Laura Op de Beke

• Jordheim, Helge; Op de Beke, Laura; Bjordal, Sine Halkjelsvik; Zuiderveen Borgesius, Leonoor; Brenna, Brita & Flatø, Emil Henrik [Vis alle 9 forfattere av denne artikkelen] (2022). Fossilization, or the matter of historical futures . History and Theory. ISSN 0018-2656. 61(1), s. 4–26. doi: 10.1111/hith.12250. Vis sammendrag

  In this contribution to the “Historical Futures” project, the Lifetimes Research Collective adds to the geological turn currently underway in historiography by presenting a theory of fossils and fossilizations as a way of rethinking the concept of “historical futures.” We proceed by addressing two pivotal speech acts in Western historiography, in the broad sense: the “fossil question,” which was first raised in the middle of the seventeenth century, about how a solid can end up inside another solid and the nineteenth-century Marxist slogan for the modern world, “all that is solid melts into air.” Transported into the early twenty-first century and faced with the challenges of the Anthropocene, both take on new meanings and perform new tasks. In this article, we experiment with different ways of thinking and writing fossils into more general questions of historiography and historical theory by investigating how they affect conceptualizations of historical time. Furthermore, we demonstrate how fossilizations indicate possible trajectories for new materialist speculations, distributing agency to various matters, physical and virtual, in the Earth's crust as well as in museums and video games. Finally, we ask how a theory of fossilization can be seen to decenter the human subject by exploring the processes of decomposition and solidification taking place in the human body. In this way, the arrangements of timescales and lifescales that have given rise to disciplines like history, geology, and biology are destabilized in favor of open-ended historical knowledge ventures that transgress temporal and epistemological borders.

• Op de Beke, Laura (2021). Pastoral Videogames: Industry, Entropy, Elegy. Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities. ISSN 2717-8943. 2(2), s. 177–191. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Op de Beke, Laura (2021). Procedural Futurism in Climate Change Videogames. Alluvium 21st-Century Writing 21st-Century Approaches. ISSN 2050-1560. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Op de Beke, Laura (2021). Premediating climate change in videogames: Repetition, mastery, and failure. Nordic Journal of Media Studies. ISSN 2003-184X. doi: 10.2478/njms-2021-0010. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Op de Beke, Laura (2020). Anthropocene Temporality in Gaia Games. KronoScope. ISSN 1567-715X.

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• Op de Beke, Laura (2021). “The Oil Blue and the Ecstatic Present”.
• Op de Beke, Laura (2021). “Deep Time LARP: A Speculative Storytelling Game”.
• Op de Beke, Laura (2020). Building Alternative Tech Trees.
• Op de Beke, Laura (2020). Ritual, Trauma, and Climate Change in Video Games.
• Op de Beke, Laura (2020). Lockdown, Labour, and Leisure: Gaming in Quarantine. [Internett]. http://timesofcovid19.temporalities.no.
• Op de Beke, Laura (2020). Anthropocene Temporality in Videogames. Vis sammendrag

  Do videogames help us engage with climate change and the nonhuman timescale of the Anthropocene? Or do they reflect exactly the kind of expansionist, techno-utopian logic that got us into this crisis in the first place? Most likely, the truth is somewhere in the middle. This talk briefly introduces the potential of videogames as environmental media by focusing on the way they engage with what I call Anthropocene temporality. In particular, I highlight a trope that has become popular in so-called god games recently: the move from map-style interfaces to the use of whole Earth images and models. This trope signals an overt and growing – although as I will point out, imperfect – engagement with planetarity: an emerging worldview that posits the planet as a world-ecology, one that imbeds both human and nonhuman forces while calling for a renewed attendance to the ethics and aesthetics of relationality. At the same time, my talk will also note the perpetuation in videogames of generic tropes and conventions like the tech tree and expansionist gameplay – which run counter to their environmentalist message. In doing so they videogames stage a dynamic at the heart of Anthropocene temporality, which casts humans as geologic subjects embedded in a planetary ecology that we continuously bump up against or seek to transcend.

• Op de Beke, Laura (2019). Environmental Humanities Reading Group blog.
• Op de Beke, Laura (2019). Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel by Adeline Johns-Putra. English Studies: A Journal of English Language. ISSN 0013-838X. 100(7), s. 935–937 . doi: 10.1080/0013838X.2019.1658475.
• Op de Beke, Laura (2019). Forming the Future in Science Fiction Video Games.

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