Early 15c., "to rest or be satisfied; to give satisfaction to," from Old French contenter (from content (adj.) "satisfied") and Medieval Latin contentare, both from Latin contentus "contained; satisfied," past participle of continere "to hold together, enclose," from assimilated form of com "with, together" (see con-) + tenere "to hold" (from PIE root *ten- "to stretch"). Sense connection of "contained" and "satisfied" probably is that the contented person's desires are bound by what he or she already has weaved together".
A
Accomplices
Adaptive Architecture
C
Conspiratorial Bleed
Critical Empathy
Commonism
D
Decentralized Directing
E
Emergent Gameplay
I
Intersubjectivation
L
Language Gaming
P
Pervasive Play
Prefigurative Play
R
Remote Reality Games
S
Score
W
Walk With Words
Accomplices
The notion of the Accomplice is similar to that of the trickster but it implies a relation. Their belonging is not based on likeness or next of kin but bound by an agreement, alternative contract or condition that outlaws them.
Adaptive Architecture
describes game architectures that can be adapted by the players during play. Instead of confining choice in railroaded decision trees that present rather an illusion of choice these game structures try to constrain themselves to the minimal impact necessary to enable the player and produce Emergent Gameplay.
Conspiratorial Bleed
Conspiratorial gameplay engages players without automatically antagonizing them. They col-lude, which means they play together, against the game itself, which makes them Accomplices.
Bleed is a term used in LARP (Live Action Role Play) to describe the grey zone between fiction and reality, where the border between player and character dissolves.
Conspiratorial Bleed is committed to show the fragility of that boundary and to understand collective dynamics in the construction of fiction and reality.
Bleed is a term used in LARP (Live Action Role Play) to describe the grey zone between fiction and reality, where the border between player and character dissolves.
Conspiratorial Bleed is committed to show the fragility of that boundary and to understand collective dynamics in the construction of fiction and reality.
Critical Empathy
...does not only refer to the process of imagining another person’s point of view or emotional state, but also to an awareness of the limitations and complications of empathy.
Empathy is critical,
if it is critical,
also of itself.
If you take anybody seriously, one of the things you learn is not knowing. - Donna Haraway
Empathy is critical,
if it is critical,
also of itself.
If you take anybody seriously, one of the things you learn is not knowing. - Donna Haraway
Commonism
‘a practice-based ideology that is making its way from the margins’, as described by Nico Dockx & Pascal Gielen in
Commonism - A New Aesthetics of the Real
and builds on the effort of Binna Choi, Sven Lütticken and Jorinde Seijdel in exploring a
An Aesthetics of the Commons,
“truly a monster reconciling everything that is in fact irreconcilable”.
More Reading:
Antonio Negri on the aesthetic style and strategy of the commons
Jacques Rancière reconfiguring the common field of aesthetics and politics
More Reading:
Antonio Negri on the aesthetic style and strategy of the commons
Jacques Rancière reconfiguring the common field of aesthetics and politics
"to weave together," 1540s, verb from Latin contexere "to weave together"
Reflection and Theory around Role Play, Collective Worlding, Non-linear Narration, Embodied Research.
Exquisite Corpse
How the fictionalizing of the body and use of somatic techniques can turn the players body into a play ground, allowing them to explore alternate selves, and subvert existing narrations and projections it is subjected to.published in Metropolis M #4, dutch translation
#Embodiment #Pluralism #Plasticity #Role Play
This is an Invitation to Conspire
Article tracing the emergence of Role Play as a medium within the Arts -
ŠUM Journal #21 ALGO-RHYTHMIC IDEATION ASSEMBLY#Live Action Role Play
No More Heros
This text abandons the hero on his search for individual growth to encounter non-linear and collective narratives that unfurl aside his trodden path.Exquisite Corpse
Carina Erdmann
Imagine a small version of yourself balancing on this I.
Look at yourself. How is your posture? Do you seem stable? Feel relaxed?
Can you make yourself comfortable?
Now watch the letter I with intent. Feel its imprint in your own eye.
Imagine with it the imprint of the small self that rests on it.
Feel how your projection is slipping of the I and out of sight into the black hole that is your pupil.
Here you start to take any shape you want to be.
Create a fiction of yourself. We all do.
Can you see yourself projected on the inner wall of your eye?
How do you feel?
What do you desire?
Your fear?
Your trick?
Your paradox?
Think of one memory that you try to forget.
Exercise from Playscript Alter Ego, Olga Terre, 2020
The tabletop RPG ‘After the Maestro’ by Tom K. Kemp is set within an ‘anthropomorphized anatomy’. It depicts the inner human body as an industrialized city and draws from its existing narrativization that ranges from the body as state, territory, factory, and machine and serves to naturalize sovereign power, war, or the atomization of labor and technology. Tom’s work aims at complicating and subverting such oversimplified and scientifically inaccurate models that are projected onto the body.
Listening to the recording of the play sessions it becomes clear just how inescapable the metaphoric weight of the body seems to be. Metaphors are an integral part of translating abstract concepts and feelings into tangible experiences. Our cognition is embodied.1
Mental models are physical brain circuits that derive meaning through the nervous system of the body. Neural mappings are created unconsciously through their navigation and interaction with the physical world. These ‘primary metaphors’ are directional, which may explain how the subterranean dungeon offers an intuitive metaphor for the concept of mind that divides the psyche into top and sub.
In his essay ‘Dungeoneering’2, Tom maps out the conceptual architecture and eerie3 quality of the dungeon tracing its legacy in TableTop Role Playing Games (TTRPGs) like Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) which has been influenced by the war game (Kriegspiel) and is itself influential on early developments of computer programming.
Incidentally in one of the play sessions, Matt Colquhoun aka Xenogothic is playing a group of young Spermatozoa, effectively impotent characters with a desire for conquest, hanging around in the ‘lower parts’ and are compared to aimless disenfranchised teenagers hanging out in their basements. The other two guests Lucy and Sean of the horror philosophy podcast Wyrd Signal, personify the Pineal Glandt that starts the game by putting the body to sleep, and Toxoplasma-gondii, an opportunistic parasite that spreads (mis-)information to bring the city in contact with other cities. Tom himself plays the heart of an old harbor city which when drained in an act of revolt reveals the old version of the city that was once built on the belief that intent started in the heart.
Through multiple play sessions in which Tom engages different groups of invited guests in the ‘Collective Bodybuilding’, he is able to observe how his game mechanics bring to life different forms of anatomical (re)organizations. Alongside most of the practices outlined in this text, also Tom centers the Worldbuilding process in his game design. Rather than trying to bring the players into the artist's subjective fiction, the game offers heuristics and categories that players interpret themselves.
It makes me think of Shelley Jackson’s ‘Patchwork Girl’ from 1995, a piece of hypertext fiction that invites the reader into a re-creation of a female body freed from its organizing force. The interactive narrative lets the players choose their own story that defines the order in which the body is sewn together, not unlike a body is written and created through life, rather than a static identity that corresponds to shaping expectations upon it (eg. to the reproductive function of the body.)
Creating renders of the speculative bodies he illustrates the different outbirths of ‘emancipatory body-horror’. These assemblages appear to slip into the realm of the undead, a place that also historically has been drawn out of and by a process of subjugation and the haunted bodies it produces. (Eg. folktales that demonized the ostracized during the gothic period.4) Another play session run with the crew of ‘Buddies Without Organs’, a podcast dedicated to the intriguing figure developed by Deleuze and Guattari, it is then not surprising that eventually the ‘Body without Organs’ is brought to the table. Their pill does not promise a cure.
Most Cities eventually crumble - what will happen to ours? ― Quote from Play Script of After the Maestro
Styleframe for After the Maestro
With a homeopath as a mother, the idea that our organs are affected by both immediate emotional states as well as transgenerational trauma accompanied me from childhood. Likewise, the impression of the 1996 film Body Troopers, in which a boy travels through the ailing body of his grandfather to dissolve his kidney stone with a reservoir of held-back tears to dance with his dead grandmother residing in the heart. The anthropomorphized organs represented vivid illustrations of the communicative pursuits that a holistic approach assigns to them.
‘Sick Woman Theory’5 argues that all of our bodies and brains bear the scars of oppression and insists that most modes of political protest are internalized, embodied and ultimately invisible. Framing dis-order6 as a rupture to a given and evidently sickening system corresponds to the artistic and activist strategy that delineates a movement away from reforming the outside world to a resistance that turns to a reframing of the inner.
To consider it an effective strategy it must avoid collapsing complexity into a binary of inside and outside nor shall it offer up the body as a battlefield. In her book ‘Disease and Its Metaphors’ from 1989, Susan Sontag describes the harm that metaphors of consumption have caused to herself as a cancer patient. In the follow-up book16 gearing her analysis towards AIDS, she problematizes the commonly used military and invasion metaphors that frame the disease as a war against the virus which ultimately victimizes the patient and possibly makes them die as ‘losers of a fight’.
In ‘Deep Nation’ a Live Action Role Play (LARP) designed by Omsk Social Club in collaboration with a group of artists that created the characters for the game, I played a sentient tumor, shortly after my father had been diagnosed with cancer. ‘TOMMY’, conceived by Naomi Bisley, was charming, power-hungry, and enjoyed a distaste for memory. Despite the obvious strangeness to embody cancer in this way, playing from its completely nonhuman perspective momentarily lifted some weight off Damokle’s sword. In the end, ‘TOMMY’ teamed up with ‘Love’ and convinced the other characters to open up to the potential of uncontrolled cell growth.
Sontag's theories have also been influential to the writing process of the RPG ‘Draconis Lacrimae’ a collaboration by Pablo Esbert and Federico Vladimir Strate, which is in part a coming to terms with the HIV virus within their own bodies. In the foreword that is essentially a love letter, Federico brings up the figure of ‘The Virus’ as narrator of their relationship. Next to it appears ‘The Adventurer’ that portrays their past, the shared identity constructed through migration, trauma, and settlement. As a figure to extend their couple the transcultural archetype of the dragon is brought in and in swallowing the other two, embodies their community. 17
The game design becomes a self-exploratory journey that is presented both as an autobiographical performance piece as well as a Player’s Handbook opening the process to potential players. In many RPGs, the game starts with character creation, allowing the players to personalize their Roles and decide on their desired level of ‘Bleed’ (the spillover between character and player). Here this part plunges right into the bloodstream. In a process spanning over multiple evenings, carefully crafted exercises invite a deep dive into the multiple layers and tissues of the self: Players introduce themselves as their ancestors, write an ‘Emo Bio’ that narrates their most emotional moments in life, recall personal memories on political or historical events or make a guts striptease.
