\n
This week, we gathered in a new place: a shrunken hallway far from our shifting, geometrically ‘open concept’ home of a classroom. It was the far-flung von Neumann Building, surrounded by piles of golden leaves and bordered by a confoundingly steep hill. Our gathering seemed to be one of the few signs of life in the building, with our gaggle of respectfully muted voices bouncing off of walls that seemed unused to the experience. But soon, our guide materialized: EC, manager of the 3D3A lab. Both he and it were our destination, and we readied ourselves for the wonders of the mysterious anechoic chamber.<\/p>\n
But first, a demonstration! EC summoned a small, nondescript speaker into his hand. To our eyes, it looked at first to be a simple Bluetooth speaker; but it was so much more. Held before us was a speaker imbued with the mysterious power of BACCH (not the composer!) 3D sound. Some were skeptical; EC described the speaker as shockingly realistic, able to create a full soundscape that fully surrounded the listener when held directly in front of their face. Of course, all were eager to experience this for themselves, and the speaker was slowly passed around. We waited with bated breath as the first volunteer, MJ, held the speaker at eye level, and pressed the two buttons to activate the three dimensional wave.<\/p>\n
Live audio on<\/p>\n
MJ: “Oh that is SO messed up.”<\/p>\n
‘Messed up’ is certainly one way to describe it: as the speaker made its way around the IHUM circle, EC programmed a variety of startling noises to envelop whomever was holding the speaker: a buzzing fly encircling one person’s head, the lighting of an invisible match causing eyes to twitch towards a nonexistent flame, The Beatles seemingly singing directly behind another participant. Each of our perceptions of our aural reality were, quite certainly, “messed up.”<\/p>\n
As soon as each of our realities had been rattled, however, it was time to warp them even further by entrance into the anechoic chamber. Room was sparse: only five persons could enter the chamber at a time, and so we waited eagerly for our group to be called and to be ushered in.<\/p>\n
“Anechoic, you see, as in the complete absence of echo,” EC quipped as my group entered the office space. We filed, one by one, into the sliver of floor available in the foam-covered chamber. The door remained open, and yet the effect was immediate: EC’s voice suddenly retreated back to hide within him, and the air felt heavy. In spite of the anechoic chamber’s affects being purely sonic, you could feel the lack of sound within the body somehow. It was eerie. It was “messed up.” It was magical.<\/p>\n
After we had all taken a turn in the chamber void of echo, the hour had grown late, and we had to make great haste back to our homeworld of taller, freely echoing ceilings; a feature that I no longer took for granted upon returning to our classroom.<\/p>\n
The second half of the afternoon seemed almost blurred by the abundance of sound, in contrast to the anechoic chamber’s compression. Two objects were procured, one spread across the room to be discovered and rediscovered at every angle and fold; the other gleamed silver from the center desk in the room. Amongst the words, sentences, and phrases bouncing around our non-insulated walls were<\/p>\n
“Equal access to education\u2026 but it’s money”<\/p>\n
“I like this coin”<\/p>\n
“The end of history is illusory”<\/p>\n
“It’s meant to be realized as you hold it”<\/p>\n
“The Bicho (Critter) itself would have to break in order for us to truly understand it”<\/p>\n
“An infinite origami that will never tear”<\/p>\n
Suddenly, there was silence. A Vote was held, bringing us closer to the realization of our final project. Then, with the arrival of our guest, PK, the cacophony once again began with a distinct video game theme:<\/p>\n
“Not sure if something new is to be found\u2026”<\/p>\n
“One thing I run into with game studies is if what is given to you makes something new, or if you just do the predictable path of finding A and B”<\/p>\n
“By putting everything in a similar scale, you can make what is important unimportant”<\/p>\n
“Every medium has this; the person who is interacting with the object disappears and the game becomes real. Both a joyful and horrific image.”<\/p>\n
“Immersion without mimesis\u2026 you can completely immerse yourself in a game even if it doesn’t look like the thing”<\/p>\n
“Digital twinning is almost like magical thinking”<\/p>\n
“The machine is completely working and doing things, but the human is completely taken out of it\u2026 this is the environmental mode in games”<\/p>\n
We spoke with PK of Galloway, of his bookGaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture(2006), as well as his own work within the emergent field of video game studies, what he called a study of “a canonical work with a very non-canonical method.” The echoes began once more:<\/p>\n
“It’s not coincidental that he chose these people\u2026 ‘I’m like Deleuze but I’m not Deleuze\u2026'”<\/p>\n
“Galloway once gave a 20 minute talk in 70 minutes\u2026 he stretched it by going as he does here: concept by concept, word by word\u2026”<\/p>\n
“He is using all these other fields to legitimize his claims\u2026”<\/p>\n
“Galloway reads like a manifesto”<\/p>\n
Then, in a final swell, PK told of his own practical realities of studying video games within academia; the pros and cons, the successes and failures. He remarked upon how “opaque” of a medium video games are to approach: unlike film or literature, the basic mechanics of video games — CODING, HACKING, and the like — often evade the scholars that write about them.<\/p>\n
