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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'.

 

The metaphorization of practice and the mobilisation of book artists.

 

 

My work will examine book artists'  practice and show how they use books as a strategy to 'metaphorize' their practice: that is, how they use books' capabilities and effects as a physical medium and as a social construction, to produce an interface between certain shifting terms that are brought together in their work. This is the 'metaphorical' work that books do through their physical form and in the significance they take on as a signifying social form. Amongst other things, I will be alert to ways that books allow book artists to bring together different media, different roles, different awareness and voice, and other forms of integration in the book form. In this way my work studies the practice of book artists to produce a compendium of effects that the book as a strategy produces in practice.

 

I admit to the prior intention in this study to show that books, in encapsulating a method of relation between radically different spheres of communication and action, provide a concourse on which discourse relevent to contemporary life can take place: that is, that book art itself is still, potentially, socially relevent, despite what I am increasingly viewing as its somnolent state over the last couple of decades. (I will work on criticism to support this) This suspicion centres around the work I see most often: that of artists who are committed to producing book art in preference to (and largely exclusive of) other work. It seems on the surface to me that many of the artists working most exclusively on the book do so with some intention of insulating themselves from the wider world. This does not have to be the case. Besides this, there is a competing critical sense that the works of these artists is no less worthwhile simply because it exhibits the concerns of 'a certain world' and no other (this is the case anywhere, including the 'avant-garde world'). Such work can be and often is poetically complete and satisfying. I merely state that something of the engagement with the world and with the avant garde has seemingly fallen away, to be replaced by a comfortable state of creative reverie. Although we can perform feats of critical analysis on this output, they remain based in a very particular place. From such reverie originality has been known to come, and I hope the same will be true for book artists. I would iterate, again, that I do not make a judgement about the value of book arts that tread this ground (one all too familiar to my own practice, anyway)- but I do see unfulfilled potential in the way that books can draw together many threads of experience in the metaphorization of practice. Unfulfilled in that books reserve privately what would be valuable in a more public realm. I admit that I find the notion of reworking book arts practice into a more public, and to my mind more contemporary setting, is uncongenial. I am persuaded that it would be worthwhile however. The structure suggested by 'public' and 'private' is, moreover, inaccurate. But I am trying to point towards a way of working that is perhaps less introspective, and more obviously related to the critical concerns of the moment.

 

What I had not hitherto considered about the possible outcomes of my study was that I might succeed in pushing myself and possibly others, away from book art as a more or less exclusive practice. By reverse-engineering the ways in which book art provides a heuristic framework for practices that work on the world in various tactical/rhetorical ways, I am reacquainting myself (and my imaginary reader) with the tools they had subsumed under the mantle of books. The problem of practice that books solved under their encompassing rubric, understood in this newly reflective way, affords an understanding of the metaphorical practice books make use of. The engineering of the book medium, its staging as intermedia and as a social construction, are incidental to the metaphorical practice itself, which might take place in other media. It merely happens that I (and the reader) have in the past found in the artists' book a congenial constellation of situation, strategy and tactic. Once we have understood these, we may be tempted to push away from books as a home base.

 

What about artists' books made by artists for whom book art is not a central practice?  In conversation with Julian Warren the other day, who is currently sorting through the Arnolfini's archives (including a vast artists' book collection), I found that he thinks the most interesting and most successful books are made by these artists. My thought, which I haven't entirely abandoned, is that these books tend to be made by established artists who have attracted the services of publishers such as bookworks who are keen to work with them. Simply because they're established (and therefore, we hope, 'good' artists), there tends to be more interesting output.

 

Notwithstanding my partial argument, I wonder if Warren is not correct, and that more interesting work is done by artists who don't see books as 'home' but as a situation much like any other to which they can bring their practice. There are physical forms, rhetorical possibilities, and the significance of the book, sure. But these are seen not as the identity of one's practice, but as part of the tools tactically available at the time. These artists remain in touch with the world, rather than taking on books as a turtle does its shell.

 

This sounds harsh. I don't mean to criticise book artists so strongly, nor to generalise as thoroughly as it sounds. However, I know from my own experience, if from no other, that books are a persuasive cocoon. Like certain other cocoons though, they are made of valuable stuff, and with drawing out, can be made to go far. 

 

Making books can teach us, as artists, useful things, and provide many useful solutions. But it is becoming important to me to see if there is not more that can be done with these tools. Whether this means abandoning books as an exclusive practice, or whether it means adapting my practical methods of production is not clear. But I want to be in touch with the world. I want the same for other book artists too,, and I wonder if, by collecting the ways in which artists' book practice works, I might not persuade some of them that there is more that could be done.

 

I come to these thoughts wondering if I am not enacting a supplement in the sense of a 'pharmakon' that at once works as a remedy and as a poison to the thing it supplements and usurps. To say so is to exaggerate the potency of my study. But certainly I seem to have reached a point where these questions- which, it should be remembered, come from my efforts to ratify book art- start to question whether it is the solution it thinks it is, and whether it is not, in fact, a way of doing things that potentially blocks me (if no one else) off from further development. It is equally persuasive to me that this is not the exclusive conclusion one could come to. The ways and means embodied by book art and criticised here could be transformed by reflection and bring about the rapprochement with the world that I seem to believe is necessary.

