Under the Mask: Perspectives on the Gamer Conference – University of Bedfordshire, Luton – 13 June 2012
Under the Mask: Perspectives on the Gamer Conference
Wednesday 13th June 2012
Research Institute for Media, Art and Design
University of Bedfordshire
Luton Campus, Park Square
Luton
Bedfordshire, UK
Under the Mask: Perspectives on the Gamer enters its 5th year as a conference focused upon questions concerning the player. With current debates in the Games Studies considering the effect of gamification upon our conceptions of work and leisure, the increasing prominence of pervasive gaming, location-based gaming and ARGs, and the validity of procedurality as an analytical approach versus more player-centric models, such inquiries seem more pertinent than ever before. Under the Mask is a conference dedicated to understanding the many facets of the player; the psychological, political, social, cultural and historical aspects of the user and their interactions with both games (analog and digital) and the wider culture.
Under the Mask is organized by the University of Bedfordshire, UK, in association with the University of Hertfordshire, UK and the Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. This year’s keynote will be provided by DiGRA Vice-President Dr. Esther MacCallum-Stewart.
Possible conference topics include (but are not limited to):
• How is gaming situated within, and informed by, the player’s everyday life?
• Procedurality versus the player; is it really a versus scenario?
• Gamification and its potential benefits and impediments.
• What theoretical perspectives are most productive? What are their limitations?
• What consequences are there to the increasing surveillance of players within online games?
• What role does sex and gender assume in game culture and community?
• Are there consequences of play for gamers, psychologically, politically, socially and culturally?
• The impact (or lack thereof) of gamer culture on traditional institutions, such as governments, NGOs, commercial and statutory institutions.
Call for papers:
• New methodologies or adapted methodologies for studying the player;
• Case studies of users in social settings;
• Case studies of social networking, gamification and alternate reality gaming;
• Case studies of the relationship between gender and games;
• Case studies of gamers in competitive/professional settings;
• Case studies of government, NGO and mainstream institutional gaming;
• Methodologies relating to Psychoanalysis and Analytical Psychology;
• Genre and its relation to player performance;
• The role of professional, casual and social gaming within game culture and
• Presentations/Analyses of fan fiction and fan art.
Abstracts of 250 words, accompanied by contact details and a brief biography to be received by the 16th March 2012 to: utmgamer@gmail.com
Call for Practice Proposals
As part of the conference, we are keen to support the practice of making games and game-related artefacts. If you have a game proposal you would like to run at the conference, or have any projects, works in progress, etc. you would like to display/have people play on the day, we would like to hear from you.
The deadline for practice-based submissions is 2nd May 2012. We will discuss submissions with you on a rolling basis up until this date.
Please email submissions to utmgamer@gmail.com
For further information, please go to:
http://underthemask.wikidot.com
Conference Organizers
Prof Luke Hockley
Steven Conway
Alison Gazzard
Gavin Stewart
Contact Details
c/o Gavin Stewart
A105
School of Media, Art & Design
University of Bedfordshire
Park Square
Luton
LU1 3JU
Being Social Exhibition at new Furtherfield Gallery in Finsbury Park, London – 25 February 2012
Furtherfield Gallery Opens in the Heart of Finsbury Park
Join us for Being Social, our opening exhibition of contemporary artworks that explore how our lives – personal and political – are being shaped by digital technologies.
Furtherfield has established an international reputation as London’s first gallery for networked media art since 2004. With this exciting move to a more public space we invite the public, artists and techies – amateurs, professionals, celebrated stars and private enthusiasts – to engage with local and global, everyday and epic themes in a process of imaginative collaboration and exchange.
Saturday 25 February 2012
1-4pm
Furtherfield Gallery
McKenzie Pavilion, Finsbury Park
London, N4 2NQ
T: +44 (0) 208 802 2827
E: info@ furtherfield.org
W: www.furtherfield.org/gallery
Dress code: sociable
Please RSVP by 17 February 2012 to info@furtherfield.org
For more information please download the press release (313kb)
http://www.furtherfield.org/gallery-files/Being-Social-Furtherfield-gallery-launch-press-release.pdf
or contact Alessandra Scapin on +44 (0) 2088022827 or ale@furtherfield.org
Furtherfield – A living, breathing, thriving network
http://www.furtherfield.org – for art, technology and social change since 1997
Professor Sue Thomas – The Future of Cyberspace, Leicester UK, 30 November 2011, 6pm
De Montfort University’s Professorial Lecture Series 2011
The Future of Cyberspace
A lecture by Sue Thomas, Professor of New Media
Wednesday 30 November 2011
You are warmly invited to join us for a lecture by Sue Thomas, Professor of New Media at De Montfort University. The lecture is part of the university’s Professorial Lecture Series for 2011, showcasing and celebrating the academic activities of the university’s professors.
The lecture on Wednesday 30 November will start at 6pm and takes place in our Hugh Aston Building. Tea and coffee will be served before the lecture and a drinks reception will follow the lecture.
Parking will be available at our visitor car park and directions can be found at http://www.dmu.ac.uk/aboutdmu/campuses/maps/leic_campus.jsp
This lecture will explore the evolution of the landscape of cyberspace from its creation as an unpopulated wilderness through its exploration, colonisation, cultivation, settlement and growth, and offers some predictions for the future of this most exotic place.