“You can’t read the object hiding behind the little man on the screen.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Response #2 (SD):<\/p>\n
The extremely anticipated visit to the Anechoic chamber was a surreal experience, or, as some colleagues would point out, it was messed up! The interior of the 3D3A lab was quite different from anything we, as students of humanities and social sciences, had ever seen. The presence of mannequins used to run trials, accompanied by a lot of sound-related equipment, made it all the more fascinating. The anechoic chamber, on the other hand, was a very tiny space dominated by green lights. Upon asking, ED responded that the color ostensibly emits positive energy because people can get stressed inside the chamber, so the green light, which has never been turned OFF since the chamber was built, is there to make them feel better.<\/p>\n
The second part of the class started in the usual traditional setting, with two people presenting their objects, a coin from Ecuador and the Brazilian critter Bicho, which raised interesting points for conversation to the point that our guest lecturer, PK, observing closely, spilled Coca-Cola on the table!!!<\/p>\n
PK started the discussion by asking a subtle question: Do these different combinations give you something new, or do you just combine A and B? He affirmed that they do indeed produce something different. From texts to material objects to sounds, we have moved across scales. SPT asked about the use of space in video games, noting that players constantly construct and navigate environments that act as archives of knowledge and experience. This led to a broader discussion on how video games transform 3D spaces into 2D representations and vice versa, similar to the moment in Poltergeist when the screen becomes a bridge between reality and fantasy. The class reflected on how different media, especially games, produce the aesthetic of losing oneself through feedback, collaboration, and realism, highlighting immersion as a central feature of the gaming experience.<\/p>\n
The discussion then shifted to the texts we read. PK asked why Alexander R. Galloway quotes Deleuze and Derrida. CW noted that the author goes slowly, word by word, making the essay very definitional. He tries to come up independently and resists rejecting other media studies entirely. PK added that this is a rhetorical move, taking something from one thinker and applying it to another, like using Aristotle in an unexpected context, influenced by the author\u2019s professional background.<\/p>\n
PK also mentioned the conservatism of certain departments, like East Asian Studies, and how game studies, despite growing, still faces resistance, especially toward video games rather than older forms of play. CW suggested that bias might come from the newness of the field. PK agreed and explained that he navigated this by combining canonical and non-canonical projects to gain acceptance. He spoke about the problems of archiving games, as hardware decays and old systems become unusable, giving rise to media archaeology, and argued that art museums should have dedicated spaces for video games. Reflecting on his own experience, he said he couldn\u2019t have done this as his first project and had to build credibility through traditional scholarship. CW commented on the risks, and PK agreed, noting that departments claim to value interdisciplinarity, but conservatism remains, and one still has to belong to the \u201ctribe.\u201d The discussion ended with a reflection on the fact that the author uses Deleuze because he conducted a similar study of cinema, connecting the analysis to broader cultural questions. He further mentioned that analyzing 16\u201317th century texts through the prism of video games allows canonical works to be studied in a \u201cnon-canonical\u201d way. All of this makes PK wonder whether he really needs video games to make the points he would make anyway!<\/p>\n
Later, the discussion focused on why Galloway calls them \u201coperators,\u201d and CW said it\u2019s like Barthes calling the photographer the operator. PK remarked that the author borrows from others but focuses on digital games and the non-human mechanics of play, showing how players become part of the machine. CW added that if you remove anthropomorphic language, playing becomes just a series of operations. This is a post-human move, i.e., when you play, you lose your human side and become like a machine, an operator.\u00a0LDVG asked if the author ever gets to the social component and PK said no, Galloway is text-focused, looking at how consumers interact and how operators can hack or break the game. ME said the \u201cgame\u201d metaphor is central because people play actively instead of passively reading. PK added that interactivity comes from TV culture, like a couch potato. He concluded that video games remain a medium we do not fully understand or have access to.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
November 18:\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\nResponse #1 (NG)<\/p>\n
In the first half of last week\u2019s class we spoke about the final project, still in the making and very much in deliberation. Over the semester we drifted away from the initial idea of translating our own disciplinary-bordered works and assembling them into some kind of larger inter\/antidisciplinary \u201ccommons\u201d (if that was ever really the goal). Instead, the project now seems to be reaching for something more general, or even meta, about inter- or interdisciplinarity itself. Following the advice we received earlier in the semester about how to make interdisciplinary work function: namely, to put people in a room and give them a concrete task, we decided to stage a performance at the newly reopened Princeton University Art Museum in which we use a computer program to \u201ctranslate\u201d images into sound and play these sounds alongside the artworks.<\/p>\n
The unifying theme is still unclear (\u201cuniversity\u201d?). But what strikes me is that mediating between different modes of representation has led us to a double deference. First, we defer to the computer program that converts images to sound on what is, for us, an arbitrary basis. Its internal logic belongs to the code writer, and the principles of translation are opaque to us. Second, we defer to our three (amazingly generous) music experts, who will take our reactions to the images and make further adjustments to the sound so that it aligns with the feelings we want the piece to convey.<\/p>\n
Seen one way, this could look like a betrayal of Ranci\u00e8re\u2019s pedagogical principles of equality, since we seem to give up our agency to technical processes and to \u201cdisciplinary\u201d experts. But a more charitable reading is possible. The project may be suggesting that collective, and even individual, antidisciplinary work depends first on trust: trust in peers who speak different professional languages, and trust in readers or viewers who will approach the work charitably. This also raises the role of the viewer or reader in antidisciplinarity. Presenting the performance in a public setting, where at least some of the audience will be non-academic is perhaps meaningful. The decision or commitment to appeal to non-academic viewers may be a prudential principle for antidisciplinarity more generally: it pushes us to translate, to negotiate, and to work against the gravitational pull of our own fields, even if realistically the final work remains within the sphere of the university or reaches only slightly wider audiences, much like the Princeton museum, which is housed within the university yet open to the public.<\/p>\n
Response #2 (DA)<\/p>\n
Act II<\/p>\n
(Enter JC stage left)<\/i><\/p>\n
Following a brief intermission, we are joined by our guest speaker JC. A round of applause! We are in the presence of a Tony Award winner!<\/p>\n
SD and EB present a recap of what we\u2019ve been up to thus far in HUM 583 in the form of script, delivered table-read style, managing to squeeze in all our visitors, Walter Benjamin, the almond milk, etc. It is, as CW later remarks, something like an extended inside joke, but it is more than that too, weaving together the months-long threads of our classroom conversations. JC, amused, uses the script as her jumping off point, in the \u201cyes-and\u201d spirit of the theatre, to talk about her creative practice, and to get us thinking creatively. We consider the challenges presented to us by the text, and possible ways we might begin to bring light to this surreal skit. We dwell on the possibilities of interpretation. What translates personally and how might that be translated into non-verbal cues? We think about how language does or does not translate into experience. JC advises always coming into design meetings with questions. It is not good practice to come with answers early on; not a good move to bring a thesis to the table. A reminder to remain in curiosity, no matter what discipline(s) we\u2019re working within.<\/p>\n
A lot of what we\u2019re thinking has to do with collaboration, which is at the heart of JC\u2019s work. In the Sound and Color Symposium<\/a><\/span> recording, JC questions why we lionize coming up with \u201cthe big new idea,\u201d suggesting that \u201cprobably what we need in the world is people who are really good at taking other people\u2019s really great ideas and manifesting them in a kind of thoughtful, collaborative, inclusive way.\u201d She calls for flipping the hierarchy of cultural values when it comes to creative output: \u201cPeople who can work in groups of people and make something together in a way that sort of includes all perspectives kind of seems like the thing we most need as a globe if we \u2018re going to move forward.\u201d This was the section of the video where I paused to take notes and in class, KD picks up on this thread too. In class, JC speaks about the necessity of adaptability; of a certain kind of openness not only to sharing one\u2019s ideas but also to accept that those ideas, the golden ideas you maybe stayed up all night thinking about, may not always be taken up within the context of a collaborative project. Bold ideas, loosely held<\/i>, she offers — \u00a0a phrase to hold as we approach the next stages of our final project.<\/p>\nNovember 25: <\/strong><\/p>\nNAL+AR’s response<\/p>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
Owing to the fact that it was our last formal convening of the class ahead of the debut of our final project, much of the session\u2019s first half was dedicated to firming up, democratically, the principles, constraints, equipment, and assemblages of the installation. Still, the conversation was no less lively and stuffed full of all the learnings collected by us this past semester. EC and \u201cthe sound team\u201d directed our attention towards the modes of knowledge communicated through certain sonic modalities (bluetooths and surrounds vs. individual headphones), and an interchange between NI and ME helped sure up the performative bounds of our undertaking with NI posing the generative question: what does it mean to \u201cbring\u201d sound to the object rather than work with the truth of the object\u2019s existing sonic state? There were a set of agreements reached, which I offer in summation below:<\/p>\n
