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Transcript of BioshockMLA15
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)