About this Event
Join us at the Centre for Culture and Technology's Coach House for a Monday Night Seminar led by graduate research fellow Andy Lee:
This Machine Dreams of War: Operations Research, Videogames, and the American War in Vietnam
Andy Lee's research investigates how military simulation (milsim) videogames articulate logics of spatial simulation that are inherited from their origins as military training software. This talk will begin with a discussion of the ways information theory and operations research influenced American military doctrine during the war in Vietnam, shaping everything from the chain of command to the conception of the battlefield as a space for warfare. It will then focus analysis on the military simulation game ARMA III: S.O.G. Prairie Fire (2021), considering the ways that Vietnam as a space is simulated according to a militaristic way of seeing that subtends a variety of computational media today.
Andy Lee is a PhD candidate at the Cinema Studies Institute and a graduate research fellow at the Centre for Culture and Technology. Her research focuses broadly on new media and the history of computation, with a theoretical focus on spatiality and embodiment in video games. Her dissertation investigates the relationship between the United States military and the video game industry, analyzing how military simulation games articulate logics of spatial simulation that are inherited from their origins as military training software.
About the Centre for Culture and Technology:
The Centre for Culture & Technology is dedicated to theoretical, aesthetic, and critical inquiry into the impacts of contemporary media on our interconnected world. This project is informed by the Centre’s location in the Coach House, a multi-use heritage building that was once Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s office and salon on the University of Toronto campus. The Centre draws inspiration from McLuhan’s humanistic intellectual and institutional legacy, continuing his stated goal of “investigation into the psychic and social consequences of technologies”.
The Centre promotes the study of media aesthetics in an expanded sense, examining the ways technological media shape contemporary experience by elaborating its histories, its problems, its infrastructures, and its politics. Offering both a setting and a framework, the Centre provides space and programming for scholars working in humanistic media studies across the three campuses of the University of Toronto and in the GTA. The Centre also supports the production of and conversation about contemporary media art, fostering aesthetic experimentation as a mode of inquiry.
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Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto
39A Queens Park Crescent East
Toronto, ON M5S 2C3
www.cultureandtech.utoronto.ca
[email protected]
Instagram @uoftculturetech
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Centre for Culture and Technology - University of Toronto, 39A Queen's Park Crescent East, Toronto, Canada
CAD 0.00
