User:Kendal/Situationist Times

Art in the Waiting Room

NOTES

SESSIONS WITH LIDIA & STEVE:

Labyrinth, non-places (airports, places where you wait)-> Non - Places by Marc Augé

“Town labyrinths, again. There's Pisa, I don't know what is labyrinthine about it. Then suddenly, this is like when you are queuing at the airport. At some moment I start to call just about everything a labyrinth.”

“Again processions and processions ... I don't know why processions all of a sudden become labyrinthic. And that's how you walk in an underground train station.” - http://vandal.ist/thesituationisttimes/04/index.html#9/-2.512/116.266http://vandal.ist/thesituationisttimes/04/index.html#9/-2.445/148.773

LIMINAL SPACES - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SX8XMwMw6Y

SOFT DIMENSIONS - Worked with architect, Inara Nevskaya, for Volume, that studies the psychology of how people use space - [Soft Dimensions ]

Notes on readings

ANNOTATION METHODS:

1. _ZINE: With Louisa & Floor, we started annotating the existing materials for edition #7 of The Situationist Times. A prevailing theme we all connected with was the idea of the attention economy and how games are built with the purpose to keep us locked in.
2. _TWINE: Using Twine 2, I added new layers of annotation, introducing the concept of non place into the Situationist discussion. [SITU ANNO]

PROTOTYPING:

Translating concepts and research into how things can manifest in a gameplay : https://pad.xpub.nl/p/visceralfacades

TIC80 : https://hub.xpub.nl/sandbot/PrototypingTimes/tic80/tic80.php?cart=/sandbot/PrototypingTimes/tic80/2021-01-18/tubeguy.tic
Attempt at creating a scene and character, realised pretty quickly that the idea I had regarding sound would be less than ideal in tic, so settled on creating the game is p5.js.

attempt to create sound

COLLECTIVE APPROACH:

ASCII map with Euna

World Of Text w/Euna

Collective pad of potential approaches

Overall pad

Master Pad

ROLES

1. Creative Direction
2. Copy-Editing

LINK DUMP

[Research PAD ]

Itch.io

• 

  My interpretation of the Situationist manifesto

• 

  Marc Auge research

• 

  Visual characteristics of a Non-place

• 

  Sounds of a Non-place

• 

  Figuring out the concept and areas of interest for a game

Game Ideas:

Martin Parr - Boring Postcards

Affordances of the interior

Bruno Munari - Seeking Comfort in an Uncomfortable Chair

Spam bot/chain mail characters waiting room

The limbo of waiting for people to reply/forward emails

Aspects of waiting rooms, bad art, stock furniture etc. Non-places - https://thespinoff.co.nz/art/10-05-2020/art-in-the-waiting-room/

Create a Situationist non-place

"Concentration of culture, located in a single building" Situationist Manifesto ---> cannot get the malls out of my head

The affordance possibilities of a waiting room. Gamify the non-place, what can you do with sparsely scattered interiors of transitory space?

FROM MATT:

"maybe its worth considering the sounds of non-spaces too, like the ambient noise of cars in the distance, service counters, toilet flushes etc along with the muzak that is dispersed into the environment"

A seemingly regular non-place (torn between the waiting room, an airport terminal, or an airport hotel). The player has to click the boring objects of the interior and create new affordances to create a state of play. What can a chair do? What about the non-offensive ambient music? Can this be disrupted?

Can a non-place become an opportunity for the situationists? How would this look?

I am currently using Notion to organise my thoughts with creating the game. Most updates as they are being done are recorded here

https://monoskop.org/Arseny_Avraamov

Main themes:

1. Obsolete Media - Chain mail stories
2. Non-Places - https://board.net/p/Non-Places
3. Psychogeography- Unitary urbanism
4. Performative use of space - Skateboarding
5. Affordance vs intention

- linked to the attention economy of gaming? Fast, explosive etc

- Could this be an antithesis to this?

Short description of W808

Non-places seem to be the absolute thing situationists want to avoid. The idea of a place so bound by rules yet devoid of humanity and play is fascinating to me because they're so easy to identify and we spend a lot of time in these places. Given this, I want to take the mundane aspects of a waiting room, and use them as ingredients to create a performative use of space in an attempt to suggest what a situationist non-place could be.

In regards of gameplay, this translates to using found ambient sounds to create a disruptive soundtrack of a space. Taking recognisable clips, we can redefine the meaning and purpose of this atmosphere as a jumping-off point for creativity and play.

[W808]

W808

Screen Capture of entering the game from the launch page

THISISNOTART.ZIP

AI generated waiting room art

Waiting Room Art Zine

While exploring the similarities of the medical waiting rooms, I became fixated on the enigma of waiting room art and its absolute indistinguishable nature from one to another. This prompted me to create a zine about the phenomenon and also experiment with using AI tools to create my own 'artwork'.

Books & Essays referred to:

Books

• Non Places - Marc Auge
• A Pattern Language - Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein, and Sara Ishikawa
• Skateboarding and the City: A Complete History - Iain Borden
• Planned Obsolescence - Kathleen Fitzpatrick
• Boring Postcards - Martin Parr
• Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary - Naoto Fukasawa
• Blinking and Flapping - Yasuhiro Suzuki
• On Lingering - Kirsten Spruit
• Concrete Island - J.G. Ballard
• The Production of Space - Henri Lefebvre

Essays

• Salvaging Situationism: Race and Space by Andrea Gibbons
• Homo Ludens for the People by Mattie Brice
• Game Boys by Vicky Osterweil
• Making Games in a Fucked Up World: https://www.molleindustria.org/blog/making-games-in-a-fucked-up-world-games-for-change-2014/
• Viceral Facades by Matthew Fuller
• Another Pavement, Another Beach: Skateboarding and the Performative.Critique of Architecture by Iain Borden
• Hostile Architecture’: How Public Spaces Keep the Public Out by Winnie Hu: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/08/nyregion/hostile-architecture-nyc.html
• Baring Life and Lifestyle in the Non-Place by Sarah Sharma
• Study on Personal Characteristics and Affordance Perception by Yong Se Kim
• Dynamics of Affordances and Implications for Design by Dhaval Vyas, Cristina M.Chisalita & Alan Dix
• An Affordance-based Approach to Architectural Theory, Design & Practice by Jonathan R.A Maier & Georges M. Fadel
• Musical Transformations of Non-Places by Antonio Francisco Alaminos-Fernandez
• The Rhythm of Non-Places: Marooning the Embodied Self in Depthless Space by Les Roberts
• Glitch Studies Manifesto by Rosa Menkman