“'In the beginning' is chaos,” wrote Elizabeth Grosz in 2007, “the whirling, unpredictable movement of forces, vibratory oscillations that constitute the universe.” Or, following the aphorism of Heraclitus, "everything flows." In her recent book "The Sonic Episteme," Robin James described a paradigm of "acoustic resonance," where sound and sonic metaphors--vibration, oscillation, resonance, diffraction, noise--are taken to be the very fabric of being itself. At root here is the old question of the one and the many, the simple monad versus the complex, multiple (perhaps even continuous) aggregation of the whole. In this talk we will look beyond the edges of the screen, beyond the bounds of the computer, out into these kinds of "play ontologies" rooted in becoming, contingency, vibration, and chaos. What happens when the old prescription for critical and cultural theory, "always historicize," changes into a new mandate, "always deterritorialize"?

Bio: Alexander R. Galloway is Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He is author or coauthor of several books, including The Interface Effect, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, and Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture.