This is somewhat belated given the publication date, but Kim’s book is theoretically suggestive and a great example of multispecies work in a Korean context. https://anthropological-notebooks.zrc-sazu…
In early 2026, the South African independent game company, Nyamakop, released “Relooted,” a horizontal, side-scrolling heist game with lots of cutscenes. In this Afrofuturist game, players recover loo…
Stuck in the Turing Matrix: Inauthenticity, Deception and the Social Life of AI Samuel Gerald Collins The Turing test may or may not be a valid test…
The Statue of Liberty National Monument consists of two islands: Liberty Island (which hosts the State of Liberty) and Ellis Island, the s…
One of the many benchmarks for AI is the “Turing test,” Alan Turing’s adaptation of the “imitation game” where an interrogator must decide which of two respondents…
As anthropologists work with collaborators in evoking alternatives to capitalist fascisms, they increasingly engage multimodal registers; games, design, graphic novels and sou…
Matt Durington and I had a wonderful time giving a talk at UBC Okanagan. Thanks to Dr. Fiona McDonald and the Collaborative and Experimental Ethnography Lab. Multimodal…
An article in the Baltimore Banner by Rona Kobell (https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/local-news/hampton-national-historic-site-east-towson-URF5WGM5TZCAZMJAZBGRU7JYMY/) reminded me about the…
CFP: AAA 2025 13 Ghosts of Multimodality: Critiquing, Rejecting and Learning to Live with Multimodality’s Problems Panel Organizer: Samuel Collins (scoll…
I continue to wrestle with the legacy of cybernetics in anthropology – and a future premised on an anthropological bases for the digital. https://histanthro.org/notes/communication-without-…
What are faculty thinking about generative AI? In my role at our faculty center, I speak to faculty often on the problems they face teaching in the…
By Own screenshot, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26632754 I watch people on the Seoul subway playing 쿠키런 (Cookie Run) while we barrel towards Chongno. It’s the successful coloniz…
You’ll see them in film, k-dramas, music videos, webtoons and video games: narrow Seoul alleys (골목길), old restaurants with peeling wallpaper, protagonists drown…
Today (April 26, 2024), our book, “Multimodal Methods in Anthropology” is released into the world. Here’s a song I’ve created for the moment using Udio, a text-to-song Generative…
In 1866, Alfred Russel Wallace sent a breathless letter to his friend and colleague, Thomas Huxley, inviting Huxley to join him in exploring a “new branch of anthropology”:…
My contribution to a really interesting issue on science fiction and the future in Rivista di antropologia contemporanea (2023). Abtsract: Science fiction and anthropology are separate projects,…
[From the SETI project, “A Sign in Space” (https://asignin.space/)] “To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of…
Here’s a recent conference abstract submission, prompted in large part by Geoghegan’s 2022 “Code: From Information Theory to French Theory” (Duke, 2023). The characteristics of our digital world—algo…
I published this review with “TheGeekAnthropologist” – such an interesting, important blog! Please click on the link to see the review in its entirety. Book Review: Played Out…
In 2011, we started a project entitled “Anthropology By the Wire” with participants drawn mainly from community colleges in the Baltimore area. Our goal was to collaborate with…
In 1866, Alfred Russell Wallace proclaimed a “new branch of anthropology” premised on the Spiritualist movement that was then exploding in popularity in England. For Wallace, that anthropology…