User:Fako Berkers/project3

History Will Repeat Itself

Both in the essay and in the practical assignment I want to study how re-enactment relates to simulation. I think these concepts are very similar, but they are also different in a few ways. By creating an enacted simulation and writing about what others have said about these two phenomena I hope to learn a great deal about how computers and performance art can relate to each other.

Theory

It took me a while to formulate the theory around re-enactment and simulation. Now that I have it dramatically influences the practice making my older description obsolete.

It comes down to the following. Re-enactment is used to fill in the gaps of history. To make a smooth narrative people need to interpolate the evidence that the past has left us. Re-enactment is a way of checking whether the interpolation is possible at all and indicates how likely it is to be true. This is at least the definition of re-enactment by Collingwood. History is always an abstraction of the events that have taken place. By re-enacting something the abstraction disappears and this can reveal things that were not as evident as they were before the re-enactment in the more abstract state of history.

As with history, simulation relies on an abstraction, because it is not possible to take all of reality into account when creating a virtual world. It is my theory that the enactment of a simulation and making the virtual concrete as accurate as possible, will reveal certain aspects of the simulation. These aspects may very well be design choices that have a particular proposition which has a thorough influence on the system as a whole.

Since ambiguous computing is developing rapidly and simulations and similar systems are having an increasingly bigger influence on our lives I think it's good to practice the enactment of such systems for a critical analysis of designer choices and/or biases. In the practical part of this trimester I will enact a simulation.

Practise

An older description of my practice can be found here