450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 160, Stanford, CA 94305
433A
This seminar surveys poetic and aesthetic modes for understanding ongoing transformations in everyday practices of discovery. This inventory of creative tactics aims to map the ways in which varied forms of finding in speculative video games—including Control, Death Stranding, Elden Ring, and Baldur's Gate 3—might bridge the wondrous to ongoing changes in ordinary forms of access to knowledge (A2K). By turns ludic, anecdotal, and academic, "Eerie Wonder: On the Prosody of Discovery" develops a range of approaches to understanding how we find what we don't yet know. It contends that by attending to the eerie wonders hidden within the ludic interfaces of the present, we might imagine new ways of finding—or inventing—improbable futures.
Lunch at 11:45 a.m. for in-person attendees
About the Speaker
Daniel Scott Snelson is a writer, editor, and archivist working as an Associate Professor in the Departments of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA. His online editorial work can be found at PennSound, Eclipse, UbuWeb, Jacket2, and the EPC. Published books include Elden Poem (Hysterically Real, 2022), Full Bleed: A Mourning Letter for the Printed Page (Sync, 2019), Apocalypse Reliquary: 1984–2000 (Monoskop, 2018), Radios (Make Now, 2016), EXE TXT (Gauss PDF, 2015), Epic Lyric Poem (Troll Thread, 2014), and Inventory Arousal with James Hoff (Bedford Press/Architectural Association, 2011). His most recently published book, The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), examines the networked afterlives of media-reflexive works of art and letters in search of contingent methods for reading ordinary digital collections.