Time is plastic. Our linear measure is man made for convenience. The oversimplification of minutes, hours, days is functional in a base utilitarian sense, yes, but fails to account for point of entry, context, point of view, the density of what is occurring in time and how it is thus experienced. Time is geometric; it also has the experiential component and this has height, width, variation and forms from point of view and processes differently with each individual. An event in time thus is not only to be measured in its variable detail, but also of its place in time. This is not a time-line.

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Hi, I’m Ian Bogost. I am a videogame researcher, critic, and designer, as well as an author and an entrepreneur. I am a professor at Georgia Tech (a university), a Founding Partner at Persuasive Games (a videogame studio), and a Board Member at Open Texture (an educational publisher).

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Not only new media art but all cultural production is political in its consequences. There is no artwork that is more or less political than any other (1). The political aspects of art do not only include content and aesthetics but also the relationships of power in which they are produced and circulated. Within the realm of traditional art production it is impossible to function on the outside as this would marginalize one’s practice. Much of new media art is criticized for positioning itself in the larger world just like formalist art of the past: passively affirmative of the status quo, not reflecting on the forces that restrict it, locked away in galleries or university labs where the majority of visitors are art professionals or academics. New media work, more often than not is heavily invested in modernist object production, and is frequently neither critical, subversive, nor especially conceptual. There is little advanced debate around new media artwork and the pieces themselves seem forever indebted in demo designs with much of it never coming into being as artworks that “work.” Here, the future of computers instead of the flaky reality of technology is sold. Occasionally media critics place all too much hope in the political potential of new media art, a demand they would not make as exclusively for traditional art practices.

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This essay is an exploration into the social issues that emerge when mobile technologies that have become increasingly locative begin to exist in public spaces. A constant thread throughout this paper is the concept of °viscosity°, where physical deformations of a locative media can also lead to social deformations of a space. In this article, I describe the antecedents to locative media along with several recent locative media projects. I will assert that the social networks and collective attention created by location-based media are also an attempt to respond to, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, a state of distraction and disconnectedness that is thought to exist in the contemporary urban life. This essay examines a thickness in space – linkages between people using external artefacts through which strangers and non-strangers alike may leave traces of themselves and communicate their desires, anxieties and histories in the shared places that they inhabit.

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CitiTag is a wireless location-based multiplayer game, designed to enhance spontaneous social interaction and novel experiences in city environments by integrating virtual presence with physical. In the first version of CitiTag you roam the city with a GPS- and WiFi-enabled iPaq PocketPC in search for players of the opposite team that you can ‘tag’. You can also get tagged yourself if one of them gets close to you. Then you need to find a friend to free you. Urban space becomes a playground and everyone is a suspect.

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The Trans-Reality Game Laboratory (TRGL) – a research laboratory specialising in the development of new game forms and technologies integrating virtual and physical modes of game play. The TRGL is a joint project bringing together game researchers from the Interactive Institute (former Zero-Game and Play studios) with researchers at Gotland University (HGO). TRGL is hosted at the Gotland University, and includes a research node within Gothenburg.

The purpose of the laboratory is to develop new and interesting game forms together with facilitating technology, laying the foundations for new cultural experiences, modes of expression and potential business opportunities. Studio outcomes include both advanced theoretical material in contemporary game research, and playable demonstrators of new game concepts.

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netzwissenschaft.de is mapping the emerging infrastructures of all (inter)net research endeavours. net.science as an anthropology of connectivity is trying to overcome the constraints of specialist method transfers on net matters. the protuberance of technical networks necessitates a professionalization of human net knowledge. neither the isolation of concepts as in basic research nor the encapsulation of processes as in applied sciences will ever be able to adequately describe the complex autopoiesis of networks. net.science is undoubtedly developing into a scienza nuova of its own right.

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