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01 Kick-off: Candles Tarot Joysticks

Pad: Intro to the SI20

Tea ritual

We had a brief intro session where we talked about our relationship to (video) games and rituals. Shared memories and thoughts about those two things. I remembered a couple of the rituals performed in Bulgaria (it is common in Greece too):

The first one is called Nestinarstvo, traditional barefoot fire-walking ritual:Visual documentatrion

The second one is Kukeri, elaborately costumed men (masks, clothes, bells, etc.), who perform traditional rituals intended to scare away evil spirits. Visual documentation

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Next, in pairs of two, we read, annotated and later discussed a chapter from "The Bare Facts of Ritual" about elements of rituals described which we thought were particularly insightful.

The author talked about rituals and bears (bare <-> bear). While reading, again I recalled a memory from my childhood where there were (usually) Roma people walking around towns and villages with a chained brown bear, or as they called them "Dancing Bears". Basically, once the bears learn to obey, the next step is to teach them to "dance". Then, the Roma person (aka gypsy master) would play music on the gadulka or another traditional instrument. In case you're interested, watch this video.

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Steve suggested watching "White Noise" (movie on Netflix) which I'm going to do tonight.

 
ONE SENTENCE RITUAL TASK: Every week to write down a ritual. Next, one of the rituals from the list will be performed or assigned to a person. Make them thematic, reflecting the content of the week.

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Week 02, Jan 16: Rituals

Pad: Rituals VS Games

Aglaia's ritual

Our collaborative drawing

Morning | Aglaia's ritual: coffee fortunetelling
Interesting discussion around the nature of rituals prompt by Aglaia's coffee fortunetelling ritual. I was lucky to get mine future told by a former professional fortuneteller. ;)

Afternoon | Mapping out common characteristics and differences between games and rituals
We split into two group by 3 and set to discuss what is common and different between rituals and games. Aglaia, Irmak and I had nice talk about it and listed a lot of things on both sides. Here is the list.

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Week 03, Jan 23: Reproductive technologies

Pad: Games and rituals as reproductive technologies

Modes of production

Morning | Ritual
Stephen's ritual - "Hard Drive Purification", a ceremonial cleansing of not only our browser history and cookies but also the trash or recycle bin. This is an ecumenical (what?) service, all operating systems are welcome.

Stephen's Ritual

After that, we talked about the 'Superstructure-Base' visualization that Steve showed us last week. We ended up drawing a few new versions of it because most of us had different view.

Afternoon | Exercise
Stephen and I read and annotated together a piece by Stuart Hall 'Notes on Deconstructing The Popular'. We took the first and last sentence of each paragraph from Stuart Hall's version, and (without reading what he said) put our own paragraphs in between. Bridging the gap between the sentences was sometimes conscious and sometimes fed by sub- and even unconscious forces.

Screen of a pad next to a page scan