Description:
These 14 essays examine Georges Perec's impact on architecture, art, design, media, electronic communications, computing and the everyday.
What do Perec's descriptions of the minutiae of everyday life reveal about our use of information and communications technologies?What happens if we read Life: A User's Manual as a toolbox of ideas for games studies?
What light does the concept of the 'infra-ordinary' shed on social media?
What insights does algorithmic writing generate for the digital humanities?
What lessons can architects, artists, game-designers and writers draw from Perec's fascination with creative constraints?
Through an examination of such questions, this collection takes Perec scholarship beyond its existing limits to offer new ways of rethinking our present.
Brief description: Rowan Wilken is Principal Research Fellow of Design and Social Context in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT. He is the author of Teletechnologies, Place, and Community (Routledge, 2011), and co-editor of Locative Media (Routledge, 2014) and Mobile Technology and Place (Routledge, 2012).
Review Quotes: A literally fabulous introduction to Perec's work, still relatively unknown in the Anglophone world - a treasure trove of clues as to where previously unknown riches are to be found in the multidimensional oeuvre which this Parisian polymath bequeathed us - full of unforeseen marvels and infra-ordinary wonders.--David Morley, Goldsmiths College