Participants
James Ash
James completed his PhD at the University of Bristol in the dept of Geography in 2009 on practices of video game design and play, and currently works as a research associate for the centre for citizenship, identity and governance at the Open University. He is interested in issues surrounding embodiment, materiality and technology particularly through the lens of phenomenology and the work of Martin Heidegger. He has written up a number of papers from his PhD on videogames which are both currently published and in press. Details of his research can be found on his website www.jamesash.co.uk
References
Patrick Crogan
Patrick Crogan is Senior Lecturer in film and media and cultural studies at the University of the West of England in Bristol. He is on the executive board of the Digital Games Research Association and on the editorial boards of Convergence, Scan, and Games and Culture. He has published articles on videogames, film, animation and critical theories of technology in anthologies and journals such as Angelaki, Theory, Culture & Society, Convergence, and Culture Machine. He edited a special issue of Cultural Politics on the work of Bernard Stiegler.
References
Teresa Dillon
Teresa Dillon is an artist, researcher and producer. Her work focuses the forms of communication and behavior that emerge and survive in particular locations and sites, as a result of their construction and organization. Over the last ten years, this has lead to a body of work including: locative based performances, site-specific installations, public art, academic and applied research, community networks, direction and event production. She is director of the UK-based arts collective Polar Produce; the N.I.P. research and touring network; UM: International Festival of Experimental Media, Lisbon, Portugal and OFFLOAD programme. Alongside her arts practice, she has also worked in various academic and applied research institutions (Futurelab, UK; NDRC, Ireland) and as an independent consultant and freelance producer/researcher (BBC, BECTA, JISC). She lectures widely and teaches on the Arts, Culture and Education, MA, Cambridge University. Teresa holds a PhD in psychology from The Open University and her work has been published internationally on topics such as creative collaboration, open source, open innovation, educational design, trust networks and locative mediar.
References
teresa.dillon@polarproduce.org
Dan Dixon
Is a Senior Lecturer at the new Bristol Institute of Technology, University of the West of England. Previously he was Product Manager of the BBC's DNA platform, the software that underpins all its public bulletin boards and user generated content sites. He is on the board of e-Mint, the UK’s association of online community professionals and is active in the industry training and mentoring.
References
Seth Giddings
Is Programme Leader in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of the West of England. He teaches critical media practice, particularly interactive media and photomedia production as well as courses on new media theory, with a focus on popular new media such as videogames and digital cinema. His research is developed in both written and moving image form and combines (cyber)textual analysis with the microethnography of media cultures. His interests cover computer game studies; theories of technoculture; visual culture and modern art; the cultures of games and play; popular culture and everyday life; cinema and technology (especially animation); and new media studies.
Helen Kennedy
Helen W. Kennedy has been researching and writing about games since 1993. She was co-organiser of the first UK International conference on games – Game Cultures – in 2001. Since then she co-founded and chaired (from 2004 – present) the Play Research Group at UWE and has played a key role in the organisation of colloquia and symposia on issues relating to games – Power Up (ideology and games), Playful Subjects (embodiment and gameplay) PSii (technology and games) which led to a co-edited special issue of Games and Culture that addresses this theme and PSiii (Wii Technicities) which has led to a special issue of Journal of Television and New Media which will be published in 2010. This group holds regular play sessions through which to develop collaborative approaches to the analysis of digital games and play in general. We actively involve our postgraduate students in seminars, colloquia and symposia around play and games as well as involving them in our regular play sessions and social gatherings. Helen’s current research is focused on technology, aesthetics and embodied perception in relation to games and play, and I have recently co-authored (with Seth Giddings) an article on the Wii entitled "Incremental Speed Increases Excitement: Bodies, Space, Movement, and Televisual Change". Helen has received DCRC funding to support a pilot research project 'Only Connect' which aims to investigate the potential users of games research in industry and advisory groups beyond an academic context. Alice Atkinson-Bonasio is the Research Associate for this pilot.
Helen is an active member of the Women in Games (WiG) steering committee and has helped to organise conferences and network events since its inauguration in 2004. Helen has represented the group at a number of public events (eg. the London Games Festival Fringe and in March 2008 a games panel at Birds Eye View Film Festival). She also co-convened (with Emma Westecott) the WiG strand within DiGRA 2009. WiG has been instrumental in raising the visibility of women within the games industry as well as encouraging ongoing projects to highlight the role of women in the development of games technologies, game design and as game players.
Helen was elected as President of the Digital Games Research Association having been a board member since 2005. Helen is also the author (with Jon Dovey) of Game Cultures: Computer Games as New Media, McGraw Hill, Open University Press, 2006 (soon to be available in Polish!) and has published in Game Studies, Games & Culture and tekka.net.
