Thursday, April 3, 11:00-12:20, Steinhaus Hall 128

In 1978, the French Situationist Guy Debord designed and fabricated a board game called "The Game of War." Thirty years later RSG is resurrecting this largely forgotten game, translating the game instructions from French to Java and releasing it as an online computer game. We explore the contradiction between Debord, a symbol of radical politics and art in 1960s France, and the nineteenth-century Napoleonic campaign game he created. In Debord's own words, the game was the only thing in his entire body of work that had any value. Was it nostalgia, or a vision of things to come?

Alex Galloway is an author and programmer. He is a founding member of the software collective RSG and creator of the data surveillance engine Carnivore./ The New York Times/ recently described his work as "conceptually sharp, visually compelling and completely attuned to the political moment." Galloway is the author of Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (MIT, 2004), Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minnesota, 2006), and a new book co-authored with Eugene Thacker called The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minnesota, 2007). He teaches at New York University.

The UCI Software Culture series brings new media scholars to UC Irvine, supported by Film & Media Studies, Visual Studies, and the Humanities Center. All talks free and open to the public.