Peter Krapp is Professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, with research interests in media history, game studies, cultural memory, and secret communications. Publications include Deja Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory (2004), Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture (2011), Medium Cool (2002) and the Handbook Language-Culture-Communication (2013). He studied at Bonn University (supported by the Adenauer Foundation) and Stirling University (funded by the DAAD) before participating in a Graduiertenkolleg at Konstanz (funded by the DFG), and filed his PhD at UC Santa Barbara in 2000. He taught at the University of Minnesota and at Bard College before coming to UC Irvine in 2004, and held visiting professorships at UNISINOS (Brazil), the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), and Tainan National University of Art (Taiwan).

Forschungsprojekt - Simulation as a Cultural Technique

In simulation, we see a compound legacy of inherited by digital media from cybernetics, midcentury control  systems research, and other confluences integrating operations research, game theory, and techniques  modeling feedback in complex systems. A study of simulation as a cultural technique, centering around  techniques and rites, skills and practices that provide for the stability of lived-in space the continuity of time, 

needs to touch on the controversial claims made on behalf of simulations and investigate to what extent virtual  worlds and serious games can corroborate them. The aim of this project is to elucidate inflection points where quantitative data become tractable for qualitative evaluations: for instance, in modeling epidemics both for  scientific study and for entertainment, in data mining and espionage in virtual worlds, in how numerical  calculations may turn into sounds, songs, and compositions, and in serious gamifications of higher education. Pivotal is the extent to which the experience is more about the how than the what. Cultural techniques make  symbolic work possible: and one of their features is that they tend to be recursive, self-referential, second-order  techniques. This is where cultural techniques conjoin the performative and the constative; if the telling of stories  plays a decisive role in the simulation of complex situations, then the means or medium by which such telling  is disseminated will constitute an essential factor in the shaping and maintaining of simulations.