adminicle

Games, reality, Trickster: finding ways to enhance imagination in a sustainable way

I've been reading from Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken, and I've come across what I think is an interesting notion about how games enhance our collective imagination.

Here McGonigal quotes Will Wright:

...if theres one aspect of humanity that I want to augment, its the imagination, which is probably our most powerful cognitive tool. I think of games as being an amplifier for the imagination of the players, in the same way that a car amplifies our legs or a house amplifies our skin.

The point being that by enlisting our willing involvement imaginitatively in game form, we can not only have an experience of flow, of fiero, of naches and the other positive emotions that McGonigal racks up as worthwhile aspects of games - we involve ourselves thereby in game activities that are by definition involving us in activities of collective intentionality. (The feeling is one of 'we-intend' as John R.Searle would put it.)And by gaming together, we build up massive amounts of collective intentionality. Games become a powerful force in, ironically, helping us work out our problems, together. But this notion collides with some of my other recent reading.

Games necessarily model an environment. There's a tension between imagination (which is often liminal, on the edges of breaking the rules or outright breaking them) and games, which exist because of their rules.

I've been reading Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde, so my first thought is that Trickster, who is our embodiment of disruptive imagination, needs to be part of this process of amplifying the imagination. If we want to get the most out of human imagination, we need that force to be there. It will anyway, so we need to find ways of including it or at least anticipating the services we can provide for its positive side. (It'll still surprise, confound and delight us though).

My second thought links us to Douglas Rushkoff's Program or be Programmed. If anything digital has the role of the Trickster in it, it's programming, and certainly hacking. There are still boundaries on this though, but far more play to be transgressive and to go beyond the boundaries of a single system. But there are boundaries - at least ususally. The ur-hacker movie was War Games, and the thrill of that game was seeing how easy it was to unintentionally breach those supposed boundaries. That's a game, run amok. Yet its resolution was inventive and satisfying. Very Trickster, very Hacker. 

My third thought is that novels/ideas of the transhuman (eg Neuromancer, etc) pay with the idea of the Trickster in the net, subverting and corrupting/enhancing what he touches. This notion of the imagination in service of the beyond is important, and games designers need to be aware (I'm sure they are) of how they can serve the idea that imagination wants to go beyond. Maybe it can go in other directions too?

Games need to approach this tension between the complex modelling by rules, and whatever there is beyond the rules that imagination can work on. Even though, as McGonigal later notes, 'chess is infinite' (to show how complexity can be built up from very simple premises), chess is just chess, whatever it teaches us. I'm not sure that the real world games that come later are classically defined games at all. I'm not sure about the flexibility of their rules or their purview. They seem more like roles than games, scenarios rather than gameboards. That's not to denigratetheir effectiveness or to argue that they are anything else, really. But if a game is about its rules, these games exist to transgress them. To go beyond, to grow.

This begs a further thought. Isn't this characteristic of our species' relentless insistence on expansion being the only way to survive. Isn't ecology the art and science of living on limited means instead? Of living, imaginatively as possible, within the rules? This is much more gamelike. If trickster needs to work in the ecological sense, he needs to work inside the game board. Lessons from programming can teach us that. You can't program what cannot be programmed. (You can program a computer but not an ice-cream cone) Similarly, what we see instead of 'further' is deeper: more fine grained modelling that helps us make better decisions, that helps us, also, to disappear not over the threshold, but 'through the floorboards'.

 

shaking hands

As I look at the website of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, I'm seeing pretty clearly that there's a whole lot of bridges to be built between that [field/tendency/whatever] and the things I write about in my thesis.

I've just written nearly 60000 words challenging the centring identity of the artists' books field, clearing space for a narrative of hybrid practice and trying to create a network of value for the hybrid practice's affordances as well as the formal affordances of the book form and whatever artists throw at it (affect and effect)... and taking this lot inward towards the book form's affect on the maker's consciousness, and outwards towards whatever version of the republic of letters makes sense these days. And I'm finding a whole raft of other ways of 'not belonging', of 'yet/also' cropping up here. There are some great models for the changing face of authorship, and ways of understanding common 'ownership' of a field that really light up some of the tensions so markedly to be found in Book Art in a new way.

