PhD Student Robert Jackson

Specialist areas

  • Aesthetics
  • Computation
  • Computer Science
  • Speculative Realism

Website

http://www.robertjackson.info/index

Biography

My name is Robert Jackson is an arts writer, theorist and PhD student at Lancaster University. I am an associate editor of Speculations, a journal dedicated to Speculative realist thought, and a writer for Furtherfield.org. My thesis involves Algorithmic Artworks, Digital Culture, Computer Science, Formalism and Speculative Realist Ontologies, looking at the phenomenon of undecidability in the history of computational art; an effect produced when an algorithmic system or machine can never reliably give a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to a viewer or user or even to other algorithmic systems.

My thesis title is; Decision Ecologies: The Aesthetics of Undecidability in Computational Art.

Supervisor(s)

Latest posts:

If Materialism is not the Solution, then what was the problem?: A Response to Harman

  Abstract: What follows is a cursory response to Graham Harman’s article “Materialism is Not the Solution.” It seeks to branch out his conception of ‘form’ and more specifically, ‘aesthetic form’ whilst expanding on Harman’s principal objections to the materialist account of change, and how this may challenge the contemporary aesthetic …

14 Oct 2014 in Journal

BioShock: Decision, Forced Choice and Propaganda

A historical, critical look at the famous videogame franchise BioShock, understanding it through philosophical, ideological and computational interpretations of systems, decisions and ‘propaganda’. REVIEWS & ENDORSEMENTS Robert Jackson avoids the dilettantism that normally accompanies studies of the aesthetic and cultural accomplishment of videogames, and instead offers a thoroughgoing critique of the ideology …

14 Oct 2014 in Book