In Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games, Christopher B. Patterson critically analyzes video games through the methodological framework of erotics. In doing so, he provides astute insights into the ways in which video games can work to challenge essentialized narratives and constructions of race while also fostering greater awareness and understanding of one’s own place within the larger geopolitical systems of capitalism and empire. Through understanding video gamers as not simply passive receptors of ideology, but rather as active participants in the gameplay experience, he contends that video games create pleasure and other forms of affective engagement through erotic play. Through this erotic play, Patterson argues that “games enact playful protests against the power, identity, and order of information technology” (7).
Keyword: global
Review of After Art by David Joselit (Princeton)
David Joselit’s slim volume “After Art” offers multiple intriguing frameworks to analyze art in the present-day globalized art world. After Art backs away from the traditional approach of artist intent and production and looks at what happens to images once they are attached to the networks that circulate them. Instead of proselytizing individual or even original artworks, Joselit champions images that are constantly reproduced and remediated by artists and architects such as Tania Bruguera, Ai Weiwei, Sherrie Levine, Matthew Barney, Le Corbusier, and Rem Koolhaus.