I have to go do some more reading now, and come back with some sort of primer on how I might get these ideas to shake hands.

Some of the writing for my thesis - from the chapter on the concept of 'making-reading' - will appear in late summer/ early autumn in The Blue Notebook.

Blueprint

I'm trying out Blueprint. I'm hoping it will actually get me to use CSS properly and help me to get a nice clean design for my website.

Artists' Books and the Shared World of Reading

I gave a talk at the Scottish National Poetry Library on the 27th on the subject above. The full version of the text is after the jump.

I'd like you to imagine a fairly popular book you know, say for example 'Pride and Prejudice'. When you open it up you are in touch with a world in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century. We go there. It's a place that's been drawn from someone's imagination and experience that doesn't exist, yet it has causal force, bringing Jane Austen tourists from all corners of the globe to visit places made famous by television adaptations. Other works on paper, of fact as well as fiction, have, sometimes, more powerful causal force. A marriage license is one such, being something that has authority because we say it does. The printed word is one - particularly powerful aspect - of the world of human culture, which is a world we share. It's important to us, in ways I want to touch on a bit more later.

To put it another way, many people here might may have read this book, Pride and Prejudice. Some of us may not have done, but have, perhaps, seen adaptations on tv or seen other works inspired by it, for which it represents an origin to be acknowledged and sometimes undermined. The book, the thing, the place conjured in our common experience is one we share. It is a corner of the shared world of reading. I want to talk about this world a little bit today.

One Thing Leads to Another

I've been working towards the presentation I'll be giving tomorrow at 'One thing Leads to Another'. It's a bit confessional, about the way I've gotten in my own way whilst thinking about how to make practice based research work.

Things are a bit better now, and I'm centring more on the context in which I can do more reflexive practice. What this means, basically, is keeping the 'flavours' of my academic practice handy. Questions like 'How do I use Roles?' 'What does the narrative aspect enable?' 'In what ways am I operating between media?' The sort of things that I ask other artists in fact. My writing about my work will continue to be about the other sort of reflection I do too, namely the stuff about subjects. When I'm writing about things normally, I'm writing about how I'm sorting through the subject matter and my execution of it. By incorporating or labelling the research aspects (roles/narrative) etc, I can knit it far more into my academic practice.

Funny that up to now I hadn't realised that that could be extensive enough, or go on for long enough, to be a useful part of my research. In fact, this is where it has to happen!

It also seems likely that if I take an interest in my practice in this way, my 'practice-interest' might come to resemble my 'research-interest' more. I'm not going to go for it deliberately, but half my struggle has been that they don't resemble one another at all. Just because I make artists' books, doesn't mean that my practice interest includes the same interest that informs my research... or such has been the case.

Assembling a toolkit of 'research flavours' to bring to my reflective practice will mean that my reflections become more usable as research. That's what I hope my presentation will convey.

The title of my presentation, 'Tactical Practice' reflects an idea  I had, that we use practice in different ways at different times. Sometimes it has a strategic goal or outcome, and sometimes it is a case of feeling one's way through- 'tactical practice'. I think that one applies different outlooks at different times.

If one thinks of these as two different 'logics' of practice,then it's possible to imagine still other ones, not just this simple dialectic. It's more of a dynamic response to materials, motivations and the research environment. One chooses not only a methodology, but also a logic that informs it (a 'metamethodology'?)

Strange Ritual

David Byrne- Strange Ritual

Faber, London 0571177212

We spend years learning how the wires are connected. We must eventually learn, by rote, that pulling on this particular string, as odd as it seems, will connote happiness, and this string, which our guts tell us denotes fear and anger, will, to the contrary, signal to the outside world a sense of well-being. I often sing with all my might, and I find that all I've accomplished is to convey a sense of energy being expended and a desperate need to communicate something. Often, no one is able to figure out exactly what it is I'm trying to communicate. I myself often feel that I've touched something deep as my voice rises into a sudden, painful, sharp edge and I assume and hope that the exact same feelings are reconstructed inside the minds and hearts of the listeners, but it isn't always true. The audience often only watches in puzzlement as I produce a series of nonsensical, confusing, conflicting sounds that somehow they know denote intense emotional states, but they don't know which ones they are. Just like all our facial expressions, my strings are attached in all the wrong places.