GUTS STRIPTEASE: A SPECULATIVE CARTOGRAPHIC BIO-NARRATION
Starting from the top of your head, tell yourself the history of your body: what you like, what you don't, scars, traumas, hang-ups, glorified parts, g-spots… Don’t forget the insides: virus, illnesses, organs and inner sensations. Include how you felt about your body as a kid or a teenager (and how you felt you were perceived) up to the present day.
While doing this exercise, let yourself be driven by memory and perception but also imagination. What attributes would you like your body to have? What other fictional traits may appear? Let that third eye appear on your chest; or give a voice to your left hand, the one that keeps all your secrets.
― Exercise from Handbook of Draconis Lacrimae
2
From there the character-building steers into categorization. Introduced with the ironic slogan ‘Hypertag yourself. Saturate your life with identity’, it reminds us how instrumentalization and marketing of identities reduce the complexity of the lived experience. 18 As another way that categories give shape to our self-image the game picks up the archetypes of Dungeons and Dragons. The use of archetypes evokes many ways in which personhood has been further imprisoned through essentialist, discriminatory, and supposedly universal features.19
In ‘Draconis Lacrimae’ the transcultural archetype of the Dragon becomes the Dungeon that the players collectively try to escape. It is the structure that they are trapped in but also the figure that narrates their community.‘It’s body as a multiverse, is the self that has been recognized as the others within. The body as container of other bodies, of fictions, fictions such as ghosts, organs and viruses’ 20
The following parts of the game, players construct the inner anatomy of the dragon and narrate a plot through free play, ‘conflict organs’ and worldbuilding mechanics derived from a more recent breed of RPGs that have no ‘Game Master’ and center collective creation and negotiation.21
Spread from After Action Report of Draconis Lacrimae
How we tell stories also matters in relation to the way we narrate ourselves. Carl Jung defined archetypes as symbols and personality patterns, deriving from shared ‘primordial images’ within our collective unconscious. His process of individuation runs alongside ‘The Hero's Journey’ a story told from the perspective of a single individual who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed. Joseph Campell derived this ‘Monomyth’ from his structural analysis in comparative literature. First published in 1949 it is still majorly influential on the way contemporary media fabricates role models ‘on demand’ and is also inscribed in the automation processes of narrative scripts. While these formulas doubtlessly function as valuable support also to interactive fiction that relies on relatable prompts, they risk mindless perpetuation for the sake of comfort that keeps us marching behind the hero down the same trodden path.
Doireann O'Malley's Prototypes series addresses the way psychoanalysis has enacted traditional role models in relation to gender and offers alternative forms of subjectivity. The films take the viewer into a dream-like otherworld through floating camera movement that follows a group of protagonists on a process of unraveling and rebuilding of self in a world void of binary paradigms. For the filmmaking process of the first two chapters, LARP is employed as an improvisation technique mainly to create a fictional frame for the real protagonists to perform themselves or a version of themselves. They chose different names but drew from their own dreams, memories, and embodied experiences.
Prototypes I: Quantum Leaps in Trans Semiotics through Psycho-Analytical Snail Serum (2017) explores new perspectives on trans identity through the lens of post-psychoanalytical methodologies, conjuring figures of hermaphrodite snails as well as Karen Barad's theories that intertwine feminism with physics to challenge the fraud biological determinism used to naturalize gender binaries: ‘[An] electron’s very nature is unnatural, not given, not fixed, but forever transitioning and transforming itself.’22
In Prototype II: The Institute for the Enrichment of Computer Aided Post Gendered Prototypes (2018) a holographic host introduces the protagonists to the making and unmaking of their binarized gendered identities. Finally, letting them choose whether they wish to cross through the portal into a genderless multiverse where an alternative version of themselves exists.
What is your relationship to your body? How do you feel in your body? What is your relationship to being a body in space? How would you describe your body? How would you describe your personality? What do you think of when you think of your environment? Do you feel different? What do you think of yourself being different from? When you were young did you feel different? How does difference make you feel? How do you think your body and your thoughts communicate or relate to each other? Is your gender a part of that communication?
― Excerpt from the script of Prototypes II
Video still of Prototypes II, Doireann O'Malley, 2018
Imagining scenarios in an emotionally neutral place can change our attitude toward that place in reality.23 The more immersed people tend to get into 'becoming' a fictional character, the more they use the same part of the brain to think about the character as they do to think about themselves.24 People make their own brains, Imagine if they knew that and ‘they could construct and entertain a relation with their brain as the image of a world to come’.25 I wonder if and how Role Play can support the transformation of the brain’s plasticity into mental ‘freedom.’
Said potential to ‘decode’ and ‘recode’ our brain comes with different implications. For once, the brain-computer metaphor is reductive, limiting, and harmful when considering the impact it has on our self-understanding and is reinscribed through predictive coding, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and Social engineering.
QAnon managed to recruit a large group of ‘researchers’ through guided apophenia and game mechanics that railroad players on the pleasurable path laid out with breadcrumbs in the form of small dopamine hits as the unknowing players are made to believe that it is them that ‘discover’ new clues.26
The participatory nature of games runs the risk of performing an illusion of agency. In some way though, most art could be seen as a form of manipulation, as it hides its educative intentions and engrained worldview by making the viewer believe that they make their own conclusions while oftentimes crafting a skillful path for thoughts to travel.27
This is not a call however to give up on the agency altogether. It rather calls to question: How to listen? How to create enabling structures? Here the notion of distance is useful. Both, the distance that lies between the intention of the artist’s work and the attentive focus of its prosumer but also within the player's self. Role Play offers a form of the double consciousness of being immersed and simultaneously observing one's own actions and reactions.
In her article ‘Wyrding the self’, Jonaya Kemper reflects on LARP as a tool to release the body from internalized oppression and bias by taking on roles other than those that society may commonly prescribe to it.28 Here Role Play becomes a form of ‘disidentification’29 from assigned social roles. Her writing is a call, especially to those who do not fall into the ‘mythical norm’30 although she contends that both center and margin call to be released from their oppressive relation, though only the marginalized may have enough (will) power to release it.31 The character provides an ‘Alibi’ to explore parts of the self that one would normally hold back as not suiting to the previously assigned narration of self. The idea here is that through conscious action as well as embodied and intuitive reaction in play this narration expands.
Kemper offers a method of extensive pre-and post-play preparation and reflection in which players identify themes they want to work on and consciously steer for dealing with them in-game. She calls this ‘navigational play’. This process is supported through the collection of ephemera and journaling.
The possibility to transform the way we relate to ourselves, makes Role Play a commonly used technique in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and related practices. Although artists and LARPers are not medical professionals and do not claim to be, in times and places where medical care is not sufficiently available or affordable these self-organized practices can be seen as providing at least some kind of support.
This is addressed directly by Furtherfield’s online LARP ’We were made for this // 2050 Fugitive Planning’ introducing players to ‘the Hologram’, a viral system for peer2peer monitoring and diagnostics based on physical, psychological, and social health. Developed for the Social Solidarity Clinic in Thessaloniki, Greece during the height of the financial crisis it was spread by a group of US artists in reaction to their own underattended public health and projected 30 years into the future in which players envisioned themselves as the most well-supported version of themselves - amongst collapsing human and environmental systems.
‘NOVA. Future thoughts on surviving together’ is a futurist LARP written by Ana de Almeida and Alicja Rogalska and directed to queer and feminist initiatives. The game sets out with the sharing of problems and strategies that participants experience in their activist work to then move into a speculative realm that is free of patriarchal oppression and the suffocation it presents. Collectively they create organizations as well as the threat and opportunities that they will face during play, decide on a conflict and define previously unknown and unnamed feelings to address them. Through designing costumes, rituals, and a collective celebration as a final event the players are engaged in embodied forms of community building.
Think of a feeling for which you do not have any words (yet). Eplain this feeling to each other. Make up a word for it together.Adapted score from NOVA
Documentation of NOVA
In regards to DIY therapy Brody Condon’s Role Play ‘Level5’ offers a critical stance. It presents an 'experiential essay' on the raise of the self-help industry and the dissemination of psychoanalysis throughout American popularity. It is a simulation of a Werner Erhard self-actualization workshop turned into a participatory game. Contrived as a self-reflective hall of mirrors it lets players shed multiple layers of self—via an artificial layer of self, the character.
Personal overlap with the game content and its residue varied with the player's intentions and style of play. Logbook sessions prompted the players to engage in an ongoing private conversation between themselves and the entity they became at three different levels: Character vs. character (character's self-reflection), player vs. character (your reflections on the character), and eventually player vs. player (your own self-reflection). The magical circle in this LARP is deliberately permeable, the fiction flexible to withstand intrusions and a playing field that lets players sway between different levels of immersion.
"Scan your body for non-verbal signals. Briefly observe them. Activate, then slowly transmute into, one of your located non-verbal expressions. Become your crossed arms, become your organs, become your pain."
― Modified exercise from Gestalt Technique used in Zeigarnik Effect, 2015
The LARP deals with subjectivity transformation processes from a specific period. The early large-group awareness training developed in the 70ies considered the individual responsible for all trauma and its lingering effects. Growing up with a father returning from Vietnam and a mother turning to trafficking and consuming narcotics, Brody stresses their failure to position trauma in relation to the oppressive social structures.
Documentation Level 5
Power relations are constitutive of the subject.32 Subjectivation is the person making, the ‘Character Creation’ so to say, it is the social roles we need to enact daily to survive in society. We are created by the gaze of others. This is not only done to us but also actively performed by us.33 Adding this degree of agency opens a path for subversive acts.
Once again let us pay a visit to the conflated metaphoric map of the dungeon. The BDSM Dungeon is a place where Role Play and related negotion around consent have been practiced already for a long time and where safety mechanics such as code words, calibration tools, and debriefing now widely used in progressive LARP contexts were developped refined.
The critical difference to the power relations that we experience outside of Role Play is that we do not get to consent to them. In BDSM this relies on intimate self-knowledge, the ability to communicate one's desires, and the trust that they will be respected. Being able to play with power can possibly lift some of the pressure that real power structures weigh on our bodies. It is a reminder of the inherently relational and fluid nature of power. Pain here may actually draw this experience into the body but also allow the ‘self’ to transcend it.
Of course, there are forms of therapy like Psychodrama, Gestalt therapy, or Family Constellation that use Role Play. Gestalt therapy for example lets clients play as a parent, a child, or partner in conflict, inhabiting facets of their subjectivities by adopting others. What binds these approaches is that they are relatively marginalized practices and that they are embodied.
