Oct 28, 2016 | 2:50 PM - 4:50 PM | LOFT 1

Ms. Adan Jerreat-Poole, Master's

Ghostly Playmates: Ludic Memory and Mental Illness in "Playfully Suicidal"

There are three ghosts in the videogame Dear Esther. These ghosts can only be encountered in the corner of the cine-eye: if the player attempts to centre the screen on these figures, they vanish. Perhaps this is the only way that ghosts can be encountered— through our peripheral vision, with side looks and coy glances, and only in brief, fleeting moments. Ghostly figures also shape my creative project, Playfully Suicidal, an interactive narrative that embodies the theory of hauntings Avery Gordon outlines in “her shape and his hand,” wrestles with personal and prosthetic memory, and implicates the player in jettisoning futurity as a means of reclaiming disabled time.

Ultimately, this game asks: How do we remember suicides? What are the impacts of media representations of suicide and mental illness on disabled bodies that are positioned as potential suicides? And what would it mean to ‘play’ with memory and mental illness? Playfully Suicidal is situated amongst an emerging genre of empathy role-playing games (RPGs) that engage with mental illness, including Dear Esther, Depression Quest, and Actual Sunlight (depression) and There Are Monsters Under Your Bed and Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before (depression, anxiety, and eating disorders).

My game fits into this archive of empathy RPGs by engaging the player through affect(s); however, it also interrogates mediated constructions of the disabled subject, and adapts elements of memory theory into play. This presentation will focus on the positioning of the depressed subject as caught between Gordon’s “unrememberable past and unimaginable future” (4), because both past and future are located as sites of loss. In critiquing chrononormativity as inherently ableist, and enacting this out-of-time-ness of disability, my project challenges the institutional and cultural memory of suicide that marginalizes disabled bodies, and ultimately gestures towards a re-framing of disabled time as positive.

Mr. Jamie Bamber, MA (Currently studying PhD)

Prosthesis, Censorship and Hoax: False Memory and Identity Construction in an Age of Pervasive Media

This presentation will elucidate research I am currently conducting into themes of false and misrepresented memory in the online era, drawing on case studies and cross-disciplinary research and theory to examine the perceived sociological implications.It is no longer controversial to suggest that recent technological advances are changing the ways in which we construct and consume memory. Autobiographical memories may now largely be ‘manufactured’ online. However, as Brubaker and Vertesi (2010) have noted, social network identities are seldom constructed solely by the person to whom they belong. Instead they may be collaboratively (re)constructed, continuously re-informed by posts, uploads and interactions from the both the individual and members of their network (public or closed), and representing both original or ‘re-shared’ content – offering up novel implications for the relationship between individual and collective memory, and distinctions between perceived ‘true’ and ‘false’ memory.

Loftus’s ground-breaking psychological research (1997) showed that collaborative, corroborative practices in memory formation can lead to the instillation of entirely false memories in individuals; Landsberg had a few years earlier proposed the notion of “prosthetic memories” (1995) – that “do not come from a person’s lived experience” (p.175) but from the experience of mediated narratives such as cinema.

Fast-forward 20 years, and what is at stake for the ‘authentic’ memory? In attempting to answer this question, the presentation will consider topics and examples such as: Misrepresentation, distortion, revisionism and censorship of memory (e.g. the power and limitations of super injunctions; UK government editing of Wikipedia entries; Google’s controversial ‘right to be forgotten’ within the EU); Hoax and misrepresentation (e.g. the ‘Last Tourist’ 9/11 photograph; the 2006 ‘lonelygirl15’ video blog hoax); False trauma, victimhood and testimony (e.g. the intriguing phenomenon of so-called ‘Munchausen’s by internet’, in which individuals construct entirely false victim identities’ lives and memories through social media).

References:

Brubaker, J. & Vertesi, J. (2010) ‘Death and the Social Network’, Department of Informatics, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/394566/Death_and_the_Social_Network (Accessed: 21 April 2014)

Landsberg, A. (1995) ‘Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner’, Body & Society, Volume 1(3-4), pp. 175-189

Loftus, E. F. (1997) ‘Creating False Memories’, Scientific American, Volume 277, No. 3 (September) pp. 70-75

Mr. Hans Krauch, Masters of Arts.

The Art of Lie Detection

I wish to discuss the failures of technology and medicine to accurately predict and determine if someone is indeed lying.  The theory I put forward is that societies reliance on technology has given us complete trust over the output of machines and the word of their operators as the veracity of the machine's output.  More often than not, that trust has been misguided to the detriment to the society at large. 

Biographies

Adan Jerreat-Poole

Adan is a PhD student in the English department at McMaster University. She completed her BA and MA in English literature at the University of Waterloo. Her research interests lie at the intersection of disability, auto/biography, and game studies. She recently presented a paper entitled "Gotta Collect 'Em All?: Re-imagining the Capitalist Collection in Trading Card Games" at Carleton University's 2016 CGC Conference, "Play/Rewind." She also presented a project on medical archives, feminism, and disability at McMaster University's “Chasing Traces: 2015 The Archive and Everyday Life Colloquium.” Her creative work has appeared in The New Quarterly, Qwerty Magazine, Soliloquies, and The Steel Chisel.

Jamie Bamber

I am currently studying for a PhD at the University of East London, researching the role online media plays in changing individual and collective processes of memory. The investigation is discourse based and cross disciplinary – inexhaustively drawing on theory and secondary data from digital cultural studies, philosophy, psychology, sociology, neuroscience and political economy.

My research interest in memory began a decade ago while studying a BA in Fine Art at Wimbledon School of Art, and was cemented and developed through gaining a distinction at MA level in Heritage Studies at the University of East London.

While some commentators have suggested that pervasive media and ubiquitous computing are leading to a decline in the ability to remember, others have at the same time conversely celebrated the internet era as one offering practically unlimited memory. In exploring the role of new technologies in changing memory processes, my research argues for a reframing of the debate, suggesting that instead of considering a problem of remembering less or more, we ought to be asking questions concerning control and ownership of memory. Rather than considering proposed notions of ‘collapse’ or ‘outsourcing’ of memory, I pursue the original notion that we should instead be considering a ‘battle for memory’: a battle for sociological and technological control over what constitutes memory and how it is constituted.

Hans Krauch

Academic Background:

Diploma in Aviation Technology, Nova Scotia Community College, Canada, 2002. BA History, Minor Business - University of Victoria, Canada - 2006. Certificate in Computer Based Information Systems, University of Victoria, Canada - 2009. MA Philosophy - University of Sofia, Bulgaria - 2014 PhD Philosophy - University of Sofia, Bulgaria - slated to complete 2017. Dissertation is titled 'Epistemology of Lies within the Public Sphere.'

Publications:

Sofia Philosophical Review, Vol. IX, No. 1 - 2016. - Book Review of Vattino & Zabala's 'Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx.'

Professional Background:

2000 - Present - Canadian Forces.

Occupations included pilot, avionics technician, information security officer and naval combat information operator.