In this session, Dr Emma Reay and Dr Alexandra Anikina will share their recent work, followed by a conversation bridging these projects.

Emma will provide a brief overview of death in videogames, thinking through the ways in which it is both hypervisible and hardly seen. She will then introduce her new project ‘Rest in Play: Dying, Grieving, and Gaming’, which examines a selection of contemporary videogames that speak to issues at the heart of the Death Positivity movement. 

Sasha will talk about her recent work on procedural animism and AI imaginaries. She will draw on the work of Antoinette Rouvroy on algorithmic governmentality and Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s ideas of geontology and geontopower in order to rethink the questions of governance and relationality unfolding within the implications of applying the categories of “Life” and “Non-Life” to technology and algorithmic agents.