Story, Scene, Setpiece: The Base Units of Narrative

The primary shift, it seems to me, is a kind of rebalancing of literature and storytelling away from exposition and toward scenes. The adjective “cinematic” is noted as a selling-point for stories, more so than “musical” or “architectural” or “sculptural” or “painterly,” because the ideal of storytelling is no longer the epic novel, but instead the film. This shift isn’t just a slow move, though, it’s an ongoing vector of movement: because film and literature – as major narrative art forms – are tied together, a shift in one often has a knock-on-effect on the other.

Notes on Literacy Education

At the very least, since we’ve perceived literacy to be in crisis since the inception of higher education as a more open project, roughly a century ago, it behooves us to be skeptical of the idea that literacy is in decline.

CommentaryCameron SummersJanuary 25, 2023Education, LiteracyComment

The Turing Fallacy: On Art in the Age of Its Algorithmic Generation

I’m not convinced though, that thoughts are necessarily just the activities of the brain. Leaving aside the role of the whole human body in the course of thought, this could be something like assuming that you can tap into the wifi with a transistor radio or power your car with crude oil. How do we know that the neural event isn’t just a carrier for another phenomenon that the neurons can interpret as a collective, but which would be opaque to an MRI or PET scan?

CommentaryCameron SummersJanuary 11, 2023Artificial Intelligence, AI Art, aesthetics Comments

Imagination-as-a-Service: The “Under-monetization” of D&D

If the wi-fi is out, if the power’s out and there’s nowhere to go but you have candles, dice, notebooks and a copy of the core book, you can tell stories until it comes back on. As an aside, the Broken Hands Team actually already did that one evening while waiting for the power to come back on: no need to sit in the dark, but also no need for Netflix or video games or anything of the sort. That’s why the hobby is great – it’s analog, and it’s flexible. If games are art – and I would say that they are – then the medium for them is the social contract.

Commentary, Gaming, Written by: CameronCameron SummersDecember 21, 2022tabletop gaming, Hasbro, Dungeons and Dragons, Horizon of ExtractionComment

Against “Solving” Media

The root of this, I believe, lies in the privileging of “realism” over other modes of expression in aesthetics. By this, I mean the idea that art is supposed to be a mimetic reproduction of things that would “really happen”. Leaving aside, of course, the number of really-occurring events that get you treated as insane if you acknowledge.