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The Media Arts Royall Holloway University of London Digital Research Series 2020 organized by Dr. Alfie Brown starts tomorrow. All events are at Royal Holloway, Bedford Square, London, at 5.30pm Wednesday January 29th – Dr Rob Gallagher (RHUL) - Ludic Lives: Making Sense of Auto/Biographical Videogames (Room 0-03) Over the last decade DIY, indie and avant-garde developers have reimagined the videogame as a vehicle for individual life stories and personal experiences. Where many critics have hailed this ‘ludobiographical turn’ as a sign of the medium’s growing maturity, this talk questions the assumption that personal games are inherently progressive - while also highlighting some of the more radical work happening at the intersection of game design and life writing. Wednesday March 11th – Dr Jacob Johanssen (St Mary’s) - Incels, the Manosphere and Male Fantasies (Room 1-03) This talk presents analyses of the Manosphere, a clustering of misogynistic online communities that are often in close proximity to the ‘alt-right’. I will focus on the Incel community and present some exemplary discourses from a Reddit forum by drawing on the German cultural theorist Klaus Theweleit and his two volumes Male Fantasies (Theweleit 1987, 1989). Theweleit drew on psychoanalysis to analyse the male fantasies of the Freikorps soldiers during the Weimar Republic and what they thought of women and fe/male bodies. I then draw parallels between Incels and the male soldiers. Wednesday March 25th – Dr James Smith (RHUL) - The Logged-Off Left (Room 1-03) The digital sphere has produced and encouraged entirely new forms of psychology, feeling, and desire. Notoriously, the right has been fast to experiment with and embrace these new states of feeling, from its ‘official’ social media campaigning, to its weird online subcultures. The left, while responding with its own remarkable culture of memes, app-based campaigning, and digital organising, has arguably been slower to recognise the potential specifically in the new psychological states produced by the digital moment. Smith will update arguments made in Other People’s Politics: Populism to Corbynism and Work Want Work: Labour and Desire at the End of Capitalism (with Mareile Pfannebecker) to reframe the question of psychology, the digital, and left-wing politics. Wednesday April 15th – Isabel Millar (Kingston) – Do You Want My (Speaking) Body? Sexbots and Psychoanalysis (Room 1-03) What is now almost a cliché in psychoanalytic circles - 'the non-existent sexual relation' - has found its mundane silicone expression in the sexbot industry. But whilst the creation of fantasy objects endowed with basic AI applications may pose obvious ethical questions, we must be careful to attend to the psychoanalytic implications of the concept of the sexbot more philosophically. In order to do so, this talk will introduce some of the novel theoretical dimensions that the sexbot embodies under the rubric of the 'Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence' from which this study emerges. Wednesday April 29th – Dr Esther Wright (Warwick) - Rockstar Games as American Historian (Room 1- 03) For two decades, Rockstar Games have been developing and publishing video games that interrogate and (re)mediate aspects of American society and culture, past and present, to critical acclaim and fan dedication. A developer with a proclivity for selling ‘Americana’ to players, Rockstar has been afforded the status of cultural historian by critics and fans alike. This talk will discuss the kind of American history Rockstar have been creating through franchises like Grand Theft Auto (1997-), Red Dead Redemption (2010-), and L.A. Noire (2011), and the company’s performance of the role of historian through promotional materials designed to anticipate the release of these deliberately historical titles. Dr Alfie Bown Lecturer in Digital Media Culture and Technology Media Arts Arts Building – G9 Royal Holloway University of London Recent books: The Playstation Dreamworld<http://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509518029> (Polity, 2017), In the Event of Laughter<https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/in-the-event-of-laughter-9781501342646/> (Bloomsbury, 2018), Post-Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production<https://punctumbooks.com/titles/post-memes-seizing-the-memes-of-production/> (Punctum, 2019) -------------------------------------------------------- MeCCSA mailing list -------------------------------------------------------- To manage your subscription or unsubscribe from the MECCSA list, please visit: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=MECCSA&A=1 ------------------------------------------------------- MeCCSA is the subject association for the field of media, communication and cultural studies in UK Higher Education. 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