I. THE PROJECT WILL BE AN INSTALLATION\u2014 There will be speakers stationed at the selected pieces and attendees will be guided towards them, sonically animated from the start<\/p>\n
II. THE PROJECT\u2019S FINAL TASKS WILL BE DIVIDED INTO THREE GROUPS, A ZINE TEAM, A PERFORMANCE TEAM, AND A SOUND TEAM; THESE TEAMS DO NOT OVERLAP, NECESSARILY, WITH THE FOUR GROUPS CURATED PIECES \u2014 The Zine Team will put together text in a printed pamphlet that will guide installation attendees through the thinking of each group\u2019s selected work and its inchoate sounds; the Performance Team will stage the flow and footwork of the exhibit\u2019s run and also plan any fe\u0302ting that follows this block; and the Sound Team will use the descriptions, formal and aesthetic interpretations, and affective suggestions of each curational group to produce each piece\u2019s sounds.<\/p>\n
The Performance\/Logistics group consists of ME, ME, SC, MJ, SD, HF, NG, KD, and CW. The Sound Engineers are EC, LG, and<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
IH. The Zine group includes NL, NI, ST, LS, DA, AR, SG, EB, and NP.<\/p>\n
Though there were only, seemingly, seconds left to chat about anything else, KN offered a 2x speed sound bite on Sara E. Johnson\u2019s Encyclopedie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Mery\u2019s Intellectual World and the genre and tradition of Black Feminist writing and the publishing industry\u2019s relationship to these epistemes. KN also plugged the editorial and curational care of Minneapolis\u2019 Graywolf Press and its attention to glossy pages (And I, AR, who am currently reading Graywolf\u2019s 2022 If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga, will only echo their catalogue and all its gems.)<\/p>\n
In the session\u2019s send half, we met our final guest, Rhaisa Williams, faculty in the Lewis Center for the Arts, who unlike other LCA affiliates who have joined us this term, is not a practitioner but an academic. This divide, between practice and academic writing, was the thematic clothesline upon which the many conversational interludes of our discussion were strung up. RW\u2019s research, which takes up Black motherhood and its treatment in theatre, among other forms of dramatic literature, cohered in its own presentation the major, and minor issues probed by our class: the limits of disciplinary knowledge, the radical traditions, especially the Black traditions, which undergird interdisciplinary acts, the privileging of human subjects as human subjects above all else.<\/p>\n
In keeping with the discussion in the earlier half of class, we explored various touchpoints of what constitutes \u201cperformance studies,\u201d drawing largely from RW\u2019s personal experience in Performance Studies (a slippery field of study). RW spoke of performance in relation to embodiment, noting how performance<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
can encompass questions about what it means to literally put things into your body, engaging with stories, people, and worlds one may not be able to anticipate. Performance studies in this way can offer embodied analysis of historical moments. The field, as RW evinced, is inherently disciplinary, but as with many of our class discussions over this semester, the contours of what interdiscipinarity means are constantly up for negotiation.<\/p>\n
SG discussed their experiences in anthropology and the challenges in trying to make oneself legible in multiple valences across departments. RW used the metaphor of gardening, planting seeds in various places and cultivating those seeds for future-oriented work. ME asked RW about performance studies as a discipline, to which RW responded that they are less concerned in claims about what performance is and more interested in their actual subjects.<\/p>\n
NI asked about how disciplinary distinctions with regards to performance plays out in the classroom, and CW mentioned the word \u201cgenealogy.\u201d Our class discussion ended here: with RW\u2019s reminder that often departments bear genealogical traces of the individuals who shaped them structurally.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
December 2:<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Each Friday by noon, two members of the class will send 300-500 word responses to the most recent seminar to CNW and KN, who will post these here. \u00a0As our final project develops, specific assignments toward that work will appear below as well. September 2: Response #1 (CW) What an exciting start to the seminar. … <\/p>\n
Continue reading “Discussion Thread”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3806,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-full-width.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-20","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/20","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3806"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":51,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/20\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1056,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/20\/revisions\/1056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}