ABSTRACT: This article develops a phenomenological account of videogame embodiment to theorize how players experience virtual space. Drawing from the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, contemporary media theory, and player discourse surrounding Counter-Strike 's (Valve Corporation, 2000–) movement mechanics, the article argues that virtual spatiality emerges from a technically mediated sense of virtual embodiment rather than from primarily visual correspondence. The article positions videogame skill as constitutive of this sensuous engagement with computation and concludes with a consideration of how this understanding of videogame embodiment helps us appreciate the meaningfulness of videogame play.
ABSTRACT: This article presents the work of two computer scientists working at MIT in the 1970s, Seymour Papert and Joseph Weizenbaum. Both were early pioneers of artificial intelligence (AI) in the 1960s, came to criticize the AI program, and resisted the tendency of computers to expand the empire of instrumental reason. And yet they disagreed bitterly. I elucidate this disagreement by noting a rhyme between Weizenbaum and Papert and Frankfurt School thinkers foundational to film and media theory: Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, respectively. I also propose a new way to understand the salience of the Frankfurt School in the 1970s, arguing it is in part driven by concerns about the increasing computerization of society.
ABSTRACT: On the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of Věra Chytilová's Sedmikrásky ( Daisies , 1966), this article presents six new takes on Chytilová's anarchic classic. We approach the film from differing perspectives: as part of an unruly feminism that extends from early cinema to the present, in dialogue with Georges Méliès's trick cinema, as an expression of Cold War-era anxieties about destruction, via the film's reception in the United States, as an example of socialist women's cinema, and as a reference point for Charli XCX's Brat (2024).
ABSTRACT: This article examines how film criticism functions in an algorithmic culture, in particular the role that film review aggregators play in debates around diversity in contemporary screen culture. In an age of aggregators, dominant reviewer sites such as Rotten Tomatoes can unduly influence audience behavior. Into this space have appeared newer sites such as CherryPicks, which only aggregates reviews by women and non-binary critics, and social media platforms such as Letterboxd, where users create lists to counter a depersonalizing system of aggregation. This article surveys these sites in turn, examining how they are implicated in the push toward greater equality in the screen industries.
ABSTRACT: This article explores visual displeasure as an aesthetic form in cinema that can productively facilitate trans spectatorships. It questions the aesthetic systems designed to produce cisnormative visual pleasure, which reduce trans images to palatability and entertainment value. Drawing on Rainer Werner Fassbinder's In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden ( In a Year of 13 Moons , 1978) and Ester Martin Bergsmark's Nånting måste gå sönder ( Something Must Break , 2014), I argue that the aesthetics of visual displeasure in both films cultivate novel ways of looking at trans images in cinema through their visually disturbing content and confrontational styles.
