NEW MEDIA CAUCUS CAA 2014 CHICAGO PANEL

Panel Title: Exaptation and the Digital Now Panel Abstract: Evolution is a dominant metaphor for thinking about and describing the processes of new technologies; we believe 'exaptation' [1] offers a more productive, nuanced approach to questions of adaptation and co-option that surround digital media. The term evolution necessarily evokes narratives of progress that cannot account for the ways technologies branch out, or are reused, misused and abused across communities and networks. Exaptation offers a way to think about digital culture as not ever-newer, ever-faster, ever-more-seamless, but rather as something that must always negotiate its own noisy history. Yesterdays incipient hardware becomes the ordering mechanism of todays cultural affects: a complex renewal that calls into question established notions of utility, value and engendered experience. This panel will mix approaches of theory and practice to best reflect on the varied applications and articulations of digital exaptation. Papers will be organised around the following themes: holograms, art games, videogame hardware, and media time.
[1]

When an adaptation shaped by natural selection, or a character whose origin cannot be ascribed to the direct action of natural selection, is coopted for a novel use. (Gould, S.J., & E.S. Vrba. Exaptation; a Missing Term in the Science of Form. Paleobiology 8, no. 1 (Jan 1, 1982): 415.)

Panelists and Paper Synopses Zara Dinnen (Birkbeck, University of London) Hollaback: holographic exaptation At the 2012 Coachella festival, deceased rapper Tupac Shakur was resurrected; as a simulated hologram. Holograms are 3D images first conceived in 1947. Early holographic images were described in terms of scientific progress: Holography evinced the future (Johnston 2008). Today, when immersive virtual environments and sophisticated 3D effects offer simulated 3D imagery at home, what is the relevance of holograms? Taking into account the Tupac appearance, and holograms in recent American fiction, this paper considers how a bygone scientific marvel might now function as a metaphorical gesture away from simulation, toward a strangely resistant optical matter. Rob Gallagher (London Consortium) Exaptation, Interpretation, PlayStation The sequential numbering of successive PlayStation consoles suggests a narrative of quasi-regal succession and steady evolutionary progress. This way of understanding the PlayStation family, however, imposes false coherence and continuity onto what is, in reality, a complex web of relationships, resemblances, revisions, redundancies and repurposings, more amenable to being thought in terms of exaptation. This paper uses

Alex Myers (Bellevue University) Fire in the Hole Artgames are an example of lateral evolution within the colliding environments of art and videogames. Within the game development community there is an emerging dichotomy between formalists, those that make pure games, and zinesters, those that make impure games. This entire argument is rubbish. Artgames are neither better or worse than videogames. They are merely a sidewise development that goes its own way with little regard for high or low, formalist or informalist. Speaker 4s research focuses on breaking traditional rule-based game spaces to disrupt player expectations and create accidental meaningfulness through a discussion of his and similar artgames. Daniel Rourke (Goldsmiths, University of London) I like the glow that flashes red like our Krypton sun. But not this irritating noise. Make way. The increasing complexification of new (media) technologies connotes higher resolutions, compressed through ever greater bandwidths, towards absolute verisimilitude. But as the life sciences have shown it is in fact chance disturbances, the deficiencies implicit in the processing of all information, that code/decode events into valuable, novel futures. This paper will examine the painterly technique of datamoshing used in the viral trailer for Man of Steel (2013). It will argue that time proceeds by noise and glitch, and that rich images leave us trapped outside of time, crystallised in space like General Zod and his Kryptonian cronies.

Siren: Blood Curse, a PS3 remake of a cult PS2 game, as the occasion for an analysis not only of this nexus, but of how the technological and semiotic affordances of different digital platforms inform how and what videogames communicate.

The attached is a complete panel proposal. We will not be putting out an open call for papers as the panel has been conceived as a collaboration. Using the affordances of Google Docs we have developed the proposal and paper outlines through discussion and debate, and a record of this will itself form part of the panel as we would seek to present it at the New Media Caucus, CAA. The panel is open in its approach to the topic, working across disciplines (literature, new media, games studies, fine art), and location (US/UK).