User:Kendal/Situationist Times
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 ]
ANNOTATION METHODS:
- _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.
- _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.
COLLECTIVE APPROACH:
Collective pad of potential approaches
ROLES
- Creative Direction
- Copy-Editing
LINK DUMP
[Research PAD ]
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:
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:
- Obsolete Media - Chain mail stories
- Non-Places - https://board.net/p/Non-Places
- Psychogeography- Unitary urbanism
- Performative use of space - Skateboarding
- 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.
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/
- 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