Trauma too is embodied. The past is perpetuated through a continued secretion of stress hormones that keeps the body captive in ‘flight mode’. As a result, the overstimulated subject loses touch with their body as it learns to distrust its signals. Like one eventually will stop listening to a broken alarm. In the western context, trauma is generally approached head first through a (psycho)analytical approach but this is often not sufficient. To activate the brain’s natural neuroplasticity and rewire disturbed functioning, the embodiment of new experiences plays a crucial role.34
Isabel Lewis states in a letter that she addresses at her audience, that healing begins ‘with rehabilitating our human sensorium, bringing into check the power we have given to the idea of objective, all-seeing, all-knowing vision in the modernity project.’
Her work(shop) ‘Erotic Sociability’ intertwines embodiment exercises with the theories of feminist sociologist Roslyn H. Bologh offering the notion of interhuman sociality as an alternative to the dominant 20th century relational modes of competition, conflict, and coercion.’
Bologh unfolds a relationality that is based on a mutual acknowledgment of each other and one’s own desires. It is an attending of one another, that celebrates difference. She sketches an ongoing movement rather than a fixation, a swaying between subject and object, a weighing of self-interest and care, a play with opacity and exposure that demands vulnerability to show that one is affected by the other.35
After the collective discussion of Bologhs theory, Isabel draws us into our bodies. Different guided exercises affect a heightening and tuning of the senses. More radically aware and receptive to both non-human entities and each other, we move on. The last part is a dance. Isabel calls it a striptease. But instead of stripping our clothes, we are guided to turn our attention inward, toward the surface of our own skin, and imagine peeling away layers of social constructs and identity. Since the workshop is online we are divided in break out rooms where we are asked to dance for and with each other and perform the double movement between turning us inside out and while letting the outside in.
The following is meant to be read with another—human or other-than-human, perhaps more-than-human—at a distance of approximately 60 cm.
Find this position in relation to them in space.
Hold them in your peripheral vision, gently.
Attune yourself to their materiality.
What volume of space do they displace?
What compression or expansion of your own body would be required to fill that volume?
Can you sense their weight?
What is the timbre of their vibration?
Can you transpose this into audible tones?
Do you pick up on the smell of them from this distance?
Without touching, is there a discernment that can be made about their temperature in relation to your own?
Mind this.
― Excerpt of Invocation 1, Isabel Lewis, 2021
3
Introducing the notion of the Dividuum36, Gerald Raunig destabilizes the notion of the ‘in-dividual’ as a given. He reveals the idea of the self as an indivisible unit as a cultural and ideological construction37 and losing the prefix points to the divisible nature of things opening up potential passageways that lay between the individual and the communal. He points to the authorship of books themselves and their relation to other books. We are used to thinking of books as written by individuals, but as Raunig points out they are always built on chains of other books that constitute their body of knowledge rendered visible, as direct quotations and reference noted down in the Footnotes.
The margins emerge here as place a place of trans-temporal exchange and conversation between different readers as seen in medieval scriptures38 but also as a place of resistance in the tradition of black radical thought and feminist practices of critical pedagogy.39
Another recent work of Isabel is ‘Scalable Skeletal Escalator’ an immersive installation and improvised performance that turns the entire building (in this case Kunsthalle Zürich) into a body - made up of other bodies. The holobiont live work takes cues from biologist Dr. Lynn Margulis’ who has emphasized cooperation and symbiosis as driving forces for evolution next to Darwin’s better known (and funded) view of competition. Dancers organically adapt their performance to the audiences, always responsive and in switching roles. Isabel calls this ‘multi-organismic assemblage’. Another ‘Patchwork’ Body, an Exquisite Corpse.
This game also pieces together a body collectively from body parts that might come from radically different worlds and yet they are connected, through open ends and speculation, enabling their bodies to bleed into each other. It is the writing of a body that defies narrative coherence.40 Desire here is derived from the discrete. If you take anybody seriously, one of the things you learn is not knowing.41
Dokumentation of Scalable Skeletal Escalator, Isabel Lewis, Kunsthalle Zürich, 2021
Abandonning the obsession of categorization and scientific forms of knowledge production also releases the regiment of the visual as frame of reference and language as means of communication. Áron Birtalan creates Role Plays that emphasis on subjective worlds and character-creation like his non-verbal LARP ‘DIM’ that takes place in a darkened and undefined abstract space where participants meet as Forms and Shadows and communicate mainly through their own unique body language, guided through exercises in attention, breathing and movement. Somatic LARPs like ‘Xenosomatics’ by Susan Ploetz build a vocabulary of skills (hyperobservation, ideokinesis, hyperempathy, interfacing) to fundamentally reinvent and extend the way we use and relate to our own and each other's bodies.
Participants playing an early version of DIM, Secret Fiction Lab, 2017
While this forms of engagement may seem too vague or abstract to actually address the concrete and urgent problems that are at stake, these artists argue that it is exactly this ability to think and act outside the reactive feedback loops of critique, which eventually offers a more effective defense. Contemporary criticism meanwhile often helps to sustain the system that it searches to oppose, entranced in a dance of dependency. In his essay ‘THE CRITICAL ESCAPE’artist and LARP designer Áron Birtalan insists that Role Play as survival mechanism is not purely fictional as he recalls his upbringing in the Kingdom of Pipecland, a secret world that existed between 1938 and 1978 in rural Hungary and an attempt to create an ideal society as a resistance to and ‘critical escape’ from the facist regime.
Omsk Social Club who describe themselves as a ‘futuristically political’ (i.e., unrealistic) immersive action group are known for devising a mutated form of LARP called ‘Real Game Play’ as a training camp for other modes of being.
Task: An audit of what is real
Quickly write down everything you observe about your Self until you are exhausted, it does not have to make sense as this world rarely does.
Then do an audit of what is real, cross out anything that no longer feels relevant.
― Taken from The Wet Altar Omsk Social Club
Their first public large-scale piece was ‘PLAY RAVE’ in 2017 featuring 400 Live identities constructed from looking at and speaking to four different generations of crews, promoters, DJs, producers, dancers, and cult figures in Zurich that had put on illegal raves in the city-the earliest in the 1980s. In an Interview with !Mediengruppe Bitnik they explain that Rave culture has influenced their work possibly even more than Role Play traditions. As a rendering of the body useless for capitalist work, a space of collective euphoria, illusion, and losing of one(s) self to find another.
Cryptorave#9, Omsk Social Club and !Mediengruppe Bitnik. Fotos: Mike Tsolis 2019
‘Under the cover the waves’ is an improvised re-enactment of dream accounts shared, staged and filmed by a group of participants that are invited into the collaboration of Trakal and Jack Hogan.
Dreaming-together speaks to Trakal’s artistic approach, which foregrounds questions of collectivity from a post-socialist perspective. ‘Oneirotopia’ another of his dream-works, is 4-day workshop using collective worlding techniques to imagine dreams as outlooks of an utopic otherly world, which respectively act as counter-influences to dominant cultures of consumerism and rationality. Jack came to the project interested in sociality and dispossession as engagements that crack open the often overly individuated world of the dreamer. They themselves ‘dream’ of using dream-sharing culture to get around our inner censors, accessing an oceanic imaginary. Dream states open up possibilities by shutting off the controlled part of the brain that wants to produce specific outcomes and manage everything, a form of direct action--acting as if we are already free.
Under the covers, the waves!, 2021, Athens Biennale
Here it may be also relevant to remember Beradt as an influential figure in modern dream-sharing practices, as the local and geo-political battlefield is now more than ever the human mind. After the Nazis' rise to power the Jewish journalist and writer Charlotte Beradt’s began collecting the dreams42 of her fellow germans until she had to flee the country in 1939. The dreams reveal the totalizing force of the regime permeating the subjects' psyche and yet remain a realm of free expression in which the suppressed feelings of fear and guilt can find expression. Beyond that Berardt’s book points to the potential of dream-sharing as a form of alternate narration of a collective experience and memory and therefore possibly also a way to address collective trauma.
The trajectory sketched in this text proposes an inner reframing as a form of resistance or escape. What binds the works I have presented is the artists desire to create spaces that undermine and erode existing structures of mental oppression. In many cases this may be motivated by the urgency and desire to prefigure actual transformations taking form or leaving a more permanent imprint.
And yet I wonder to which extend it may be the fleeting nature of these experiments that conditions their freedom, a caving out of ‘Temporary Autonomous Zones’ in the (sub)terrain of the self through fiction.43
How can it become a rehearsal?
It makes me think of a meme:
The Rave is also a place where bodies conspire. To conspire means to breathe together. This statement was made by Simon Asencio44, who heard it from Eleanor Ivory Weber, who saw it on an Andy Warhol poster. We are made up of other bodies. ‘Conspire’ then also means ‘to let each other breathe.’
1 ‘Metaphors We Live By’, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, 1980
2
’Dungeoneering, Tom K.Kemp, Schemas of Uncertainty, 2019
3 ‘The Weird and the Eerie’, Mark Fisher, 2016
4 ‘Mouthless-part-i-and-part-ii’ Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, artsoftheworkingclass.org
5 ‘Sick Woman Theory’, Johanna Hedva, 2016
6dis-order.info, Yael Wicki
7 ‘AIDS and Its Metaphors’ by Susan Sonntag, 1989
8 Draconis Lacrimae: Escape From The Guts of The Dragon
Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc & Pablo Esbert Lilienfeld, 2021
9 ‘Identity can often be vital in dealing with a situation of oppression, but it would be a mistake to use it to avoid dealing with complexity. Life cannot be saturated with identity’. The Handbook quotes Judith Butler in conversation with Beatriz Preciado, 2008
10 Deliberatly it also retains their markers such as (fantasy) class and race that are inherited from RPG’s legacy as a war game and it’s abstraction and discrimination of (not-fantasy) bodies to problematize it in-game. Also borrowed from traditional role play mechanics every character is reduced to 5 abilities that are define action points both by chance (a dice roll) and by their class.This is an adjustment to traditional D&D that also performs stat changes based on race which is addressed by projects like Class Modifier Module for DnD 5e.
11 apass.be/profile/portfolio-federico-vladimir-strate-pezdirc/
12 ‘Polaris’, Francois Menneteau, Philippe Tessier, and Raphael Bombayl, first published in 1997 and ‘Microscope’ by Ben Robbins from 2011
13 Karen Barad, “Transmaterialities: Trans*/ Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings”, 2015
14 ‘Forming attitudes via neural activity supporting affective episodic simulations’, Nature Communications, 2019
15 ‘Identification with fictional characters is associated with greater self–other neural overlap’, Oxford University Press, 2021
16 ‘What should we do with our brains’, Catherine Malabou, 2008 (partially quoting Marx)
17 ‘A Game Designer's Analysis Of QAnon’ Reed Berkowitz, Medium, 2020
18 ‘One Number Is Worth One Word’ Luis Camnitzer, eflux podcast, 2020
19 ‘Wyrding the Self’ Jonaya Kemper, 2018
20 ‘Disidentifications. Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics’, José Esteban Muñoz, 1999
21 a concept Kemper borrows from Audre Lorde’s, ‘Age, Race, Class and Sex’, 2015
22 Here Kemper quotes Freire in ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’, 1968/2014
23 ‘Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison’, Michel Foucault, 1975
24 ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory, Judith Butler, 1988
25 ‘The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma’ , Bessel A. van der Kolk, 2014
26 ‘Love or Greatness: Max Weber and Masculine Thinking--a Feminist Inquiry’, Roslyn Wallach Bologh,1990
27 A category of the human mind: the notion of person; the notion of self’ In his lecture from
1938, Marcel Mauss distinguishes between
notion of self and that of a persona, a fixed role or position within a society, akin to masks that an individual may switch within the course of their lives.
