AI can’t dance
This morning I was about to ask my friendly local chatbot (OpenAI) whether Zumba (the joyous, global, immensely popular dance-exercise franchise) is feminist. Luckily, I stopped myself. Just in the nick of time, I...
Category: play
Translating as Play
Long ago — 1968, to be exact — Vilém Flusser proposed a model of human communication based on games (yes, Wittgenstein IS in the background). It may sound like trivialization, but it isn’t. The...
Field Green: Book Review
It must be a memoir. A reader — or a fact-checker — could challenge any number of things, especially names, including the name of the author. But there can be no doubt about the...
The Piano’s Role
If a movie doesn’t ever let you forget that it’s a movie, but keeps making you wonder how anyone could decide to cast, costume, and direct a scene as he has, you are probably...
Games and Play
On New Year’s Eve, the postman delivered a copy of a new book from Bloomsbury, Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism. It contains my essay, “Games and Play: Being Human in the Universe of Technical Images”. ...
Flusser on Games
I’m honoured to be a contributor to a volume called Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism, edited by Aaron Jaffe and published at Routledge, probably 2020. Jaffe’s earlier volume is called The Way Things Go: An Essay on...