JISCMail - MECCSA Archives

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