28
‘Dividuum: Machinic Capitalism and Molecular Revolution’, 2016, Gerald Raunig
29 ‘Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book’, 2021, Elaine Treharne
30
‘On Footnotes’, Lecture (2021), Legacy Russell; ‘Zeroes and Ones’ (1997), Sadie Plant
31
‘Giving an Account of Oneself’ Judith Butler, 2005. Butler compliments Foucault’s views on how self-narration is entangled with power relations disputing the pursuit for narrative coherence in favor of vulnerability, precariousness, and relationality.
32 Making Kin: An Interview with Donna Haraway, 2019
33
‘Provided we can escape from the museums we carry around inside us, provided we can stop selling ourselves tickets to the galleries in our own skulls, we can begin to contemplate an art which re-creates the goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols ... Art tells gorgeous lies that come true.’ - ‘T.A.Z.:The Temporary Autonomous Zone’ Hakim Bey, 1991
_____
43 ‘The Third Reich of Dreams’ is a collection of seventy-five dreams, compiled by journalist Charlotte Beradt and smuggled out of Germany during the 1930s in code. Neither scientific study nor psychoanalytic text it is a collective diary, a witness account hauled out of a nation’s subconscious mind.
44To conspire means to breathe together, Simon Asencio, 2019
No More Heros Please
Carina Erdmann
Or should we maybe join in with Tina Turner when she sings just one year later:
Out of the ruins
Out from the wreckage
Can't make the same mistake this time
We are the children
The last generation (the last generation)
We are the ones they left behind
And I wonder when we
Are ever gonna change, change
Living under the fear
'Til nothing else remains
We don't need another hero
The songs of the two women express precisely the split we want to explore. Which desires do we project into figures ‘larger than life’ to borrow Tyler's words once more? Whom do they serve? Can the long-dead heroes be resurrected and recast in a contemporary framing that allows for more diverse identities to assume their roles? Does the spotlighting of the hero offer the necessary attention to marginalized groups? Or is it in fact the hero archetype itself that is holding us captive in narratives that praise the individual and disavow the community? Contemporary politics give vivid proof that if we call out for a strongman to hand over our own civic responsibilities, he will gladly appear. He will demand sacrifice for the greater good and will produce more heroes that can fight and possibly die for the nationalist fantasies he recalls or deliver pizza for the minimum wage to keep the extractive machine of capitalism well oiled and nourished. ‘To make America great again’ and to ‘Always delivering an amazing experience’ as the slogan of the company ‘Delivery Hero’ promises to its clients and demands from its workers.
As the hero can be used to motivate individuals to sacrifice themselves in return for honorary mention it is no big surprise that it is abused to exploit those that lack recognition in society otherwise. This also explains why the health and ‘essential workers’ were praised as heroes for a short time after the outbreak of the pandemic for being out there and exposing themselves on the front lines. Still, the loud pledges to turn their one-time hero pay into a long-term raise was silently revoked in some case giving the explanation that care workers should be doing their job out of ‘care for people rather than ‘need for money. Real heroes are apparently not paid.
And indeed there are billions of gamers each year who pour countless hours of their free time into playing the hero on screen. For free as well. In video games such as: ‘Quest for Glory: So You Want to Be a Hero’ from 1989 one of the main incentives set in play is to rise above others. Overcoming ever bigger bosses the player can gain a sensation of personal growth and heroic strength. Suitingly they are often reincarnations and mash-ups of figures from mythology or the lone survivor roaming through a post-apocalyptic aftermath, the mythology of our time. The hero's journey sketched out by Joseph Campell is a perfect mold for those stories. Even as open-world or multiple-choice narrative they follow the same trodden path from the perspective of a single individual who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed.
With the alternative title, ‘Monomyth’ Campbell wants to sign towards the universality of this template. It is indeed produced through a structural analysis within the field of comparative literature and its potency in mapping a path of individual transformation becomes evident when tracing a similar structure in the Jungian process of individuation, the stages of the shamanic Initiation as well as the schizophrenic renewal of the self, that are deeply spiritual and psychological processes. One connecting element of ancient and contemporary mythologies is their pedagogical purpose and transformative potential. Drawing from psychoanalysis we are particularly interested in how these techniques draw relations from the personal to a collective subconscious.
Structural analysis of narration is becoming especially relevant in increasingly coded environments where algorithms are trained to produce new narratives based on unified principles but also for human scriptwriters and storytellers these formulas doubtlessly function as valuable support in reproducing new tales after an old recipe. Precisely because the formulas have been proven to work, it is important to not fall into its mindless perpetuation for the sake of comfort. In a (re)turn to narrative conventions and archetypes lays of course also the possibility to question and subvert them - updating the stories and applying them to today's contexts is only one part of that endeavor. The other would be be to observe and experiment with the underlying motives implicit in the structure itself. This would also imply a shift in perspective from the individual to the collective. In LARP and multiplayer games, there are no single heroes because every player requires a fulfilled game trajectory. A search for non-heroical narrations are thus also an exploration of nonlinear and collective forms of storytelling and can take inspiration from narrative structures that are built around multiple characters eg. in the Scandinavian or Indian narrative traditions or more relational forms such as in West-African narratives. It would entail a collective research of the different narrative models and characters in different (sub)cultural traditions, variations and common ground within different local mythologies and facilitating an ensemble of characters that celebrates difference. It would be an international collaboration that works against the universalist approach of imperialist logic of globalization as well as the resurrection of nationalist traditions and ideals.
early 15c., "to come together, meet in the same place," usually for some public purpose, from Old French convenir "to come together; to suit, agree," from Latin convenire "to assemble; unite", from assimilated form of com- "with, together" + venire "to come"
2022
Footnotes: Annotating the Future of Arts Education
A workshop, conference, and role-playing game that unfurled in a speculative scenario set in 2045. Participants assumed a character to design and research future realities for arts education. It took place from at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and was organized by School of Commons and 0ct0p0s.
2021
Blend&Bleed: Online Symposium on Transreality
& Pervasive Play
A series of online workshops conjuring synergies between the fields of performance, larp, game design and media theory. The common inquiry will be the phenomenon of 'bleed', wherein the boundaries between fiction and reality, the virtual and physical world dissolve.
2020
late 14c., "aspire or plan, agree together to commit a criminal act," from Old French conspirer (14c.), from Latin conspirare "to agree, unite, plot," literally "to breathe together," from assimilated form of com "with, together" (see con-) + spirare "to breathe"
This is a list of practicioners working on the intersections of performance and play. It will always be far from complete. If you would like to add an entry write to contact@0ct0p0s.net
0
0ct0p0s, Research platform for performance and pervasive play & Development of (Remote) Role Plays, Worlding Workshops and Sonic Fictions.
A
Albin Werle, visual artist making interactive artworks that function similarly to play, games and fortune telling
Argn.com, Alternate Reality Gaming Network
Aron Birtalan, artist working with games, mysticism,
intimacy and the politics of imagination.
Axel Stockburger, artist and theorist who designs games and researches on gaming.
B
Brody Condon, artist creating game-like group encounters.
Black Swan, collective testing horizontal and decentralized approaches to the traditional art world templates through Role Play, exploring digital tools that facilitate peer support, artist-led funding, and horizontal decision making.
C
Carina Erdmann, artist, researcher working with remote role play, and collective worlding.
Claire Tolan, artist and programmer and designer of Die Siedler von ShÜSh, a fantasy tabletop role-playing game rooted in the sounds of ASMR
CRISP, organisation that designs simulation games on political and social conflicts, in which the participants can test alternative problem-solving approaches in a safe zone.
E
Elio J. Carranza, artist working between formats of moving images, games and installation. They are passionate about critical pedagogy, conflict resolution and autonomous healthcare and sickness.
Eva Wei, larpwright, IP-lawyer and lecturer dealing with Intersectionality and nerdism, discriminatory structures, and political activism. |
F
FedericoVladimir Strate Pezdirc &Pablo Esbert Lilienfeld, artist duo that createRole Playing Games from the perspective ofperformance.
Francis Patrick Brady, artist, curator and pedagogue, who creates artistic games that question the accepted realities of social and cultural norms, building scenarios that establish crossovers between fantasy and fiction.
G
GAMESCENE, website dedicated to Game Art started with the bookproject Art in the Age of Videogames written and edited by Matteo Bittanti.
J
jujul0v3, world builder, ecofeminist, witch, an oracle... Inspired by feminist science fiction, manga, pop culture & fantasy
Jonaya Kemper, activist, artist, educator, designer, writer, and games scholar who looks at play as a means of liberation for people of marginalized identities.
L
LAOG (Live Action Online Game), Live Action Role Plays using video call technology and meta-techniques. Manifesto by Gerrit Reininghaus
Leak Ventures, (positive) trolling collective creating Real Game Plays on art and speculation as form of critique. eg. Goldman $nax, a night of financial t€rr0r.
M
Maria Cynkier, curator working in the fields of art, ecology and digital culture, using LARPs as discursive method.
Mario Mu, artist working on various research projects which are often constructed as extended gaming platforms.
Me gustas pixelad [I Like You Pixelated], a festival where the performing arts meet the world of computer screens, the internet, and video games; curated by Matías Daporta.
Mirror World Creations, Live Action Role Play studio that creates Phone LARPS.
Moving Castles, modular and portable multiplayer miniverses; inhabited by communities that use them to manage their lore, ecosystems and economies.
Mycological twist, project by Eloïse Bonneviot and Anne de Boer operating both as a fixed mushroom garden and as a nomadic project, infecting and spreading mycelium alike.
N
Nick Koppenhagen, conceptual artist working with game-like aesthetics and experiences. Collaborating on the Dream Dungeon and the dreamXchange ~ Guided Sessions.
Nina Essendrop, LARP designer with a focus on movement, sensory experiences and the meaning of physical action.
Nordiclarp.org, online magazine about Nordic style larp. The website is a non-profit community project managed by a team of volunteers who are part of the international larp community.
