Fine art gets an 8-bit inspired make-over

Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe was rejected by the Paris Salon when he submitted it in 1863. In fact, so may paintings were rejected that year that the Emperor Napoleon III decided to create the alternative event where these works could be seen and judged by the public at large.  This “Salo

Shut Up, Gaming Positivity

This article is part of a series called Shut Up, Videogames, in which critic Ed Smith invites games old and new to pipe down, or otherwise. In this edition, he looks at today’s atmosphere of “gaming positivity” in games criticism. Rather than challenged by the emergence of different games and differ

Virtual Drag, or how to queer virtual reality

“We’re born naked, and the rest is drag.” – Ru Paul, Lettin’ It All Hang Out, 1995 /// Australian digital media artist Alison Bennett says that Virtual Drag came to her “like a bright flash.” It may not seem obvious at first, the connection between drag performance and virtual reality, but once the

Corporate hell as seen through a 1980s operating system

Imagine a purgatory for the beleaguered office worker. It is probably a world of endless (or, to misuse the term to constructive ends, more endless) meetings and water cooler chat. Fair enough: That is what office culture and the cultural portrayals thereof have conditioned us to expect. But what if