2. ARIS & MENOKIN:
NEW TECHNOLOGY FOR A
RENEWED HOUSE
A project by Laura Heiman & Caitlin Miller students in my
History and the Digital Age course. The course is a research
methods course for doctoral students at American university
and an elective for students in their Public History Master’s
program.
Caitlin Miller: http://www.dighist.org/2012/04/remembering-
rebecca-a-new-way-to-engage-with-historic-houses/
Laura Heiman :http://www.dighist.org/2012/02/aris-menokin-
new-technology-for-a-renewed-house/
11. WHAT IS THE
E.T. ATARI
GAME?
FROM IAN BOGOST’S ALIEN PHENOMENOLOGY: OR
WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE A THING
12. THE E.T. ATARI GAME HAS AT LEAST 11
EXISTENCES, EACH OF WHICH ARE IMPLICATED IN
DIFFERENT ARTIFACTS
1. E.T. is 8 kilobytes of 6502 opcodes and operands,
2. E.T is also it’s sourcecode
3. E.T. is a flow of RF modulations that result from user input
4. E.T is a mask ROM, memory etched on a wafer.
5. E.T. is a molded plastic cartridge
6. E.T is a consumer good, a product packaged in a box
7. E.T is a system of rules or mechanics that produce experience
8. E.T is an interactive experience players partake in
9. E.T is a unit of intellectual property that can be
owned, licensed, sold
10. E.T is a collectible, an out of print scarce object
11. E.T is a sign that depicts the video game crash of 1983
15. 3. ATTEND TO
FORENSIC
MATERIALITY
OF THAT THING
ONCE YOU’VE IDENTIFIED THE THING THAT HAS IN
IT TRACES OF WHAT MATTERS DO YOUR BEST TO
BE SURE YOU ARE DOING AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE
TO THE QUALITIES OF THAT THING.
Editor's Notes
“The Menokin Foundation near Warsaw, Virginia, operates the historical house and grounds of Declaration of Independence signer Francis Lightfoot Lee. The Foundation holds 500 of the original 1,000 acres, of which 350 acres have been given over as a National Wildlife Habitat. The house itself is a ruin.”
“Yes, that’s glass. Think Apple Store meets Colonial Williamsburg: the negative space of the house (everything that currently isn’t there) will be filled in with structural glass, including floors and roof. The house is projected to be finished by 2017 or 2018. The Menokin Foundation is committed to making the future visitor experience reflect the innovation, creativity, and unique quality of the Glass House project.” Laura’s blog post
This is everything about this project that matters. It includes much more than the actual implementation of the ideas. It has the storyboards, all the objects featured in the exhibition, it has a justification in it, it has information on how they would evaluate the game, it has their rationale and a review of related projects. Not only is it easy to save this stuff, but this stuff has far more than the actual game itself. This both contains the nature of this particular work, but it also explicates and contextualizes that work.
It might be in a conversation, it might be in the experience of people in a particular context using it. Preserving the software of world of warcraft doesn’t tell you what it meant to people. Preserving videos of raids, preserving guild discussion forms, and peoples personal collections does, even better, oral history interviews could let you get inside the heads of players. That’s not to say that saving the game doesn’t get you somewhere, the game itself, it’s source code, etc, contains a ton of information that might be worth analyzing.