O
Omsk Social Club, collective using Real Game Play in LARP situations to induce states in which the fictional world bleeds into the real, offering new shared and virtual spaces with a taste of activism.
P
Philip Tomei, experience designer and cognitive scientist using LARP, neuroscience and immersive theatre to create transformative experiences.
R
Research Center for Proxy Politics, lens based class of Hito Steyerl, in which LARP is used to test run science fiction scenarios reflecting critically on the present.
Ruth Catlow, artist, curator and researcher on emancipatory network cultures, practices and poetics frequently using Role Plays eg. to reflect personal and collective data practices. She is artistic director of Furtherfield.
S
Sarah Lynne Bowman, scholar, professor and game designer writing frequently on the practice of role-playing games.
Steph Holl-Trieu, artist and researcher interested in imbrications and slippages between media theory, symbiotic ecology and historical materialism.
Susan Ploetz, artist who deals with bodymind-technology interactions, imagination as interface and emancipatory emotional dissonance in her LARP designs.
T
Tom K Kemp, artist using RPG design, improvised filmmaking and animation to parse the eerie consequences of global bureaucratic and economic systems on intimate and immediate human relations.
Trojanhorse, autonomous educational platform that organizes summer schools, live action role-plays, workshops and reading circles in the landscapes of architecture, design and art.
ÖRJÄT (2018) a 3-day interactive narration, taking place on an uninhabited island in Sweden, designed to prompt reflection on the meaning of free will facing the urgency of environmental change.
0ct0p0s
0ct0p0s is an organization providing a platform for sharing collective and embodied research methods that enable the emergence of other ontologies and social imaginaries
through play and performance.
PRACTICE
Dream Dungeon
Role Play Game that lets you (re)enter and explore a collective dreamscape. Connecting and merging the different dream locations in a growing underground architecture, it provides a place for a fictional tale to unfold through free association.Carina Erdmann, Nick Koppenhagen, Balint Mark Turi
Sculpting Sonic Worlds
Workshop experimenting with collective worldbuilding methodologies through the medium of sound.Steph Holl Trieu
LUCIID
Extended Reality Game in which Remote Players are embodied by Real Live Avatars who move in a physical gamespace via video livestream and an adaptive soundscape and game score.Carina Erdmann, Steph Holl Trieu Marijn Degenaar, Lendl Barcelos
Where the Unborn Conspire
Workshop approaching world-making through voice, breath, relational dynamics, and role-play techniques. It forms a metaphysical narration of becoming a choir.Carina Erdmann
Buried Accomplices
Online Role Play set in the future vision of
E.M. Forster’s 1909 novella ‘The Machine Stops’ lets players re-construct a speculative past through archival video fragments and the method of loci.Carina Erdmann, Nick Koppenhagen
COMMISSIONS
Footnotes: Annotating the Future of Arts Education
(Commission by → School of Commons /Carina Erdmann , Steph Holl Trieu )
Role Play, workshop and conference held at the Zurich University of the Arts letting participants develop and research critical designs of future realities for arts education within a fictional setting of 2045.
Emotional Futures
(Commission by →LIGHT ART SPACE (LAS) / Carina Erdmann, →Marcel Darienzo, →Ed Fornieles, →Steph Holl Trieu, →Andrew Pasquier, →Xiaoji Song, →Moritz Tontsch & →Ingeborg Wie Henriksen) Extended Reality Game letting players extract and account for each other’s emotional labor in the fictional currencies Blood, Sweat, and Tears, produced and valorized in interaction and relation to other players. Reconstructing paradigms of gamification and financialization, it aims to reveal and subvert the co-creative force of datafication through recursive feedback.Commons: The Game Show
( Commission by Curatorial Collective for Public Art and Parzelle X / Collaboration with Steph Holl Trieu, Trakal, Carina Erdmann / Funded by Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion)Participatory art project suggesting the speculative formation of a Commons on an urban wasteland as the premise for a game show. Residing on the intersection of public art, art film and reality television, it explores the challenges of founding and maintaining a communal resource through a series of participatory mirco-LARP scenarios.
MORE INFO
© Edgard Berendsen
RESEARCH
DISTANT BODIES & ACCOMPLICES
Research project investigating embodied inter-action and inter-subjective exchange between player and avatar through Remote Role Play.Carina Erdmann
Machine Acts
(Pilot Project for → FILM-EU RIT/ Carina Erdmann, Patrícia Sequeira Brás, Liina Keevallik, Rita Grácio, Vincent Thornhill, Veronica Romhany, Tobias Fruhmorgen) Research pilot investigating the narratives around AI and how they become entangled with our own narration and subject creation as we communicate in digital environments that are increasingly governed by predictive algorithms. Weaving philosophical concepts (like dividuum, plasticity) into different Role Play Scripts for both human players and GTP-3 to simulate the recursive feedback loops that condition human-machine interactions.Carina Erdmann
Carina Erdmann lives between Berlin and Brussels working as artist, researcher, curator and mentor in Game Design. Her
practice engages non-linear narration, role play, and collective worlding as a tool for enacting critical thought. Co-creating sensuous simulations of social speculation it lets players (re)visit collective memories, (per)form
plural perspectives and act out alternative agencies. In the PhD project “DISTANT BODIES AND ACCOMPLICES – Rethinking the interaction between player and avatar through remote LARPing ' she investigates the hybridization of online gaming and
performance
as part of the ongoing research into Preformative and Pervasive Play opened on 0ct0p0s.net
WEBSITE
RESEARCH
CV
Where The Unborn Conspire: Worlding workshop for more than one voice*
Everything not saved will be lost
— Nintendo
Which songs are sung after the end of a world? The workshop approaches worlding through voice, breath, relational dynamics, and role-play techniques. It is a game played by the living, summoning the voices of those who will come after them, through the resonance of their flesh. You recognize me by my voice. I learned to love listening to you. The characters dwell in what is left of the institution - A ruin to re-inhabit. Participants can play a character from the computer at home or become their body moving through the Theater space. Either way, they act as Accomplices as they construct the metaphysics of another world. An apocalypse is also a beginning.
18.09.21 @ Shedhalle Protozone 4: Extra Worlding
Concept by Carina Erdmann
with support of Lendl Barcelos and School of Commons
Where the Unborn Conspire, Invite, 2021, Graphic Design: → Marijn Degenaar
First the remote players created a world collectively from which characters emerged that were then embodied by the participants physically present at Shedhalle. They were connected via livestream transmitted by smartphone worn with chestmounts.
The Worlding Workshop included adaption of existing scores for performance and choir improvisation, sensing, deep listening, and feminist practice.**
Reflections:
‘It is the idea of intersubjectivity. You are one character. A me & you relation is held within the character. Mutual acceptance produces the subject. The me is the me & you feeling sth. together. A way of working through who that me is together.’ — Pule
‘The experience allowed us to think through really crucial concerns: How do we keep our minds open to the potential of true change? What would that mean for us as people? Who would we become?’ — Chantelle
Where the unborn conspire_ WORKSHOP SCRIPT
*After the title ‘For more than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression’ by Adriana Cavarero
**Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice - by Pauline Olivieros, Undoing What We Know: Dramaturgy as Cosmology on the Making
→ by Andrea Božić and Julia Willms, → To become Two: Propositions for Feminist Collective Practice by Alex Martinis Roe
LUCIID
#Virtual Embodiment #Relational Worlding #Somatic Scores #Adaptive Audio #Social Dreaming #Intersubjectivation
Online Player, Player: Hannah Schiefelbein
LUCIID is an Remote Reality Game in which online players are embodied by Real Live Avatars who move in a physical gamespace. Players can take on the role of a playable character wearing a camera mounted on a chest harness, transmitting their first person perspective, or ‘take action’ from home as a player on the browser-based multiplayer interface. The (literal) framing of a computer game opens as a portal into mental, physical, and performative space. For this purpose a lightweight web application is built, that connects players via video livestream and leads them through an adaptive game script. The interactive score combines methodologies of Role Play, Game Design, Performance Improvisation and Psychoanalysis to craft a transindividual and transformative experience for the players, offering experiences of intersubjectivity and a space for (self)reflection. What happens when your avatar is another person with their own set of motivations? What resistance and implicit violence is felt when you are being played?
ABYSM, Player: Dawid Grzesinski & Nikolas Brummer, UI Design by Marijn Degenaar, Font:Icarus by Sophia Brinkgerd
The movements and choices made within the game shape the performance scripts and soundscapes that serve as a guide for characters and players alike. Together they set out on a journey from personal to collective memory and trauma. The story is non-linear and subverts narrative conventions and archetypes - following the Fool’s rather than the Heros Journey. It takes place in a Multiplayer Game played in a state of connected Hypnagogia, the state between wakefulness and sleep. Multiple QUESTS lead through three REALMS: The Node, The Edge, The Field, which correspond to division of Theatre Space: Backstage, Stage, Auditorium.
LUCIID, Player: Sayuri Chetti and Maciec Sado, UI Design by Marijn Degenaar,
Font:Icarus by Sophia Brinkgerd
Together, player and avatar construct the shared identity of their character, as they set out on a journey from personal to collective memory and trauma. The story is non-linear and subverts narrative conventions and archetypes. It takes place in a Multiplayer Game played in a state of connected Hypnagogia, the state between wakefulness and sleep. Multiple QUESTS lead through different realms which are mapped to the physical gamespace.
Character Creation, Player: Yiou Penelope Peng, UI Design by → Marijn Degenaar
Considering the role of sound in accessing deeper layers of meaning, memory, and non-verbal communication, the project foregrounds the development of an adaptive soundscape that responds to and evolves with the player in different ways. Embracing both emergent and analog technologies it investigates areas of Adaptive Audio, Auditory AR, Psychoacoustics, and Improvisational Performance. Probing into algorithmic feedback systems, the project experiments with generative music eg. using sensors, spatial mapping, biofeedback. As bodily or perceptive extension, it explores the effects of haptic and spatial sound but also somatic exercises.
Online Player, UI Design by → Marijn Degenaar
The project opens up to the potential of extending our perception and world-making through sound; but also explores critical views on the brain's plasticity and sensual ways to address the mutual feedback between between algorithms and our bodies. It experiments with various choreographic scores, their relations to the notation of music, and how to translate them to social interactions. Exploring the possibilities and challenges of remote interaction, the project is invested in the search for embodied forms of communication, moving beyond the confines of the screen: being moved by one another's voice or reacting to rhythms sensed through the skin.