 

1 Sept, 2007.

Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson

I've been battered with Robert Smithson recently. So far I haven't read a word of his, but that'll soon change. I just got a copy of his collected writings.

Smithson has repeatedly cropped up over the last 6 weeks or so, First off my good friend Andrew Atkinson has been reading Smithson alongside some work on the great American city planner Robert Moses as part of the background research he's doing on a project he's doing based underneath a highway overpass in Northern Manhattan. we spent some time shooting pictures there while I was over in the United States to speak at a conference on artists' books in Chicago.

Secondly, I came across Smithson's collected writings again when I looked over the resource materials at the Alex Hartley exhibition at Edinburgh's Fruitmarket gallery- Hartley's work on the built environment, using 'buildering', the technique of climbing on buildings as an act of urban trespass or critique, and his appropriation of urban spaces and architectural spaces as a realm of artistic reflection, presumably reflected in Smithson's writings.

Thirdly, I was speaking with Julian Warren and Smithson came up. Julian is working at Bristol Record Office just now, doing some preliminary sorting of the Arnolfini's archives, which at the beginning of Julian's task were literally 400 boxes of assorted stuff. Amongst this lot they have a very interesting collection of artists' books from the 60's and 70's, including, I'm told, comprehensive examples of Ed Ruscha's 'trade' books... and works by Robert Smithson.

From my point of view the significance of the coincidence points up the collision of some of my interests. There must, I think, be something in this. So I'm off to find out more about him and his work, which I previously only knew through Spiral Jetty.

Technorati Tags: Robert Smithson, Smthson, Robert Moses, Moses, art, planning, urban renewal, coincidence, Alex Hartley, Hartley, buildering, climb, L.A. climbs, exhibition, Edinburgh, Bristol, Manhattan, New York, Arnolfini, Fruitmarket, gallery, Andrew Atkinson, Atkinson

Alex Hartley at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

Alex Hartley at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh- Hartley is a 'builderer', meaning he climbs about on the surface of human-constructed objects. The photographs in this exhibition are of several main sorts. One records his buildering exploits, with the artist perched, clinging or splatted against various concrete, brick and stone surfaces, whilst others are photos of buildings where possible routes are mapped out with lines superimposed on the surface of the photos. Other work was of 'stolen' images of various private modernist homes (which Hartley later began clambering about on, in an attempt to get closer still to the buildings). He also creates sculptural pieces that include ;ife-size photos behind glass intended to create model spaces we have some voyeuristic access to, but into which we can never go.

This tension between our legitimate gaze and trespass is brought up time and again by Hartley in these pieces, and taken further in his buildering, which represents a particular form of creatively-motivated trespass. It is twofold: it involves his physical trespass on the property, and the wrongness of his encounter with the building in a way never intended by the architect. His body looks wrong, splatted against these surfaces. The architectonic framing of the modernist (and other) spaces he transgressses usually support the human being in a simple perspectival plane, not tilted at strange angles into crevices. The lines of ascent and traverse on other pieces represent the same thing- this time the line of looking for routes that deny the usual architectural progress through designated volumes.

Some photos involve a sort of collage of materials (wood, plastic) assembled in detailed form like architectural models, reading right into the photographic space, but projecting from it. The collage obscures any underlying image that might inform the object's construction. They might represent things that are 'really' in the photo, or they might not.
(Hartley's process of 'imagining what might be there' tells me there's nothing beneath') But the point is that it doesn't matter. Our imposition on the real landscape being photographed is every bit as transitory and flawed as the constructions Hartley glues onto the photo's flat surface. Hartley's constrcted buildings are always either flawed or deserted, the titles implying some sort of hiding place or flight from the inevitable. I think this ties in with the ravages of weather and time that are depicted in various other works. Inevitably, buildings turn to ruins. Inevitably, the aesthetic and ideological concerns of our culture are deconstructed by our traversing them in a new way. Hartley's art puts him in the position of an active participant in the ongoing conversation of what our built environment (and our representation of it, both in art and in language) means.

William Kentridge at the Edinburgh Printmakers Workshop

I went to see the William Kentridge show at Edinburgh Printmakers on Saturday. I'll write more about this shortly:

for now...
Thinking of him as an example for practice
leporello
portage
commentary on narrated images
compare to Alex Hartley- surface line issue/the negotiation of contour
various strategies of continuation/assemblage/narrative. Held together by drawing itself

Book review "The World Without Us" (partial)

First impressions are that this is going to be an interesting read, with lots of individual pieces within it. This goes two ways- first, it's a fascinating silva rerum, casting sidelights on the subject from many different angles, and ensuring that the individual pieces, the little stories that inform the narrative, each get their own ray of illumination. One is bound to remember one or two amidst the collection. By the same token it seems to be suffering as an extended essay,reading instead as a series of themed pieces. This is by no means a bad thing, nor, really is it a bad way to write a book, per se. But the argument arrives in a sedimentary manner, not through the guidance of the author as intellectual champion- despite the fact that it's the author's hand guiding the shovel.

