18:30 Timothy Druckrey – Re-thinking Games

Re-thinking Games
The typical notion of computer games is that they provide a multi-dimensional ‘narrative’ into performativity and agency. Instead, these game forms (in such a complex historical framework) come to elide reflection in favor of feverish engagement. In the game ‘alienation’ comes as a substitute for agency and collapses the world for its model in which consequence is abandoned or dismissed in favor of some vague ‘victory’ over the algorithm. Yet the game provides a decisive convergence where the cinema and the ‘special effect’(in Norman Klein’s terms) merge into a perverse cathexis.
    This talk will present a film that attempts to re-enliven the computer game as a resource for environments that are a charged by their artificiality as for their possibility!

Timothy Druckrey is Director of the Graduate Photographic and Electronic Media program at the Maryland Institute, College of Art. He also works as a curator, writer, and editor living in New York City. He lectures internationally about the social impact of photography, electronic media, the transformation of representation, and communication in interactive and networked environments.
    He co-organized the international symposium Ideologies of Technology at the Dia Center of the Arts and co-edited the book Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology (Bay Press). He also co-curated the exhibition Iterations: The New Image at the International Center of Photography and edited the book by the same name published by MIT Press. He edited Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation and is Series Editor for Electronic Culture: History, Theory, Practice  published by MIT Press. These books now include Ars Electronica: Facing the Future, net_condition: art and global media (with Peter Weibel), Geert Lovink’s, Dark Fiber, and Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film (edited by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel), Stelarc: The Monograph (edited by Marquard Smith), Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Siegfried Zielinski). Recent exhibitions he has curated include Bits and Pieces, Critical Conditions and co-curated New Media Beijing (2006).  He has been Guest Professor at the University of Applied Art, Vienna (2004) and Richard Koopman Distinguished Chair for the Visual Arts at the University of Hartford (2005).