Remembering Pokémania: Memory, Cognitive Assemblages, and Augmented Reality

Introduced in July 2016, Pokémon GO is widely considered the killer app for contemporary augmented reality. Popular attention to the game has waned in recent years, but Pokémon GO remains enormously successful in terms of both player base and revenue generation. Whether individuals experienced the game for a short time or remain dedicated hardcore players, Pokémon GO exists as memories of time and place, imbuing familiar sites and routes with new meaning and temporal connection. Attending to these complex interrelationships of place, space, mobility, humans, technologies, infrastructures, environments, and memory, we situate Pokémon GO as what Hayles (2016) calls a cognitive assemblage—sociotechnical systems of interconnectivity in which cognition is an exteriorized process occurring across multiple levels, sites, and boundaries. In turn, we conceptualize cognition (and specifically memory) not as confined within a delimited hominid body, but instead operating through contextual relations, at multiple sites, and in a constant state of becoming. By reflecting on our own experiences as part of the distributed memory of Pokémon GO, we situate memory as momentary convergence of signals made possible by infrastructures, inscribed on servers and silicon, and made part of algorithmic suggestion and learning AI. Additionally, our own memories and experiences serve to highlight the experiential complexity of cognitive assemblages in relation to structures of feeling, as well as new temporal and spatial relations.

Matthew K. Gold and Lauren Klein, Eds., Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019

A review of Matthew K. Gold and Lauren Klein, Eds., Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. 472pp.

Potential Ideas and Other Things that Live in Your Gut

Potential Ideas and Other Things that Live in Your Gut is a survey poem built around a standard “product concept testing” structure, designed and distributed on Qualtrics software. It captures real-time feedback on a selection of eleven new poetic concepts by evaluating readers’ emotional and aesthetic response to a set of surprising biological facts about bacteria and human development.

Follow the Pathfinders: a Case Study Approach to Production, Use, and Readership on Scalar

This born-digital article examines the multimodal academic publication Pathfinders (Moulthrop and Grigar). Through a combination of interviews with readers and the author, textual analysis of the book, and literature review of Scalar, I trace the affordances of the platform, appropriation by scholars, the media text, and readership of Pathfinders. I distill themes that are key in the multimodality of the book, including platform adoption, institutional embedding, technological context and research values. Throughout the article, which is also written on Scalar, I reflect on my own use of Scalar and the various considerations that come with it in terms of software sustainability, accessibility, and transparency of research context. I conclude with a reflection on the media specificity of Scalar as an academic platform.

James J. Hodge, Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art

A review of James J. Hodge, Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. 232 pp. $27.00.

Environmental Concerns in Virtual Worlds: Interactive Experience of Ephemeral Life Beyond Borders

The Flutter of Butterflies Beyond Borders (2016) is an interactive digital installation by an interdisciplinary art collective teamLab based in Japan. The title of the artwork urges critical questions and implications such as, are the butterflies or the participants beyond the borders of digital technologies in this work? How and why are these borders shaped? If we consider the digital butterflies as the substitute for nature, who has control over nature beyond borders, digital technology, or human? The work situates the human body not only as a part of its natural environment but also as the dominant factor for shaping nature's future as well as the work's. Participants become gradually more aware of their behaviors that impact the continuity and well-being of the natural environment through the experience of intimate interaction with the artwork, particularly with their physical touch. By building a digitized nature installation, the artists create an experience not to prioritize the illusory sense of visuality but to increase and manipulate social awareness of the natural environment. This media artwork presents an exceptional and timely experience with its comments on the contemporary ecological turn through the entanglement of humans, nature, and technology.

Talking Trash: The Rhetoric of Waste Bins

There is no mythical “land of away.” We have a trash problem, and plastic is a major contributor. In 2015, we generated 34.5 million tons of municipal solid plastic waste (EPA, “National Overview”), and it is only a part of our waste. Ironically, plastic containers, from household cans to plastic liners to the large green curbside bins, held that solid waste at one time—and were soon to be their own contribution to the 3.4 million tons. The banality, opacity, and capacity of our waste bins facilitate consumer culture. Reflective design, however, can help us query our trash practices by defamiliarizing the trashcan through making its attributes and properties visible and explorable. “Talking Trash” is an act of reflective design in which I wove a waste bin from the environmental articles of various magazines. Next, I set up a Twitter account, @Talking_Trash_, to tweet about items I was placing in the bin. Then, I considered the pedagogical value of Talking Trash and similar reflective design projects in environment humanities classes. Ultimately, I argue that our trashcans engage in a rhetoric of the everyday that encourages consumer practice and waste-world-making. Talking Trash provides insight into the public and private natures of waste, the revealing and concealing our bins promote, and the affordances of materiality present in our waste bins. Talking Trash is an intervention of hope.

The Bullshit Cartoon Abstract: In Praise of Creative Academic Writing

This article introduces and discusses a novel form of scholarly output, the bullshit cartoon abstract, which can be used to illustrate summaries of fictitious research papers for both scholarly and lay readers. Presenting five self-authored examples that meticulously deal with trivial research subjects, from the use of visual mnemonics in education to disaster marketing, the article classifies these abstracts along seven dimensions (analytic, aesthetic, existential, satirical, pedagogical, recreational, and opportunistic) to illuminate how bullshit is enacted in academic writing. Building on this classification, it reappraises academic bullshit(ting) as potentially generative of new and multi-textured expressions of creative scholarship.

Biometric Poetics: The Case of Eververse

Eververse was a yearlong conceptual poetry project which used a poet’s biometric data as the basis for generating verse. This article describes the project’s conceptual contributions to the field of electronic literature and its technical development. Eververse operated by collecting biometric data from the poet with a commercial fitness tracking device; this data was sent to a custom-built poetry generator which deployed a number of processes from the domains of Natural Language Generation and Sentiment Analysis to generate poetry; the form and content of this poetry was designed to vary according to specific changes in the biometric data, resulting in a poetry that conspicuously correlated with the poet’s daily activities; this poetry was published in real-time on the project website and the full poem and associated data have now been archived. In addition to providing details on the technical implementation of Eververse, this article includes discussion that situates the work within the tradition of electronic literature and analyses its unique inscription of biometric data. The article examines that feature in the contemporary context of the quantified self, but also in its engagement with historic poetic theories of composition, creativity, and the textualisation of the body.

Tom Petty

Matthew A. Cicci examines Tom Petty’s songwriting process. Cicci’s juxtaposition of Petty's insistence that his songwriting is mystical against the artist's own back catalog of alternate takes reveals a musician who diligently revised, experimented, and understood the writing craft. Cicci sees in Petty’s dichotomy an approach to composition that is honest regardless of medium.