous posts on gaming.
• Last week Mitchell Whitelaw tipped me off about Strange Ontologies in Digital Culture, a paper that he recently co-authored with Troy Innocent and Mark Guglielmetti. The essay explores the implications of social software (facebook, del.icio.us, etc.) and some of the counterintuitive percepts and phenomena made possible by immersion in digital space. I found the discussions on death in gaming and character deletion particularly engaging.
• The video archives of the recent Software Studies workshop/symposium at UCSD have been posted. The two dozen or so pecha kucha-style presentations provide an incredible window into the current research projects of numerous top shelf digital theorists and practitioners including Jordan Crandall, Warren Sack, Nick Montfort, and many others. I've only watched a few videos thus far, but I found Ian Bogost's presentation on the forthcoming Platform Studies project quite fascinating.

Régine Debatty recently posted a fantastic interview with Alessandro Ludovico on the freshly redesigned We Make Money Not Art. Ludovico is extremely active throughout the new media world as a theorist, educator and practitioner. I'm particularly fond of Neural, a magazine and companion art blog (pictured to the left) that he edits. I've been enjoying Neural for several years now and beyond the excellent art and media writing the publication also features engaging discussion and reviews of contemporary electronic music (a rarity in the digital art world).

While the entire interview is quite interesting, I was particularly stimulated by Ludovico's description of his writing project(s):

Sometimes I think of Neural as an info-gallery, the best info-gallery I'd want to read. If you want, it'd be defined as my personal narrative of the digital culture evolution, formed by important chunks of information condensed in a limited space... I always thought that the more cultural efforts (including blogs and magazines) are made to discuss (and then implicitly promote) digital culture the more we'll get out of the actual ghetto... The aim of Neural is to vehiculate meaningful ideas within local and international networks.

While I'm not sure about vehiculation, Ludovico certainly captures the spirit of collaborative, distributed art and technology writing across the net.

Alessandro Ludovico has also (co)authored several high profile projects that critique the intersection of capitalism and online culture, if you've never seen Google Will Eat Itself and Amazon Noir they are both worth spending some time with.