Abstractmachine

Interview with Douglas Edric Stanley Born and raised in Silicon Valley, Douglas Edric Stanley has been working for ten years in France as artist, theoretician and researcher in Paris and Aix-en-Provence. He is currently Professor of Digital Arts at the Aix-en-Provence School of Art where he teaches programming, interactivity, networks and robotics. He has taught workshops on the production of code-based art and has shown his work at digital art exhibitions and festivals around the world. A couple of months ago Douglas Edric Stanley invited me to give a talk at the Ecole Supérieure d'Art d'Aix-en-provence. The interview is somewhat longer than usual. Can you tell us something about the abstractmachine research projects you developed for ZeroOne San Jose? First, a conceptual response. Often we talk about "interactivity", and I might even be a specialist on that subject, at least I probably was once (cf. Diagram of Concrescence The idea came to me while watching an Autechre concert.

"Exhausting Gameplay" by Douglas Edric Stanley (@abstractmachine) #theory #games A significant percentage of video games employ in one way or another the figure of death. The thanatological sub-species of video game representations are practically endless: dismemberment, infection, untreatable wounds, explosion, etc. Players can be eaten, crushed, sliced, diced, quartered, electrocuted, impaled, and so on. The need for death in gaming is multifaceted. A less cynical, more narratological reading of eschatology and gaming might look at death as a question of motivation: by introducing death into the game, a certain internal dynamic is created, which in turn heightens the gameplay and structures the temporal form of the game itself. A third approach would be to look at the material substrate of gaming itself: video games are played on machines and machines, eventually, break down. *Spoiler alert: you probably shouldn’t read any further if you haven’t played the games “Passage” (Free/Cheap, Mac/PC/Linux/iOS) or “Journey” (~15€, PS3).

Blog Archive » Tables tactiles (1): Douglas Edric Stanley En liaison avec « Surfaces sensibles », l’un des axes de recherche du « Cycle supérieur de recherche, création et innovation » de l’Ensad, nous entreprenons un inventaire analytique de projets artistiques et de propositions techniques et ergonomiques centrés sur les tables tactiles, le plus souvent avec projections vidéo. Cette étude mettra en évidence les corrélations entre visionnage et feuilletage, entre film et livre (et donc entre visible et lisible) qu’impliquent de tels dispositifs. Un aperçu des recherches et œuvres de Douglas Edric Stanley peut être trouvé dans les vidéos figurant sur son site Abstact Machine et concernant son dispositif « Hypertable ». On peut notamment consulter le document vidéo sur l’installation Concrescence (2003-2004).