[-empyre-] March -empyre- Welcome Alenda Chang

[Renate Ferro]

Welcome Alenda Chang to -empyre- soft-skinned space.  We are grateful to Alenda for organizing an international discussion entitled The Mixed Realities of Games. I want to welcome Alenda and her guests to -empyre- most of whom are new subscribers.  
While her short bio is posted below I wanted to mention the studio at UC Santa Barbara that she co-directs, Wireframe.  The lab looks like a collaborative practice/theory-based initiative on campus but I am hoping that she talks a bit about the lab and if they are developing games for social/environmental justice. Looking forward to this month's discussion topic

As long as most of the guests this month are new to -empyre-, it might be a great time to remind all that our discussions are archived and can be accessed via 
http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/
The discussions are keyworded and can be searched via Thread/Author/Subject or Date.   
In quickly looking back two discussions on gaming came up that you all might want to reference: 
December, 2010, “Gaming Subcultures” Moderator, Gabriel Menotti
March 2013, "Videogames and Art: Incite/Insight" Moderator, Claudia Pederson

Welcome and hope that a few of our lurkers out there will also join in. 
Best. Renate
__________________________________________________________________
Moderator’s Biography:
Alenda Y. Chang is an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), whose research and teaching encompass environmental media, game studies, science and technology studies, and sound studies. Her first book, Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games, develops environmentally informed frameworks for understanding and designing digital games (University of Minnesota Press, December 2019). Chang co-directs Wireframe, a UCSB studio that promotes collaborative theoretical and creative media practice with investments in global social and environmental justice. She is also the founding co-editor of a new UC Press open-access journal, Media+Environment (http://mediaenviron.org).

Renate Ferro
Visiting Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of Art
Tjaden Hall 306
rferro at cornell.edu