Reviewing Studio Practice as Research

Some notes towards reviewing my studio practice as research.

Axis Mundi

DSCF0961, originally uploaded by aesop.

At the Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh.

Axis Mundi: Pleasures of the text

The scribbles are more-or-less random quotes from Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text, which has arrived just a bit too late to inform my article on 'The Promise of Reading', even though its descriptions of the pleasure/bliss of reading would be really useful for my notions about why book-makers want to make-reading.

Perhaps another idea wll come out of it. Anyway, this sketch purses the Axis Mundi project I've been thinking about: everything is at the centre of the world. Potentially everything is holy. But there's a disconnection between the perspectival organisation offered by photography and conventional imagery (even, partly by narrative, though its a perspective organised largely by the reader). We look through a conventional lens, literally and figuratively to see the world. We find it centred wherever we look, in the objects of our experience and in our perception of space and volumes. This back and forth argument between the 'holiness' of the real world with its distinct objects and experience, and on the other hand, the animating principle of the viewer/reader/being, recalls defunct notions of sight and seeing. Do we see by projecting rays actively out of our eyeballs? Or do we perceive rays which enter directly into our consciousness. (Both, perhaps? Or rather, we do see light, but we make up a lot of what we think we perceive as real).

Which is a lot to ask of a poor old stencil, a photo of a keyboard, and a couple of illegible quotations. We'll see how the book gets on...

Artists' Books at UWE

Just attended a really interesting artists' books conference at UWE. Lots of good ideas thrown up and talks by Francis Elliott, Maria Fusco, Dr Jackie Batey and Linda Newington & Dr Maureen O'Neill. A really interesting mix of attention towards new publishing and promotional material and things libraries do. Dr Batey's site, www.dampflat.com was a really good example of how to do an artists' book site and I really look forward to seeing more of it and hopefully talking to her about her work sometime in the future. Linda Newington & Dr O'Neill's work on their collections sparked off some discussion about how books were served by their representation on such sites. Obviously noone wants to replace them, but we were able to begin a discussion about how they might be more and more useful. I was glad to see such a site with such a clear intent of opening up the visibility of collections. Well done!

Maria Fusco's talk was also interesting to me because of all the talks we heard, this came nearest to my own current concerns to do with artists' practice and mediation. She mentions not only De Certeau and McLuhan, but also talks about 'ideological circuits'- which patches right into what I'm talking about in terms of book history (My book history reader even has a whole section on the book distribution 'system' as a circuit, so I gt right into that). Fusco's talk edged towards discussing how books 'piggyback' things in on the book circuit, accessing many things (Including, per my current essay, the 'promise of reading'). Oh, yeah, I'm writing an article ostensibly for submission to the Blue Notebooks called The Promise of Reading about making-reading rather than making books. the idea is that a slight cognitive shift in how one perceives artists' books practice makes them less physical and more about the shared world of reading and all the societal attachment and stuff that throws up. There's more, but I've got to see if I can get some of the hot air ironed out!

Francis Elliott's talk centred around the establishing of a book about the artists' book canon on wikipedia. He spent a while showing us around the controls and we got into some talk about editorial control and versions and the like. Perhaps this is a good way of creating and archiving points of view about the canon, but I think a forum is also needed, since editorial decisions to add or excise material don't have to be explained. There's no cut and thrust of debate, just the cut and paste of editing. However, I think that wikipedia is going to be an invaluable tool as a site for such arguments to show themselves, but I'm afraid that it'll not really record the way things get to be that way. in a debate format like a forum, one gets to see stuff actually happen as people make their points and counterpoints. This might be another one of those things where the map is not the territory.

Cakes were good too!