![\"Replace](\"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/Replace-Batteries-crop-copy.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWhich is what Erratic Play is about: playful wandering through the visual media forms that inhabit the world\u2014and, in turn, posit new worlds to inhabit. But embracing playfulness has its hazards. Play is woefully misunderstood by the culture at large (at least in the U.S.), and is often misconstrued as \u201cnot serious\u201d or \u201ctrivial.\u201d Some with various, well-intentioned agendas attempt to rehabilitate play as social health food (visual media as pedagogical lecture or model), or to distinguish between \u201clow\u201d and \u201chigh\u201d media objects based on rather cosmetic criteria (e.g., valuing only \u201cserious\u201d narratives and subject matter in video games).<\/span><\/p>\n These paths have their destinations, but my wanderings lean toward visual media first as autotelic forms\u2014as creative objects with purposes in and of themselves. Going to the movies, watching television, interacting with video games, posting videos to YouTube\u2026 whatever extrinsic necessity or other use-value such forms may satisfy (or not), they are also intrinsically satisfying; pleasure is the primary product of human experience with visual media. Working through the experiential nuances of visual media pleasure (its desires, manifestations, contradictions, and absences)\u2014especially in an age saturated with screens\u2014constitutes invaluable play for anyone interested in thinking about the media they consume.<\/p>\n Wandering in an ever-widening orbit, my interests also explore what these experiences of various media forms reveal about the technologies, creators (industrial or individual), histories, and cultures that invent and inform them. Contrary to ahistorical, reductive analyses that seek to \u201cclose down\u201d (instead of \u201copen up\u201d) media objects, responsible investigations revisit\u2014and re-play\u2014their observations and conclusions. In scholastic parlance, my research frameworks are informed by media archeology, phenomenology, and industrio-cultural analysis. That is to say, I\u2019m interested in the object itself, the human experience of the object as used, and finally its larger relationship to various cultural histories of creation and reception. Such frameworks are dynamic, and the knowledge derived from their application is necessarily provisional and conditional (most knowledge is). So too, therefore, are the posts and articles presented here. Consider them play in progress.<\/p>\n Erratic Play, finally, reflects both means and ends\u2014to playfully wander, unpredictably but purposefully, through the landscape of visual media and culture. And sometimes to stop and replace the batteries.<\/p>\n \u2014David O’Grady<\/em> Stamped on the bottom of some early Atari Pong video game consoles is the phrase, \u201cReplace batteries if play is erratic.\u201d Although we associate the word \u201cerratic\u201d with malfunction or unpredictability, erratic in its Latin root means \u201cto wander.\u201d Which … Continue reading
\nAbout the author<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"