Fiona Schönberg is a queer novelist, game designer and scholar from Germany. She holds a BA in Film & English Literature, an MA in Mediadramaturgy and currently pursues her PhD in Media Studies as an Associate Researcher at Regensburg University’s Digital Area Studies Lab. Her research focus lies on affect and belief, how it is perceived and how it is constructed – and how that knowledge may be used to build a kinder tomorrow.
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Replayability
FROG 2026 – Talk
In the past, a great deal of heated discourse has poised games and ‘legacy media’ (used here as per Hartmut Könitz) against one another, both within the field (one need only remember the bitter rivalry between ludologists and narratologists of the early 2000s) and in the public (perhaps most famously in the wholesale dismissal of the ludic medium by the late Roger Ebert and the memetic discussions is spawned).
Building upon contemporary media psychology as well as Walter Benjamin’s foundational 1936 essay evoked in its title, this talk means to propose a yet new understanding of the Aura of an artwork, one that highlights the interactivity inherent to the reception of any artwork, regardless of the semiotic channels involved, regardless whether it be a painting on a museum wall or a modern video game. From this basis, the talk will expand upon where the differences between game and painting do lie – in the differing number of semiotic channels (used here as per Hawreliak 2018&19), and how the conscious employment (and conscious consumption) of procedural semiotic channels can enrich the consumption of art in ways that would be reductive to describe simply as interactivity.
In so doing, this presentation aims to foster both a greater understanding of how art is consumed in the 21st century, and propose this alternate understanding of hermeneutic interactivity to the ongoing discourse that surrounds ‘interactive’ art.