About this project
This is a Critical Code Studies reading of Spacewar!, the space-combat game written for the DEC PDP-1 at MIT in 1961–62, read as a cultural text: at once literature, mechanism, spatial form, and a record of the social world that produced it.
David M. Berry
David’s current work develops a notion of what he calls vector theory, an account of how artificial intelligence, organised around learned high-dimensional geometries (the manifold), is reshaping the production of knowledge, the conditions of culture, and the political economy of computation. He works across the philosophy of technology, critical theory, critical code studies, and the digital humanities, with a particular interest in how the theories and methods developed for older media now need to be rethought.
Mark C. Marino
Mark C. Marino is a Professor (Teaching) of Writing at the University of Southern California (USC) and the Director of the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab, where he explores the cultural and social impacts of computer code and artificial intelligence. A leading scholar on the topic of AI and writing, he also has an extensive background in electronic literature, including co-authoring the experimental books 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (2012) and Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} (2015). His recent work in the AI area includes his book Hallucinate This! an authoritized autobotography of ChatGPT (2023) and his role as a co-author of the forthcoming book Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI, scheduled for publication in May 2026. Marino also shares his insights and projects on Medium and Substack.
Anthony Hay
Wrote a near-perfect clone of the original MAD-SLIP ELIZA in C++, first from Weizenbaum’s 1966 paper, later corrected against the recovered MIT source. Untangled the “certain counting mechanism” behind ELIZA’s memory.
Sarah Ciston
Builds critical-creative tools to bring intersectional approaches to machine learning. Winner of the 2025 Ars Electronica STARTS Grand Prize. Author of A Critical Field Guide to Working with Machine Learning Datasets and founder of Code Collective.
Art Schwarz
Developed gSlip, a public-domain implementation of SLIP, the list-processing library underpinning ELIZA. Interests include hashing algorithms and anomaly detection.
Claire Carroll
Interested in the aesthetics of interactive fiction (IF) and how they might connect to broader digital behaviours. More specifically, she’s exploring how the normalised usages of the second person voice and the present tense in IF create slippage for players’ immersion as they are simultaneously readers and characters, thus balancing and bouncing between extra/diegetic modes of engagement. Her research methodologies include actor-network theory, disability studies, critical code studies, and new media theory.
Norbert Landsteiner
Software archaeologist whose browser-based reconstructions of historic systems include the definitive emulation of Spacewar! running on the PDP-1. His restorations and technical notes on the original code inform this project throughout.
The source and emulator preserved in this project descend from the canonical PDP-1 emulator by Barry Silverman, Brian Silverman and Vadim Gerasimov. The reading draws throughout on the reconstructions and software-archaeological work of Norbert Landsteiner. Source and issues: github.com/spacewar1962.