Memory Stack, Player: Nikolas Brummer, UI Design by → Marijn Degenaar
The game serves as a training ground for imaginative flexibility, as collective fictions and colliding worlds become entangled and bleed into the physical and personal reality of the participants. How can we open ourselves towards different ways of knowing as well as the implied not knowing? Can we perceive and reconstruct an interwovenness between multiple perspectives and modes of being?
Memory Stack, Player: Yiou Penelope Peng, Maciec Sado; UI Design by → Marijn Degenaar
Technology: Auditory XR, Mobile web application with integrated video live stream, responsive soundtrack via real-time feedback and interactive narrative score.
Direction: Carina Erdmann
Programming & UI Design: Marijn Degenaar
Music: Lendl Barcelos
Narrative Design: Steph Holl-Trieu
Technical Advice: Nick Koppenhagen
Supported by
Théâtre de Liège, ST'ART invest, Rayonnement de la Wallonie
Temporal Worlding
Remote Reality Games as Spatio-Temporal Navigation and Narrationby Steph Holl-Trieu & Carina Erdmann
The question of systems of time-keeping and the structuring of temporality is central to design processes and experiences of games. The very foundational theories of games and play (Huizinga, 1950; Caillois, 2001) argue that ludic spaces are defined by clearly delineated temporal durations that separate game temporalities from everyday lived experience. Allowing for the navigation of time through pausing, slowing down, rewinding, replaying, reactivating time, video games offer entirely new and malleable experiences of temporality (Hanson, 2018). In Live-Action-Role-Playing (LARP), time and temporality is an equally crucial tool to set game worlds apart from consensual reality, whether it is through the setting of a time frame to define the magic circle, meta techniques that allow scenes to be played out in non-chronological time, or fluid time structures to pursue multiple plotlines simultaneously.
Our workshop proposes a Remote Reality Game for DiGRA participants, half of the participants should be in Guadalajara and half of them call in from around the world. Participants are paired and become one character with two bodies: player and avatar. Together, they go on a walk, in which the player directs the avatar and instructs their movement via voice call. The game play is facilitated through a narrative that overlays the real world environment of the players with a speculative framing using temporal navigation systems and narrative structures from games. While the workshop investigates hybrid or remote interaction, it also introduces embodied forms of knowledge production, tuning into cyclical and linear rhythms that condition the body through somatic exercises.
Through different temporal logics the players record their avatars' narrations in a shared spatio-temporal map (a shared online whiteboard that connects all players), channelling the avatars’ concrete embodied experiences into an abstract overview. In an intimate exchange in which the participants rely on each other's asymmetric means of perception, the avatars’ bodies become the interfaces for the players to experience the city. The players trace and map the pathways of their real-life avatars walking through Guadalajara, as the city becomes the gamespace or playground.
This project is an invitation to analyse, reflect on and conspire with and against modes of temporal worlding. Temporal worlding can be understood as the making and unmaking of worlds through infrastructures of time and temporal practices. From the first railway accidents to the logistics of global supply chains, the imposition of labour regimes and the affordances of high-frequency trading, the demand for synchronised clock time is inseparable from colonial conquest, militarism, financial and industrial capitalism. Within, against and beyond the social control of time, we find uneasy, weird and wayward temporalities produced through lived experience and experimental navigation.
We propose the use of role-play, nonlinear narration and collective worlding to examine and construct livable alternatives to existing infrastructures. Our aim is to experience and negotiate divergent conceptions of time as they exist within consensual reality. Negotiating the sometimes paradoxical patterns as well as conducive synergies that emerge between these temporal practices, we hope to develop the social and collective agency to launch operative fictions and heterogeneous worlds that have the potential to disrupt, undermine and reshape ‘our time(s)’.
Hybrid Workshop
at DiGRA Conference 2024: Playgrounds, July 1-5th, Guadalajara, México
References:
Caillois, Roger. Man, Play, and Games. Translated by Meyer Barash. University of Illinois Press, (1961) 2001.
Hanson, Christopher. Game Time. Understanding Temporality in Video Games. Indiana University Press, 2018.
Harviainen, J. Tuomas. “Time and Temporality in Live-Action Role-Playing”. Homo Ludens 1(11), 2018.
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Beacon Press, 1950
Koljonen, Johanna, et. al. LARP Design : Creating Role-Play Experiences. Knudepunkt, 2021
Lefebvre, Henri. Rhythmanalysis : Space Time and Everyday Life. Continuum, 2004
Phillips, Rasheedah. “Dismantling the Master('s) Clock[work Universe], Pt. 1”, Space-Time Collapse I: From the Congo to the Carolinas, Black Quantum Futurism, The AfroFuturist Affair/House of Future Sciences Books, 2016, 15-34
Sharma, Sarah. In the Meantime : Temporality and Cultural Politics, Duke University Press, 2014
Thompson, E.P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”. Past & Present, Volume 38, Issue 1, December 1967, Pages 56–97, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/38.1.56
Volmar, Axel, and Kyle Stine, editors. Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time: Essays on Hardwired Temporalities. Amsterdam University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1xcxr3n.
Zhexi Zhang, Gary. Catastrophe Time! Strange Attractor Press, 2023
at DiGRA Conference 2024: Playgrounds, July 1-5th, Guadalajara, México
References:
Caillois, Roger. Man, Play, and Games. Translated by Meyer Barash. University of Illinois Press, (1961) 2001.
Hanson, Christopher. Game Time. Understanding Temporality in Video Games. Indiana University Press, 2018.
Harviainen, J. Tuomas. “Time and Temporality in Live-Action Role-Playing”. Homo Ludens 1(11), 2018.
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Beacon Press, 1950
Koljonen, Johanna, et. al. LARP Design : Creating Role-Play Experiences. Knudepunkt, 2021
Lefebvre, Henri. Rhythmanalysis : Space Time and Everyday Life. Continuum, 2004
Phillips, Rasheedah. “Dismantling the Master('s) Clock[work Universe], Pt. 1”, Space-Time Collapse I: From the Congo to the Carolinas, Black Quantum Futurism, The AfroFuturist Affair/House of Future Sciences Books, 2016, 15-34
Sharma, Sarah. In the Meantime : Temporality and Cultural Politics, Duke University Press, 2014
Thompson, E.P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”. Past & Present, Volume 38, Issue 1, December 1967, Pages 56–97, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/38.1.56
Volmar, Axel, and Kyle Stine, editors. Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time: Essays on Hardwired Temporalities. Amsterdam University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1xcxr3n.
Zhexi Zhang, Gary. Catastrophe Time! Strange Attractor Press, 2023
c. 1300, "agree, give assent" from Old French consentir "comply" (12c.) and directly from Latin consentire "agree, literally "feel together," from assimilated form of com "with, together" + sentire "to feel"
Interactive Sound and Active Listening
Interested in both emergent, as well as ancient technologies 0ct0p0s explores areas of haptic and spacial Sound, Auditory AR, Psychoacoustics, and Improvisational Performance Scores (such as Deep Listening and Vocal Techniques) applied within the context of interactive performances, films, or games. As algorithmic feedback, it would experiment with generative music eg. using sensors, spatial mapping, biofeedback, vocal modeling, cloning & synthesis. In terms of bodily or perceptive extension, it would explore the effects of directional and binaural microphones, bone-conduction headphones, and wearable bass technology but also somatic exercises. To give the active listener agency and meaningful choices it might be interesting to play with different adaptive audio techniques used in computer games (such as horizontal re-sequencing or vertical re-orchestration) in more spatial and immersive contexts. The practical exploration would be situated in the reflection around the role of sound in accessing deeper layers of meaning, memory, and non-verbal communication.
Plasticity & Resonance
The project explores applied forms of Adaptive Audio and Somatic Listening to extend our sensing capacities and critical reflection on the circular relationship between algorithms and our bodies. It will draw from both; the research of neuroscientists such as David Eagleman who use haptic feedback to develop new sensing capacities, as well as the critical views on the brain's plasticity as discussed by Catherine Malabou. On the one hand, the project opens us up to the potential of extending our perception and world-making through sound. On the other, it explores sensual ways to address the problematic feedback between our brain and predictive algorithms generated by cognitive capitalism. The research will also entail experimentation with various choreographic scores, their relations to the notation of music, and how to translate them to social interactions.
READ:
‘Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice’ - by Pauline Olivieros
‘For More than One Voice. Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression’ by Adriana Cavarero, 2005.
‘Low End Theory_ Bass, Bodies and the Materiality of Sonic Experience’ by Paul C. Jasen, 2016
‘Sonic Agency_ Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance’ by Brandon LaBelle, 2018
‘Sonic Possible Worlds, Hearing the Continuum of Sound’ by Salomé Voegelin, 2021
‘Sonic Somatic_Performances of the Unsound Body’ by Christof Migone, 2012
‘Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear’ by Steve Goodman, 2009
LISTEN:
‘Sound Characters (Making The Third Ear)’ by Maryanne Amacher, 1999
AGENTS:
Mauro Hertig, composer with an output of ensemble, chamber and site-specific works. His focus lies on explorations of interdependence, creating stage environments that distribute agency in game-like settings, often using sounds of intimate speech, touch and instructions.
NSDOS, musician and choreography researcher. Inventing his own his hybrid tools out of old audio converters, Gameboy emulators he unravels the rectilinear anatomy of techno music. Inspired by meteorological stations and according to a principle of «bio feedback», he surveyes the movements of nature, turned into data before translating them into sounds, textures and rhythms.
Steph Holl-Trieu, artist and researcher sculpting Sonic Worlds taking cues from a perpetual interplay of media theory and historical materialism.
Thomas Deueles, neurologist, musician, and neuroscientist. He has invented a brain-music interface, called the Encephalophone, allowing one to generate music in real time without movement. He has begun clinical trials of the Encaphalophone to restore musical ability to patients who are paralyzed from motor disability.
1660s, "put together the parts" from Latin constructus, past participle of construere "pile up together, accumulate; build, make" from assimilated form of com "with, together" + struere (from PIE *streu-, extended form of root *stere- "to spread"). Sense of "to devise and form in the mind" is from 1755.
A central element to both games and performance is that the design of an interactive score. Rule systems, scripts and scores are structures that enable and guide action. Often they aim at finding a minimal form. The barebones that the participant can flesh out. What is the least structure needed to create emergent gameplay and lead participants into an experience in which they can surprise themselves?
This platform aims at making available existing scores and forms of notation that are shared with the creative commons and report on those those that may be accessed upon inquiry or through live experience.
#Algorithms
#Emergent Gameplay
AGENTS:
1000 Scores. Pieces for Here, Now & Later, an online performance space that presents new scores from various artists. Each score is an instructional art piece for one person, commissioned by the project initiated by Helgard Haug, David Helbich & Cornelius Puschke.
Everybodys Toolbox, a data base and a library, a toolbox and a game creator, a publication house, a score container, a site for distribution and for long term investigatory discussions.