Another way of criticising this method would be that it comes off as somewhat journalistic: the research comes in digestible chunks and serves to confirm the story as reported.

Despite my criticisms, I really enjoy this sort of reading. It's not as taxing as other sorts of non-fiction reading, and one tends to remember more facts, even if the great ideas tend not to come to the surface. I suppose that this is the dilemma faced by non-fiction authors: whether to serve the average reader something more palatable, or to run the risk of believing so strongly in their thesis that they sacrifice entertainment for difficult-to-read expressive clarity. Is there a way to have both?

(more on this book when I'm finished with it).


Technorati Tags: book review world writing

De Certeau on gifts

De C, around p28, mentions gifts and potlatch. This of course shifts my attention to Lewis Hynde's book The Gift, with its emphasis on gift economy as a tactical 'way' within the world that is particularly suited to creative work (in the broad sense). I'll take another look at my notes from Hynde shortly.

Around about the same area, DeC starts talking about the diversion of la perruque taking place across contexts (ie not localizably), through actions. The coincidence of terms (if it is a coincidence), makes me wonder what the current popularity of Getting Things Done reveals about its adherents' attitudes to work and the order on which it takes place. In the Spinozan sense, perhaps they are taking charge of an internal order of justification for their work? Aided and abetted by the fluidity of digital working?

Technorati Tags: book, reading, review, studio log

Spinoza/Mind/Free will

If Spinoza reckons that the good life is one where we can be motivated increasingly by internal causation rather than external causes (thus changing what we think of as free will), can we postulate a theory of mind that is simply a collection of such causations?

 The experience of free will is the experience that my mind wills a thing to be for me, and to some extent I accomplish it, through physical and mental agency. What is open to me are my interior causations, consistent with the boundaries of mind, and my ability to work in the physical world to the extent of my abilities and the laws of the empirical universe. (I make the physical/mental distinction solely for convenience. I really think that mind is material, too) What I think I am, do, and can be, is circumscribed by these properties of internal cause. There is no aspect of my experience of free will that is not served by internal causes: it is the case that the variety of possibilities presented to my will are identical with those present in the world and in mind.

If it is in our nature to seek an increased participation in internal causation, who is doing the participating? There is a homonculus problem here. Nonetheless, the events that happen internally depend not so much on who is in at the meeting but on what is on the agenda. Free will is all that is the case. It doesn't matter so much how the causations are passed 'under review' (it is difficult to escape the homoncular metaphor of language); instead, the source of free will's predicates is identical with internal causation. This doesn't limit our mind, because it is our mind.

Technorati Tags: reading, report, review, studio log, writing

Candice Breitz / Marcus Coates

• working class hero/birdsong
• earpieces/earpieces
• recording people/recording people
• human culture/human version of animal culture
• personal interpretation/loss of the personal to type, through field typology
• common identity/projection of typology
• chorus/chorus
• funny/funny
• observation in 'neutral' space/located field observation
• shared human values of pop culture/shared human interpretation of animal-signs
• dichotomy between the shareable and the not-shareable/ relationship between interpretation and mediated practice
• etc/etc

Technorati Tags: art, review, studio log, writing

La Perruque

"La Perruque" in De Certeau is that practice of getting bits of one's own work done whilst ostensibly working for one's employer, like for instance the secretary who spends time composing love letters rather than getting on with legitimate typing. (But does it also include the academic whose mind wanders creatively fromt the stated focus of study? Probably not. But such work is enshrined in non-ordinary practice and language and thus has the stamp of the expert about it). The Boss has to decide whether to penalise this behaviour or turn a blind eye to it. In the first of the two, the boss runs the risk of having to perform a sort of infinitesimal iteration of the practice of control to wipe out the poachers, in the process reducing her/his productivity to nil. In the second, a tacit relationship springs up between the practice and the ordered power it transgresses.

I was wondering what the internet means for things like this. Say one was a person who worked with wood. One's incidental practice 'la perruque', would consist of things one could make out of scrap. The internet, on the other hand, finds new forms of mediation and new depths of mediation all the time. In the last few years one has gone from the ability to write a letter on the fly, to the possibility of trying to finish editing your movie before the lunch break.

As important as this, is the fact that a worker with access to the internet is more than ever connected to their ongoing private practices. Despite employers' efforts to oversee access,
workers find ways to access materials pertinent to themselves that are not relevant to the job they are employed to do. Whilst this is an important problem for employers to face, it is a development of the age-old 'perruque' that must have been part of employment ever since there was such a thing. There have always been, ruses, tactical smugglings-in of one's own agenda, poaching on one's traded time. The extension concerns digital media's tendency to embrace other media, and the character of access. One could have access to any document, and to an ongoing portfolio of materials. The secretary can now embark on a novel, not merely a letter.

This is not to say that previously, people did not join up the various aspects of their practice, but rather that the ease of carrying on an extended personal practice has been greatly augmented. The nature of our media changes the available tactics for 'the practice of everyday life'.

Technorati Tags: reading, studio log