Wolf, Mark J(oseph) P(eter) 1967-

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WOLF, Mark J(oseph) P(eter) 1967-

PERSONAL: Born May 21, 1967, in Wilwaukee, WI; son of Joseph Andrew (a mold die designer) and Dorothy Jane (a secretary and homemaker; maiden name, Ostrowski) Wolf; married Diane Therese Lyons, July 14, 2001; children: Michael. Ethnicity: "Polish and German-Russian." Education: University of Southern California, B.A., 1990, M.A., 1992, Ph.D., 1995. Religion: Roman Catholic. Hobbies and other interests: Drawing, film.

ADDRESSES: Home—1636 Sherman Ave., South Milwaukee, WI 53172. Offıce—Concordia University Wisconsin, 12800 North Lake Shore Dr., Mequon, WI 53097. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Educator and author. Concordia University Wisconsin, Mequon, associate professor of communications, 1995—, member of computer use committee, 1998—, and faculty development committee, 2001—. Editor of film projects, including Upon This Rock, for Lutheran Heritage Foundation. Organizer and participant at conferences. Member, Saint Adalbert Parish Council, 2000-02.

MEMBER: Christians in the Visual Arts (member of board, 1999—), Society for Cinema Studies.

WRITINGS:

Abstracting Reality: Art, Communication, and Cognition in the Digital Age, University Press of America (Lanham, MD), 2000.

(Editor and contributor) The Medium of the VideoGame, University of Texas Press (Austin, TX), 2001.

(Editor and contributor) Virtual Morality: Morals, Ethics, and New Media, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 2003.

(Editor, with Bernard Perron, and contributor) TheVideo Game Theory Reader, Routledge (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to books, including Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick Change, edited by Vivian Sobchack, University of Minnesota Press, 2000; Encyclopedia of Documentary Film, Fitzroy Dearborn, 2003; and Nights to Remember: Memory, Modernity, and Myth of the Titanic, I. B. Tauris, in press. Contributor to periodicals, including Film Quarterly, Cinema Journal, World, Spectator, CIVA Seen, and Velvet Light Trap. Member of editorial board, sim/iotic@ (magazine), 2003—.

WORK IN PROGRESS: The Seven Stones, a fantasy novel and the first in an intended series that contains King of the Silver Sea; Subcreation: Building Imaginary Worlds, an analysis of J. R. R. Tolkien's "ideas of subcreation and secondary worlds to today's trans-media secondary worlds"; two other books for Italian publishers.

SIDELIGHTS: Mark J. P. Wolf is an academic who shares a popular interest: video and computer gaming. As editor of The Medium of the Video Game, he brings together nine essays—five of which he wrote—to explore the commercial video game as an artistic medium, and study the techniques videogame designers use to achieve different techniques amid a quickly advancing technology. Wolf divides his study into three sections: "The Emergence of the Video Game," "Formal Aspects of the Video Game," and "The Video Game in Society and Culture." While noting in his study that "videogame studies" "is not yet an accepted field of academic study in the way television studies are," Wolf nonetheless presents the results of recent analysis done of video games as they impact society through essays by Charles Bernstein, Rochelle Slovin, and Rebecca R. Tews. While Wolf argues in the introduction to The Medium of the Video Game that games "are best approached and analyzed using conceptual tools developed in film theory and media studies," William Steinmetz disagreed in his online review for the Technology and Society Web site. While praising several of the essays included as "must-have reads," Steinmetz concluded that The Medium of the Video Game "wants to investigate the videogame as 'an artistic medium,' but fails to understand that art is not about the act of creation, but rather about the art's effect on the viewer. As a result," the critic added, the book "spends a lot of time telling you how, but never 'why.'"

In his Abstracting Reality: Art, Communication, and Cognition in the Digital Age, Wolf broadens his focus to include all digital media, and studies the evolution of these technologies. Arguing that digitization—the ability to identically reproduce images mechanically—has changed the method by which society preserves, showcases, and produces artistic works—and also the way we now rigidly objectify time, space, and other measurements—he "believes that these technological changes are responsible for altering our concept of 'art' through the transformation of a formerly physical world into a digital record stored in numeric form," explained Jean Trumbo in a review of Abstracting Reality for News Photographer. Trumbo deemed Wolf's book "a compelling collection of arguments and observations" that are supported with "examples from art, science, and communication." While expressing discomfort with Wolf's theoretical framework as based on a "naive notion" of the way humans gain their "sensual perception of reality," Film Quarterly's Nitzan Ben-Shaul nonetheless maintained that Abstracting Art contains a "broad-based description of the historical trajectories leading to present-day computerized technologies" and "concrete examples of how technological processes may be reconfiguring human perception."

Wolf told CA: "I enjoy both fiction writing and academic writing, as well as drawing, design, and film, video, and multimedia production. Since my area is cinema and media studies, my creative work and academic work often overlap."