Sue Thomas is Professor of New Media at the Institute of Creative Technologies in the Faculty of Art, Design and Humanities. She has written several books including the novel ‘Correspondence’, short-listed for the 1992 Arthur C Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and most recently the 2004 non-fiction cyberspace travelogue ‘Hello World: travels in virtuality’. She has written about computers and the internet since the 1980s and is now working on ‘Nature and Cyberspace: Stories, Memes and Metaphors’, a study of the relationships between cyberspace and the natural world, forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic. She co-directs the influential Transliteracy Research Group and the DMU Transdisciplinary Group, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Further information about this lecture and others in the series can be found at www.dmu.ac.uk/events
Places for the lecture must be booked by contacting the Events Office on 0116 257 7452 or via email: eventsoffice@dmu.ac.uk. Alternatively, places can be booked online at www.dmu.ac.uk/events. There are limited places available, so if you are interested, do please book early to avoid disappointment.
New Multimedia Tools for Electroacoustic Music Analysis symposium – Leicester, 5 November 2011
As part of the AHRC funded project ‘New Multimedia Tools for Electroacoustic Music Analysis’ directed by Simon Emmerson and Leigh Landy (Music, Technology and Innovation – De Montfort University, Leicester) -
Symposia 2011-2012
Symposium 1: Saturday 5 November 2011
Theme: what do we want from analysis of electroacoustic music and how might we get it?
Location: Institute of Creative Technologies, Gateway Street, Leicester
http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/info/contact.html
Time: 10.30-17.30
Chair: Simon Emmerson
Keynote: Michael Clarke (University of Huddersfield)
This is no ordinary Symposium. Invited speakers will give 10 minute (max) presentations with one slide (if needed); there will be much more time for discussion; the field has been divided into arbitrary cliché genres; we must start somewhere and these may well be critiqued; such as – post-concrète and the acousmatics; soundscape and real world reference; glitch, hacking, failure aesthetics; sound art, installation and the site-specific; algorithmic and interactive; live instrumental (mixed and live electronics); live post-instrumental (hardware hacking, found and constructed instruments); electronica/IDM related; audio in computer games; discourse analysis – any others?
Contributors include: Simon Emmerson, Leigh Landy, Pierre Couprie, Mike Gatt, John Dack, Katharine Norman, Owen Green, Manuella Blackburn, Andrew Hugill, John Young, Pete Batchelor, John Richards, Bret Battey, Neal Spowage, Ben Ramsay, Panos Amelides, Katerina Tzedaki, Simon Atkinson – and more
In an afternoon session Pierre Couprie will give a demonstration of the first beta version of the project software ‘EAnalysis’ and Mike Gatt will report on the wiki OREMA project he has created.
While entry is free and open, spaces are limited and should be booked -please email s.emmerson@dmu.ac.uk to register (not the IOCT please). Your participation assumes you are happy to be recorded.
Further details will be available one week before the symposium.
Bath Time by David Soden – Fabrika, Leicester, UK – 28 September 2011
http://interactgallery.co.uk/honest-dave—bath-time-at-fabri.html
Bath Time is a one day exhibition on wed 28th sept as part of my Major Project for the MA in Creative Tech.
Showing at the new Interact Gallery in Fabrika, 68-70 Humberstone Gate, Leicester, LE1 3PL
An interactive moving image piece where reality tv meets portrait gallery.
Exhibition open from midday with drinks and talk at 7pm
Feel free to come and help “test the water”
Dave
Be Your Own Souvenir – Old St, London – 23/24 September 2011 #digitalart @alphavillefest
Create a statue of yourself with kinect and 3D printers in the streets of Hackney
Red Market, Old Street (ex-foundry )
PRIX ARS ELECTRONICA 2011
International Competition for CyberArts
Honorary Mention
Be Your Own Souvenir connects street users, arts and science, linking them to under-lying alternative spaces and their own realities. The audience are released from established roles in a perspective exchange: spectator-performer, artist-tourist, observer-object.
blablabLAB
ES, 2010-1
Be Your Own Souvenir connects street users, arts and science, linking them to under-lying alternative spaces and their own realities. The audience are released from established roles in a perspective exchange: spectator-performer, artist-tourist, observer-object.
The user is both producer and consumer in this unique art installation and project. Be Your Own Souvenir invites the viewer to perform the role of and become a human statue, with a free personal souvenir as a reward: a small figurine of the participant, printed three-dimensionally from a volumetric reconstruction of their form, generated by the use of a structured light scanner.blablabLAB is a collaborative collective structured around transdisciplinary collaboration. They imagine strategies and create tools to make society face its complex reality (urban, technological, alienated and hyper-consumerist). It works without preset formats, approaching the knowledge generation, property and diffusion of it.
www.byos.blablablab.org
Fri 23rd: 16:00-20:00 in Shoreditch, Redmarket Square (Behind old Foundry)
Sat 24th: 16:00-20:00 in Shoreditch, Redmarket Square (Behind old Foundry)
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