The Text Score Dataset 1.0, was created by Jennifer Walshe as training material for Machine Learning algorithms, so that new generations of text scores could be created. It comprises over 3,000 text scores, running to almost half a million words, ranging from Fluxus event scores to compositions written in the last year.
The Interactions Group, a transdisciplinary group of scientific and artistic researchers who explore collective thought through playful experiments and develop ‘human algorithms’ like the → The Wonder Machine.
Bernadette Mayers writing prompts
languageisavirus is a site made to cure writer's block and collects interactive writing games, story writing activities, poem generators and writing prompts
READING:
‘Software for People: Collected Writings 1963-80’ by Pauline Oliveros
early 15c., "thicken, make more dense or compact", from Old French condenser (14c.) or directly from Latin condensare, from com-, + densare "make thick," from densus "dense, thick, crowded," a word used of crowds, darkness, clouds, etc.
Image: Fragment ofThe Dream of Saint Joseph, Georges de La Tour, 1628 - 1645; Font:Cruder, Hyunjun Jang, 2018
DreamXchange
Weekly meetings to share and discuss dreams of the past week exploring Dreams as Tales, that might reflect our inner and outer world(s). The group also offers a place to exchange exercises in Lucid dreaming and any research conducted on or within dreams.
Entering each others dreamscapes, archiving and discussing common tropes as well as comparing its fabric to the records of past generations, we try to listen to dreams as tales. How do they narrate our present and allow access to a collective memory that may haunt it?
dreamXchange follows the vein of previous projects* that have studied dreams to examine a hypothesized collective unconscious.
The dreamXchange public program during the months of November 2023 to February 2024. It invites four artists, researchers, healers, tricksters or mythical figures are invited to guide the participants through a 2-3 hour session loosely based on the structure of the regular dream sharing sessions and the speaker's own approach to social dreaming and (collective) dream work.
* Examples (listed below) are Charlotte Beradt’s ’The Third Reich of Dreams’ (1966) a collection of dreams gathered during the 2nd World War in Germany or the amassing of COVID dreams by the London Museum in a project called ‘Guardians of Sleep’. Both projects record the effects of societal upheaval on the unconscious.
Dream Dungeon is a Role Play Game that lets you (re)enter and explore a collective dreamscape. Connecting and merging the different dream locations in a growing underground architecture, it provides a place for a fictional tale to unfold through free association. Players may choose a character that has appeared in any of the shared dreams to follow and find out more about their desires, fears, and questions. In the dream dungeon, the individual dreamer dissolves in a trip of transindividual memory and reflection.
Dormant Territory is a workshop hosted by the research group dreamXchange and extends their weekly dream sharing meetings and oneirotopia methodology to a larger audience. Oneirotopia makes use of nonlinear storytelling, positive conspiracy and the method of loci. In three consecutive parts the workshop will uncover and construct a multitude of superimposed topologies that the participants connect through liminal portals. The workshop builds on our experience of creating LARPs (Live Action Role Plays) and worldbuilding workshops.
Image: It looked like an embrace, Koma Somnus; 2020, Font:Krungthep
Dream Tapestry is a collective sharing session weaving together dreamscapes and real-world landscapes, initiated by Koma Somnus a character that is collectively conceived and nurtured during the dreamXchange sessions. The feature-length walk is an invitation to listen to and share fragments of past dreams while moving through a chosen environment, blending memories with live impressions of the immediate surroundings.
Dates:
29th of April, 2021, on discord, hosted by the Ashley Berlin
Koma Somnus (*19987) is an artist and researcher based in the oneirotopia feed harvested from collective dreamscapes. They are interested in digital game play, video game realism, digital materialism, pseudo-experiments, reciprocal practices between humans, software tools and care work, the co-constitution of memory and trauma, the mutation of written language in programming environments, collective imagination and mythology, the visual properties of abstract systems and collective worldbuild.
LINKS:
Baratto&Mouravas
Artist duo navigating Archaeodreaming, a multi-disciplinary methodology that merges archaeology with dreamscape-making. Their work recounts narratives integrating history, mythology, material memory, personal dreams, and collective imagination.
COVID Dreams
Millions of people around the world weave the horrors of COVID-19, into their dreams, exposing feelings of fear, loss, isolation and grief in a way that transcends culture, language and national boundaries. Humanity has rarely experienced “collective dreaming” on such a broad scale in recorded history — at least never while also being able to share those nightmares in real time.
Deirdre Barrett, a Havard professor of Psychology researching on the connection of trauma and dreams, has created an online survey to collect the dreams of people living through the coronavirus pandemic.
DREAM WORKS
Three sessions of practice and experimentation with and in dreams: dreaming together, dreaming in the dreams of others, preparing dreams before and after being dreamed. Dreaming of art forms and as an art form. initiated by Galerie founders Simon Asencio and Adriano Wilfert Jensen.
Drawing made by Adriano and Simon transformed through Deep Dream Generators, Madrid, 2018
Liminal Archives a global database of the strange and uncanny locations that blur the line between real and unreal. The archive operating as an open sandbox allowing users to add their findings through different ways of documentation and navigate through each others liminal locations in a hyptothetical gamespace composed of different levels.
ONEIRIC.SPACE is a research project dedicated to exploring our relationship to dreams and the unconscious through an interdisciplinary lens. It consists of the online magazine, a monthly newsletter, events and special projects.
Dream drawing, 2015
READING:
‘The Third Reich of Dreams’ is a collection of seventy-five dreams, compiled by journalist Charlotte Beradt and smuggled out of Germany during the 1930s in code. Neither scientific study nor psychoanalytic text it is a collective diary, a witness account hauled out of a nation’s subconscious mind.
‘Social Dreaming’ by Susan Long & Julian Manley, 2018
reflects upon and extends the theory and philosophy behind the method of social dreaming which argues that dreams are relevant to the wider social sphere and have a collective resonance that goes beyond the personal narrative. The book offers an introduction into the principles of social dreaming and dives deeper into an epistemology to support the theoretical principles of the field, new research in the area, and how social dreaming practice is conducted in a range of localities, situations and circumstances.
mid-14c., "to move about, live, dwell; live or behave in a certain way" (senses now obsolete), from Old French and French converser "to talk, open communication between," also "to live, dwell, inhabit, reside" (12c.), and directly from Latin conversari "to live, dwell, live with, keep company with," passive voice of conversare, literally "to turn round with," from assimilated form of com "with, together" (see con-) + versare, frequentative of vertere "to turn, bend"). Sense of "to communicate (with)" in English is from 1590s; that of "talk informally with another" is from 1610s.
If we think of the oldest narratives and mythologies transmitted through oral culture, those were the continuous creation of multiple authors. The idea of the author was fabricated only later in order to extract value from such tales. To better understand the mechanisms within collective storytelling we explore existing storytelling engines that enable collaborative and non-linear narration.
LINKS:
Dungeons and Dragons First Pen&Paper Role Play published in 1974
Storium Online creative writing game
Storyjam Multiplayer Narrative Game For Collective Storytelling developped by Yujie Zhu
Semantic Web refers to W3C's vision of the Web of linked data. It provides a common framework that would enable people to create data stores on the Web, build vocabularies, and write rules for sharing and reusing data.
Patchwork Girl is a work of hypertext fiction by Shelley Jackson. It was written in Storyspace and published by Eastgate Systems in 1995.
Patchwork Girl tells the story through illustrations of parts of a female body that are stitched together through text and image
late 13c., conceiven, "take (seed) into the womb, become pregnant," from stem of Old French conceveir (Modern French concevoir), from Latin concipere (past participle conceptus) "to take in and hold" (source also of Spanish concebir, Portuguese concebre, Italian concepere), from con- + form of capere "to take" (from PIE root "to grasp"). Meaning "take into the mind, form a correct notion of" is from mid-14c., that of "form as a general notion in the mind" is from late 14c.
A World
A world is composed of a specific frame of reference, it defines how we perceive and relate to base reality and gives meaning to it.
A world needs us to believe in it so it can protect us from overwhelming complexity.
A world follows it’s own logic and dynamic.
Once externalized it takes a life of its own.
“A World is an artificial living thing,
but a living thing nonetheless.” — Ian Cheng
Worlding
There are different ideas of what the activity of worlding pertains. It ranges from the imagination and fostering of fantastical cosmologies, utopias or futures you can believe in to the construction of new reality systems or the active forging of functional systemic alternatives.
Gameworlds often reinforce stereotypes and perpetuate past and present power structures as well as their claims on Worldmaking. To produce stories which defy the dominant narrative, requires a critical analysis of representation in storyworlds, but also the invitation of diverse authors into their making.
Multiple Worlds
This research begins with attempts at dissolving the illusion of a ‘common world’, that appears already co-opted by satisfying hegemonial claims for (its) order. Surely, colliding worlds are confronting. Their crashing can make a mess in our shelf of convictions as it unravels the seams of our thinking fabric and yet, this is a proposal to embrace complexity, leaving the comfort of one's own skull or self applauding filter bubble.In Ways of Worldmaking (1978) Nelson Goodman already performs the ontological turn away from a dualist approach of ‘Many worldviews, only one world’. What follows it the radical gesture of multiplying the world. Once we have shattered the illusion of the universal, what are the implications of this such relativism for public and artistic discourse? How can we construct a common place in which multiple worlds intermingel instead of drifting apart in a fight about the centerstage?
Worlds end...
The conditions that make a world, naturalizes its construction. Which makes it seem unchangeable. It perpetuates a law like structure of being complete, or ‘natural’
Still all worlds eventually come to an end…
As ‘model’ becomes outdated (new knowledge is produced) or because the conditions it produces become unlivable.
Let us assume that ‘Western Modernity’ faces a similar fate. ‘An End to "this" World’ (2019) Denise Ferreira da Silva
Common World vs. Worlds in Common
The discrepancy between globalized modes of inhabitation and a (theoretical) planetary condition can be captured in the following distinction: the difference between the making of a common world vs. the making of worlds in common. — Patricia Reed
The making of a common world is coincident with ‘the entropic tendency towards the elimination of the diverse’,— Bernard Stiegler
Dissolving the illusion of a ‘common world’, that appears already co-opted by satisfying hegemonial claims for (its) order and taking the underlying theory of multiple worlds as a point of departure for exercises in ‘Collective Worlding’.
Worlding is also the unmaking of the world: it requires us to rethink our relation to the environment and our own role within it. Instead of trying to fix a broken system we can change a world by reconfiguring its frame of reference.
‘But how to think of frameworks for an unrealized world?’ - ‘The End of a World and its Pedagogies’, Patricia Reed, 2021, Making & Breaking
Relational Worlding
Relational Worlding shifts the focus from existence to coexistence, from questions of where things are to how they hang together. It considers entanglement and interdependence on a micro and macro level.
