Category:Situationist Times

Introduction

Jacqueline de Jong in her studio with pinball machine. Archive Jacqueline de Jong. Photo: Nico Koster/Maria Austria Instituut.

Originally intended to be an English-language counterpart to the Internationale Situationiste, The Situationist Times was a publication initiated in 1962 by artist Jacqueline de Jong as a response to her expulsion from the Situationist International. The 14th Special Issue will take, as its point of departure, the never published 7th issue of the Situationist Times. Had it been published, the issue would have provided an exhaustive topological exploration of Pinball.

This trimester, we will be asking: what would the seventh issue of the Situationist Times look like nowadays?

Our topic of exploration? Videogames. Our means of exploration? Videogames. Considered by Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter to be the ‘ideal commodity’ of post-Fordist capitalism, videogames embody its acting social forces, conflicts and crises. As a cultural artifact, video games, and triple-A video games especially, reflect and reproduce dominant hegemonic structures, often serving as a means to educate subjects into specific roles under neoliberal capitalism. Much like with the pinball machines described in the unpublished Situationist Times, the multibillion-dollar videogame industry has historically catered to a cishetero, white male audience.

However, the same mechanisms that allow videogames to function as a reproductive technology may also be explored for their emancipatory potential, making video games an especially persuasive medium for artistic expression. Together, we will be looking into a growing array of tactical videogames used for social and political activism. We will immerse ourselves in the artistic programme of the Situationists in order to explore the radical potential of play. Play, both as a category and tactic, was a major topic of interest for the Situationists. Their aim was to expand play into the whole of life, liberating it from its commodified forms under capitalism and fully utilizing its capacity for critique and subversion. In the tradition of Situationism¹, we will get hands-on with the creation of videogaming experiments in order to hijack, détourne and abuse traditional videogaming canon.

¹ With caution and critical distance: the Situationists were a famously homogeneous group (e.g.: only two of their members were women)

Week 1

Tuesday, January 5th:

Kick-off Special Issue #14:

• Intro to Situationist Times nº7
• Overview of the topics we will be tackling during the trimester

With: everyone

Week 2

Tuesday, January 12th

Diving into The Situationist Times nº7: Pinball original material:

• Annotation exercises with Steve
• Discussion of key concepts, methods and insights

With: Lídia, Steve

Literature:

• How to Read The Situationist Times (article by Ellef Prestsæter)
• The Situationist Times (interface developed by the Scandinavian Institute for Computational Vandalism)
• "The détournement of détournement" by McKenzie Wark

Week 3

Tuesday, January 19th

Diving into Situationism:

• Brief history
• Key concepts and methods: spectacle, détournement, dérive (psychogeography), unitary urbanism
• Critique
• Annotation exercises with Steve
• Discussion of key concepts, methods and critique

With: Lídia, Steve (T.B.C.)

Literature:

• "Report on the Construction of Situations" by Guy Debord (we will focus on the "Towards a Situationist International" chapter)
• "Salvaging Situationism: Race and Space" by Andrea Gibbons
• T.B.C.

Week 4

Tuesday, January 26th

Lecture: Anne-Marie Schleiner (http://www.opensorcery.net/)

Play:

• Historical definitions (Huizinga, Callois)
• The Situationist definition of play
• Intro to the topic of videogames

With: Lídia

Literature:

• "Homo Ludens for the People" by Mattie Brice
• Contribution to a Situationist Definition of Play
• T.B.C.

Week 5

Tuesday, February 2nd

Lecture: Jamie Woodcock (https://www.jamiewoodcock.net/)

• Brief historical contextualization of videogames
• Videogames as a reproductive technology
• The 'gamer' identity
• Gamergate and Alt-Right

With: Lídia

Literature:

• "Game Boys" by Vicky Osterweil
• "Ctrl+Alt+Del: GamerGate as a precursor to the rise of the alt-right" by Kristin Bezio
• "What we still haven't learnt from Gamergate" by Aja Romano
• "No girls allowed" by Tracey Lien

Games:

• T.B.C.
• T.B.C.

Week 6

Tuesday, February 9th

Feminist Game Studies:

• Beyond Representation
• Gaming cultures and subcultures
• The videogames industry and the workplace

With: Lídia

Literature:

• "Confronting Toxic Gamer Culture: A Challenge for Feminist Game Studies Scholars" by Mia Consalvo
• "Collective Organizing, Individual Resistance, or Asshole Griefers? An Ethnographic Analysis of Women of Color In Xbox Live" by Kishonna Gray
• "On Being a Feminist in Games Studies" by Sal Humphreys
• "Editor’s Introduction: It Isn’t Difficult to Find Feminist Game Studies, but Can We Find a Feminist Game History?" by Carly A. Kocurek for Feminist Media Histories (Volume 6, Issue 1)

Games:

• T.B.C.
• T.B.C.

Week 7

Tuesday, February 16th

Tactical Game Studies:

• Brief intro to tactical media
• "Games against Empire"/ Situationist gaming:
  • Counterplay
  • Dissonant Development
  • Tactical Games

With: Lídia, Aymeric (T.B.C.), Marloes(?)

Literature:

• "The ABC of Tactical Media" by Geert Lovink and David Garcia
• "Dissolving the Magic Circle of Play: Lessons from Situationist Gaming" by Anne-Marie Schleiner
• "Making games in a fucked-up world" by Paolo Pedercini

Games:

• What Remains by Iodine Dynamics
• T.B.C.
• T.B.C.

Week 8

Tuesday, March 2nd

Persuasive Games:

• Procedural rhetorics
• Game mechanics
• Gameplay
• Narrativity

With: Lídia, Aymeric (T.B.C.)

Literature:

• "Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames" by Ian Bogost (Chapter 1: Procedural Rhetorics)
• T.B.C.

Games:

• T.B.C.
• T.B.C.

Week 9

Tuesday, March 9th

• Speculative Feminist Fabulation
• Games as zines

With: Lídia

Literature:

• "SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far" by Donna Haraway
• "Feminist game environment" by Natacha Roussel
• "Parasite" by Porpentine

Games:

• Parasite by Porpentine
• Queers in Love at the End of the World by Anna Anthropy
• T.B.C.

Week 10

Tuesday, March 16th

Editorial guidance and support

With: Lídia, Manetta (T.B.C.)

Week 11

Tuesday, March 23rd

Editorial guidance and support

With: Lídia, Manetta (T.B.C.)

Week 12

Tuesday, March 30th

Safe Launch Party \o/