Rune Klevjer
Is Associate Professor at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, where he teaches media studies, computer games, and media education. His main research interest is computer game theory, with a particular focus on questions of representation and narrative. His recent publications in English include “What is the Avatar?” (phd thesis, 2007), and “Model and Image. Towards a Theory of Computer Game Depiction” (2009).
Mitu Khandakar
Is currently a PhD candidate at the Creative Technologies Department, University of Portsmouth. Her research concerns video game interfaces, specifically affective video game interfaces.
Grethe Mitchell
Is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of East London. She is currently editing a book on the intersections of Videogames and Art and has recently presented a paper on this subject at the Level Up Computer Games Research Conference. She is a founder member of the organizing committee for the COSIGN conferences, an interdisciplinary series of conferences exploring the creation of meaning through computers. She has also authored papers on the relationship between computer games, interactive entertainment and film, and on the nature of interactivity in digital performance.
Kenton O'Hara
Kenton O’Hara is Senior Researcher in the Socio Digital Systems Group at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. His research explores the social and behavioural factors that shape the design and use of emerging technologies. The work utilises a variety of behavioural science approaches from field studies to experiments, and combines closely with design concerns to transform user insights into technology solutions. He is currently looking at the area of touch and touchless interaction, social aspects of brain computer interaction. Over the years he has looked at a wide variety of topics including social and collaborative aspects of mobile video, collaborative music consumption, surface computing, location-based computing, paper-based hyperlinking, public and situated displays, alternate reality gaming, affordances of paper, local and remote collaboration, reading and writing, context aware computing, smart environments, mobile work and mobile communication. He has published over 60 publications including two books, “Public and Situated Displays” and “Collaborative Music Consumption.”
Mark Palmer
Was appointed the first Watershed Senior Research Fellow in 2003, where he led a collaborative project entitled ‘ D-Shed’, a new on-line channel that showcase new talent and innovation in digital media. Between 1999-2002 Mark Palmer was an AHRB Research Fellow in Creative and Performing Arts, working between the Divisions of Fine Art and Philosophy at the University of Staffordshire. He has exhibited widely, often working part-time to enable his practise as an artist working on onsite installations. His research interests have focussed on the use of digital technology to help create installation Art.
Mark Paterson
is Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Exeter. Between 2002 and 2006 he was Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of the West of England (UWE). In 2002 he completed his Ph.D. in Human Geography at the University of Bristol entitled ‘Haptic Spaces’. After Consumption and Everyday Life (Routledge, 2005), he wrote The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (Berg, 2007) in Sydney, Australia, with a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). He has published journal articles in philosophy and social science journals, and is involved in research projects on robot skin and the haptic modelling of prehistoric textiles. Currently he is writing Seeing with the Hands: A Philosophical History of Blindness for Reaktion and co-editing Touching Place, Spacing Touch for Ashgate.
References.
Elena Marquez Segura
I am an interdisciplinary research assistant in the field of Human-Computer Interaction in the Game Department at Mobile Life Centre and the Interactive Institute in Kista, Sweden. My background is in Telecommunication Engineering (ETSI Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingerieros, Seville, Spain) and Interactive Systems Engineering (KTH, Stockholm, Sweden). I am currently working with game designers, theorists and technicians in the 'DanceStar' project, funded from Vinnova and run in collaboration with Movinto Fun. My research is focused on the design, analysis, development and evaluation of a little 'dancebug', the BodyBug. The purpose of the project is to evaluate the somaesthetic experience of using the bug, and co-develop a game for the equipment.
References
Bart Simon
Bart is Director of the Centre for Technoculture, Art and Games
(http://www.tag.hexagram.ca) and Associate Professor of Sociology at
Concordia University in Montreal. His areas of expertise include game
studies, science and technology studies and cultural sociology. His game
studies research crosses a variety of genres, platforms and modalities
looking at the relation of game cultures, socio-materiality and everyday
life. Some of his work is represented in journals such as /Games and
Culture /Game Studies/ and /Loading. His current research on gestural
gaming is funded by the Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada
and he is a network investigator for the Canadian network on New Media,
Animation and Games (http://www.grand-nce.ca).
Carolina Johansson
Is a Master Sc. in Information Technology Engineering graduate from Uppsala University, Sweden, and did her Master thesis as visiting researcher for Prof. Paul Dourish at the Institute for Software Research, University of California, Irvine, US. Carolina is also a professional dancer and has studied modern dance in Stockholm, New York and Los Angeles and has performed with various dance companies, latest in spring -09 with the Impulse Initiative in New York. Carolina joined the Mobile Life Centre fall -09 as researcher in the Body Studies
project and is intrigued by how we can understand, describe and design engaging and meaningful movement interaction with technology.
Event Details
Contact: helen.kennedy@uwe.ac.uk for more details
There is a £10 fee for the event - lunch and refreshments are included.
To book a place at the event please visit: gptech.eventbrite.com by 4th May 2010.
Links