Writing makes up a large part of my practice. Collected here are a selection of essays and other longform writings that focus especially on new media art, performance, and role-play aspects of Internet culture.
A good deal of my writing is available online, either linked from this page or on academia.edu.I have also worked as a book and journal editor, for example as Associate Editor for the 2007 anthology Searching for Sebald: Photography After W.G. Sebald. Earlier, I served for four years (1995-98) as guest editor for Leonardo's annual issue on the New York Digital Salon.
"'Alive in the Now': Ekphrasis in Philip K. Dick and William Gibson"
MOSF Journal of Science Fiction 2:1 (September 2017).
"Pseudo Space: Experiments with Avatarism and Telematic Performance in Social Media."
2016. Chapter in Social Media Archeology and Poetics, Judy Malloy, ed. MIT Press.
"Imposture as Improvisation."
September 2016 (print), 2013 (online). Chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Oxford University Press. George Lewis and Ben Piekut, eds.
"Social Proxies and Real-World Avatars: Impersonation as a Mode of Capitalist Production"
2015. Art Journal, Winter 2014.
"Excerpts from Reading Frankenstein: Mary Shelley as 21st Century Artificial Life Scientist."
2013, with an introduction. With Annie Loui. In Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media & Technology, Fall issue.
"Eisbergfreistadt: The Fictive and the Sublime"
2009-10. In Visual Communications Quarterly, Fall/Winter issue.
"Commentary on Demotic"
2009. For Judy Malloy's Authoring Software blog, I've written a commentary on how my mixed-reality and multimedia performance works get authored. (Scroll down for my contribution.)
"All That Is Beyond Hearing: A Life of Arturo Ott"
2007. In Searching for Sebald (Los Angeles: ICI Press).
"Combining playful self-referentiality with a deep sense of mystery and melancholy, it is by turns hilarious and troubling, and genuinely 'Sebaldian' in its unsettling power." —Jonathan Long on "All That Is Beyond Hearing"; in Source, Spring 2008.
"A Meditation on Virtual Kinesthesia"
2007. Dialogue with Robert Allen in Extensions: The Online Journal of Embodiment and Techology, v.3.
"Media Commedia"
2005. Essay on The Roman Forum Project 2003 in Leonardo 38:3. Co-authored with Robert Allen.
"SHIFT-CTRL"
May 2002. Essay on the 2000 exhibition "SHIFT-CTRL: Computers, Games, and Art" at the Beall Center for Art and Technology, Irvine, CA. Co-authored with Robert Nideffer. Leonardo 35:1.
"Marcel Duchamp and the Museum of Forgery"
January 2002. Essay published in Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, Vol. 2, Issue 4. "The Museum of Forgery is a child of Marcel Duchamp: it nominated itself as a museum despite the fact that by many definitions it does not belong in that category at all..."
"Stay and Play: Game Not Over"
December 2000. Paper presented at U.F.R. d'Arts Plastiques et Sciences de l'Art, Université de Paris, for the ISEA Conference, Paris, France; and at the Medienforum München's "Digital Happy Hour" at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany.
"WinSide Out: An Introduction to the Convergence of Computers, Games, and Art"
November 2000. Web catalog essay for the 2000 exhibition "SHIFT-CTRL: Computers, Games, and Art" at the Beall Center for Art and Technology, Irvine, CA. "We think of games in terms of play, but in fact they generally embody notions of efficiency that have nothing to do with the sloppiness of real play...."
"The Memetic Museum"
1999. Paper presented at the College Art Association Conference as part of the panel "The World Wide Web and the New Art Marketplace". A version of this paper was subsquently published in Tout-Fait in 2002 under the title "Marcel Duchamp and the Museum of Forgery".
"Did Anyone Bring a Word or an Ax?: Towards an Id Theater"
1996. Paper presented at the 1997 College Art Association Conference as part of the panel "Cyberspace: Trojan Horse or Roman Holiday?" "Online theater is marked by loose (often episodic) structure, tangled narrative, chaotic rhythm, uncontrolled utterance, superfluous detail, and refusal to end."
"The Bearded Lady & the Shaven Man: Mona Lisa, Meet Mona/Leo"
October 1996. Essay in Leonardo 29:5. "Where L.H.O.O.Q. presented itself openly as a modified Leonardo, L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved reverses these terms and turns the Mona Lisa into a modified Duchamp."
"A World Exhilarating and Wrong: Theatrical Improvisation on the Internet"
October 1995. Essay in Leonardo 28:5. "The god in the machine points inexorably at the machine in god, the desire for and fear of a mechanistic universe..."