Instead of channeling energy and resources into new inventions that fix the world it sets out to changing the world itself, that beeing the ideas and attitudes inside our heads.
Otherworlds
Against the crisis of imagination, also diagnosed by Mark Fisher as ‘depressive ontology’ (The impossibility to envision a future that is different than the past) Collective Worlding may open ourselves to other forms of knowing, reconnect us to our sensual and social bodies and lay foundations for new forms of cohabitation.
→ For many people perpetual apocalypses have arrived long ago and many of the techniques and tactics of ‘otherworlding’ are owed to their legacy and resistance as survival.
Instead of starting from scratch or zooming in from an scientific abstraction and distance that recalls the map making and of settler colonial forms of ‘Worlding’ Collective Worlding produces flexible, relational, opaque, incoherent (inter)subjectivities and above all include the body with all it’s senses into the narration of the self.
Plasticity
Imagining scenarios in an emotionally neutral place can change our attitude to that place in reality.
The more immersed people tend to get into 'becoming' a fictional character, the more they use the same part of the brain to think about the character as they do to think about themselves.
People make their own brains, Imagine if they knew that and they could construct and entertain a relation with their brain as the image of a world to come.
Somatic Worlds
Role Play offers a form of double consciousness of being immersed and simultaneously observing one's own action and reactions.
Jonaya Kemper reflects on LARP as a tool to release the body from internalized oppression and bias by taking on roles other than those that society may commonly prescribe to it. Role Play becomes a form of “disidentification” from, and active re-coding of, assigned social roles.
Framing dis-order as a rupture to a given and evidently sickening system corresponds to the artistic and activist strategy that delineates a movement away from reforming the outside world to a resistance that turns to a reframing of the inner. ‘Sick Woman Theory’, Johanna Hedva, 2016
Trauma too is embodied. To activate the brain’s natural neuroplasticity to rewire disturbed functioning, the embodiment of new experiences plays an important role’The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma’ , Bessel A. van der Kolk, 2014
LINKS:
Around the day in eighty worlds book by Martin Savransky calling for a radical politics of the pluriverse amid the ongoing devastation of the present. Responding to an epoch marked by the history of colonialism and ecological devastation, Savransky sketches a “pluralistic realism”—an understanding of the world as simultaneously one and many, ongoing and unfinished, underway and yet to be made.
EMISSARY'S GUIDE TO WORLDING, book by Ian Cheng presenting practical methods for seeing and making Worlds as a whole-brain activity.
Microscope, collective world building RPG by Lame Mage Productions, that enables players to jump around in time and zoom from the overarching narrative into details of the fractal storyline to pla out scenes and answer questions that the players choose to focus on.
The end of a world and its Pedagogies, article by Patricia Reed on the difference between the making of a common world vs. the making of worlds in common.
Prophetic Culture, book by Federico Campagna on the end of Westernised Modernity, how to die well and how to leave behind inhabitable ruins to the generations that will world anew.
late 14c. (implied in configured) "to form, dispose in a certain form," from Latin configurare "to fashion after a pattern," from assimilated form of com "with, together" (see con-) + figurare "to form, shape," from figura "a shape, form, figure"
In The Garden of Forking Paths (2019) collective
improvisation was guided using formulas like Propp’s
‘Morphology’, an analysis of the basic structural elements
of Russian folk tales, also used in Machine learning.
The tool served well as a framework for the collective
creation but ultimately reinforced narrative stereotypes.
ZOOM (2019) adapted a world building game called
Microscope, because the players jump freely from the
overarching narrative to zoom into details within the
fractal storyline. Similar to the Epic theatre by Bertolt
Brecht, in which spoilers created an alienating effect,
the players start by deciding where the story ends and
where it should begin, to then in taking turns, flesh out
the stories that may have occurred in between.
All participants are co-authors and owners of the film
and can decide where, if and how the film was and will
be presented.
AGENTS:
The Institute for Scene Experiments by Nikhil Vettukattil is a fictional institution devoted to investigating scenes. The workshop aims to reflect on the film crew as a social form, and the generative potential of scenes independent of plot, development and conclusivity.
"to render (the abstract) concrete," 1826, from concrete (adj.), late 14c., "actual, solid; particular, individual; denoting a substance," from Latin concretus "condensed, hardened, stiff, curdled, congealed, clotted," figuratively "thick; dim," literally "grown together;" past participle of concrescere "to grow together," from assimilated form of com "together" (see con-) + crescere "to grow" (from PIE root *ker- , "to grow").
Alternative Forums,
Temporal Zones,
& Laboratories
Commonist Organizations, While a large part of this site is concerned with crafting speculative, imaginary, and thus temporary worlds as laboratories for thoughts, the aim of these endeavors is in most cases motivated by the urgency and desire to prefigure actual transformations taking form beyond the realm of fiction. Therefore this subthread is dedicated to material manifestations. It lists collectives and spaces that have carved out temporal, spatial, or contractual architectures in which alternative modes of cohabitation and collaboration are explored. In these experimental zones, play is employed as a method of maintaining an ongoing open organizational structure. This thread also offers a place for critical reflection around autonomy and access, scale and sustenance, as well as strategies that may grow sharper teeth to the theory.
au JUS - Game Space
A → project space collectively run via an extended LARP. The project establishes a zone for prefigurative play and (re)enactment as research. The three story building consisting of a residency apartment, a white cube gallery and a black cube basement offers a site to explore LARP over extended periods and in communication with its local context and public. The group explores its own narration and organization through role play and offers other practitioners and residents to explore their questions within a speculative (re)framing.Alternative Education
Critical Theory Workshop
is a non-profit educational institution that seeks to bring affordable education with real use-value to a broad public.
Glossary of Common Knowledge (GCK) seeks to find common knowledge to speak about less visible stories in contemporary art and address systems that govern our ways of thinking in art and beyond.
Monoskop is an independent web-based educational resource and research platform for arts, culture and humanities. It features wiki pages with multilingual genealogical bibliographies of contemporary topics and movements in art, culture, and society linked to electronic versions of publications or other freely accessible digital libraries.
Overview of alternative art schools, free schools, projects, support networks and vanguards of the alternative education movement initiated as part of a collaborative research project by ART&CRITIQUE
Commonist Organizations
Remix the Commons is a collective acting as a platform working for the commons movement. It enables commoners to carry out research and mediation projects on the commons, and to disseminate and advocate for the recognition of practices of sharing and common self-organisation. Remix enables to preserve the knowledge produced by the commoners as structured information, in particular through semantic web tools, for making visible a grammar of collective action for solidarity.
Decentralized
Autonomous
Organization
Radical Friends. Online DAO Summit for Decentralisation of Power and Resources in the Artworld discusses the value of and presents pathways to peer-produced decentralised digital infrastructures for art, culture and society – in particular through Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) for the cultural sector. The symposium takes as its inspiration the defining principles of friendship – sustained intimacy, fellowship and camaraderie – which, when applied to complex difficulties (particularly those that might otherwise be invisible to us), offers excellent design patterns for social infrastructure.
Decentralized Autonomous Kunstverein (DAK) is an art association inspired by developments in blockchain technology and the unique tradition of non-profit art associations in Europe. The organization’s mission is to promote experimental approaches to creating and curating contemporary art, exploring the potential of decentralized collective work within the context of contemporary art and technology. To fulfill this purpose, the members of the DAK will collectively work to finance and curate exhibitions, screenings, performances and related programming.
Open Residencies
Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre (B.O.A.R.C.) is a not-for-profit study site in Prenton (UK) that focuses on providing individual users and groups with a low cost, temporary place for research and experimentation, which is primarily directed towards cultural and artistic practice, and supporting the development of communities.
Kerminy is a meeting place for artistic, research, theoretical and cultural production residencies, situated in Rosporden (France). Kerminy works autonomous and explores new possibilities for working practices. An agricultural activity at the heart of the place is developed to the commitment of both permanent and temporary residents.
MASSIA is a user-created informal residency space for individuals or groups from any field – who can motorize their own artistic and knowledge production, not only responding to the opportunities given by the institutional market. Initiated and run by artists, theoreticians and practitioners themselves, MASSIA is busy with notions of self-organisation and making alternatives possible.
PAF(PerformingArtsForum) is a place in St Erme (France) for professional and not-yet professional practitioners and activists in the field of performing arts, visual art, literature, music, new media and internet, theory and cultural production, and scientists who seek to research and determine their own conditions of work.
FEDERATED WEB
A collection of networks, tools and devices aiming at decentralisation of the internet:
- Distributed Web of Care an art project by Taeyoon Choi.
-
Homebrewserver.club a monthly gathering in Rotterdam for self-hosted services.
- Lurk provides a few community services composed of mailing lists, chat and access to the Fediverse.
READING:
Temporary Autonomous Zone is a term coined in 1990 by poet, anarcho-immediatist and Sufi scholar Hakim Bey, as a liberated area “of land, time or imagination” where one can be for something, not just against, and where new ways of being human together can be explored and experimented with.
Commonism (edited by Nico Dockx & Pascal Gielen)
Is a book of ‘commonist’ practice, drawing an image of a political belief system through theoretical analysis, wild artistic speculation, inspiring examples from the arts, near-empirical observations and critical reflection.
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (by Bell Hooks) discusses education as a potentially profound and transformative experience that can tax the mind, body, and spirit due to opposition and oppression that is very evidently still in place in our educational systems.
The Tyranny of Structurelessness is an essay by American feminist Jo Freeman that concerns power relations within radical feminist collectives. The essay, inspired by Freeman's experiences in a 1960s women's liberation group, reflected on the feminist movement's experiments in resisting leadership hierarchy and structured division of labor.
S U B S C R I B E to Newsletter
YOUTUBE
Platform for
Prefiguring
Play
Pervasive Play is said to permeate the contractual boundaries that seperate games from life. 0ct0p0s investigates the critical use or abuse of game-like structures to sketch the world we live in—now reconfigured as Gamespace.
It provides a platform for practical and theoretical research on and through play, conjuring synergies between the extending fields of performance, politics, philosophy, psychology and pedagogy.
0ct0p0s owes it’s name to an animal with its brain divided throughout its different arms. Every arm senses the surrounding world individually, and yet do they act as one.
As a training ground for imaginative plasticity 0ct0p0s fosters simultaneous stories and colliding worlds through the creation and negotiation of a shared gamespace. Beyond mere mental play it searches for embodied and participatory forms of knowledge production that let us rethink our relation to the environment and our own role within it. It develops and presents Prefiguration as prophetic and participatory practice, calling for co-created and sensous simulations of social specualation.