Steampunk Recursions &

Computational Retrofutures in

@RogerWhitson

WA State University

#mla15 #s154

08 Jan 2014

SPOILERS for BIOSHOCK INFINTE! ;)

“[T]he meaning of [the hypothetical counterfactual] is interdiegetic,

contained in the contrast between what happens in the diegesis and

what the reader knows to be uncontroversial facts.”

—Catherine Gallagher, “What Would Napoleon Do? Historical,

Fictional, and Counterfactual Characters.” (2011)

“Instead of looking for obligatory trends, master media, or

imperative vanishing points, one should be able to discover

individual variations. Possibly, one will discover fractures or

turning points in historical master plans that provide useful ideas

for navigating the labyrinth of what is currently firmly established.

In the longer term, the body of individual archaeological studies

should form a variantology of the media.”

—Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: An Archaeology of

Seeing and Hearing by Technical Means (2008)

“By using anachronism to tamper with timelines, a writer of color can

also tinker with how migration, assimilation, segregation, and other

such cultural movements occur; this makes visible how identities are

shaped by such histories, and how they could be shaped otherwise.”

—Jaymee Goh, Toward Chromatic Chronologies: Using the

Steampunk Aesthetic for Postcolonial Purposes. (2011)

“Irrational’s heavily modified Unreal 3 Engine allowed

them [the developers] to remove such trickery and

concentrate on the added performance of computing

dynamic independent decisions which composed

Columbia’s ecology: from characters, to buildings, to set-

pieces. […] The great levels of space are almost too

much, largely as the player is beholden to a greater level

of disorienting action across multi-level arenas.” —

Robert Jackson, Bioshock: Decision, Forced Choice, and

Propaganda. (2014)

“We can no longer entertain such visions of wonder-working,

properly ‘science-fictional’ futures of technological automation.

These visions are themselves now historical and dated –

streamlined cities of the future on peeling murals – while our lived

experience of our greatest metropolises is one of urban decay and

blight. That particular Utopian future has in other words turned out to

have been merely the future of one moment of what is now our own

past.”

—Frederic Jameson, “Progress vs. Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the

Future?” (1982)

“The geology of media […] wants to extend deep times towards

chemical and metal durations [and] includes a wide range of

examples of refined minerals, metals, and chemicals that are

essential for media technologies to operate in the often

audiovisual and miniaturized mobile form as we have grown to

expect as end-users of content.”

—Jussi Parikka, The Anthrobscene (2014)

“Something potentially combustive therefore unfolds within both

frames at the moment of contact between mortal flesh and lithic

materiality: the advent of a disorienting realization, no matter how

inchoate or dimly perceived, that stone’s time is not ours, that the

world is not for us.”

—Jeffrey Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (2014)

Thanks!

@RogerWhitson

#mla15 #s154

www.rogerwhitson.net