User:Senka/Almost Final Graduation Presentation
Urgency I started from
The urgency I started with is twofold: 1. Queers in the Balkans are often labelled as ‘imported from the rotten West.’ They’re not seen as a local concern. 2. The West being branded as a queer haven, while embracing a homonationalism, which perceives the rest of the world as the ‘backwards’, homophobic and transphobic other.
Through this project, my aim was to both counter these notions and explore what the political imaginary of queerness in the Balkans could be.
What the project was conceptualized as
A non-linear game that makes use of non-linear time (time-travel, loops in space-time). The player doesn’t merely travel through space but across time as well to encounter fragments of queer Balkan pasts. In this thorny journey, the archival information about these pasts is embedded into the narrative through 3D models and audio snippets.
Findings that changed how I thought about the project
There was not as much shunning of queer people as I had initially believed there to be. But there was a continual amnesia in regard to queer people ever existing in the region. Miloje Avramović, a trans/intersex man is one such example, he transitioned medically in 1937, yet all the way in the 70s trans people were labelled and called ‘the first of their kind.’ Reading Ariella Azoulay’s Unlearning Imperialism and familiarizing myself with ‘imperialism’s pursuit of the new,’ I saw a parallel between claiming new land and labelling people as new in order to sever our relationships with past knowledges. This act I called an imperial prescription.
Miloje Avramovic blender render
The only photo of Miloje
Miloje Avramovic's head texture painting based on the only photograph of him
Some information sparked a lot of speculation and wonder, such as discovering that same sex unions (similar to marriages) existed in the 14th century Serbian Slavonic church.
A lot of the information I was searching for was hard to find or in conditions that were difficult to decipher. A portion of my analysis could just be called ‘reading into the pixels’. This is what I was doing for instance when encountering the death sentence verdict of the partisan Josip Mardešić.
Third genders in service of the patriarchy, virdžine and keeping land in the family. When people who live outside of the gendered norm align with the ideology of the state it doesn’t mean they will be looked on with pride in the future.
Politika's article (in Serbo-Croatian) on Miloje
Photo of an Albanian burrnesha (sworn virgins same as virdzine)
The verdict of Josip Mardesic
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The testing sessions provided granular information of how people relate to the game and what they want to explore. It became clear to me that people saw the game as an ‘open world’ game, and that a ‘rewarding’ mechanism of the game was to find new rooms and new things to discover in them.
Conclusions I came to:
- Archival knowledge can be disseminated in a game format, but a lot of translation needs to happen for it to legible.
- Accepting citizenship means accepting imperialism. It cements the idea of a binary gender system and enforces the oppressive forces that determine who gets to be called a citizen.
- Queers almost never benefit from aligning with the state, as their existences can be weaponized.
Mechanics of the game
Sites
Each room of the game is a ‘site’ of memory. It starts at the airport as a site where gender and national identity are scrutinized, policed and defined, and moves on to historical sites which are connected by portals.
Apart from the airport, the sites were built trying to apply critical fabulation to mediums beyond text. 3D modeling here builds lost worlds and renders them possible and present.
The Forgotten Pioneer of Memory
The Forgotten Pioneer of Memory is a recurring figure in every room. She is supposed to be there as a safeguard, who gives some reassurance, as well as serve as a reminder of how pasts are re-written because “the political battle is a battle for the territory of collective memory.”
Early modelling based on the reference
One of the models in Godot
The Forgotten Pioneer of Memory in game
Pop up text when you walk into the pioneer
This character is based off a keychain of a pioneer girl I got in a secondhand shop in Belgrade. Since it was made from cheap plastic, it continued to erode into a dilapidated shape that seemed very symbolic of the history of Yugoslavia.
Pop ups
I’ve included pop ups which ground you and give context to which historical period you are in.
Pop up for the 14th century site
Pop up for the 2020 site
Airport announcements
Parts of the thesis are spoken out loud in the game as airport announcements. They’re signaled by the floating sparkles, and they get activated once the player is close enough to trigger the audio to play.
The idea behind this was to include an element of transmitting knowledge that feels both like eavesdropping, spreading queer knowledges through gossip, as well as uncovering something that has happened to you (you=an amalgamation of queer history). The snippets (as well as the whole thesis) are written from the 2nd person perspective (e.g. ‘you go to the airport’) to make the player/reader feel the content of the journey on their skin, to feel narrative immersion.
Iterative approach of making public
The project exists in several different iterations.
Web
The first major way in which the game is made accessible is through a webpage. Many of the design decision were made to create a game that could be easily available online (low poly designs, compressed files and similar).
USB
When talking to Marloes, I was brought to consider that more intimate modes of sharing this work can exist as well. Which is why I also flashed a version of the game on USB drives and created a keychain of the Pioneer of Forgotten Memory to accompany it. With this instance of the game, it could be spread offline, from one hand of a player, to another.
Performance
I did a performance in drag at Brienenoord Buitenplaats, to test out how portions of the thesis that will be spoken in game sound when spoken out loud. This also brought me to shift more towards the voice.
Brienenoord thesis reading in drag
Preceding this, for the second public moment Thijs and I made use of queueing for our project. In this moment, I also started to ask for identification before people enter to play the game. The queue and implementing some of the hostile policing strategies that the game addresses became performative acts.
Thesis
The thesis serves as a backbone and a script of the project. The content it writes about is what the game is based on. It writes about queer histories using Saidiya Hartman’s method of Critical Fabulation, trying to expand the borders of what is seen in the archival document, image or video. (Saidiya Hartman’s method which uses historical information, archival material and fiction to do reparative work in the archives.)
The thesis also exists as a printed publication, which mimics the design of a passport. This was not my initial intention, but after seeing the how much traction the thesis got during the public moments and reading portions of it from my own passport, it needed to be fleshed out as a printed publication.
The design and adaptation of iconography of the two headed eagle which looks both East and West, was changed to represent less patriarchal ideal of strength and perseverance into a two headed chicken which could feed a nation.
What changed compared to the initial project
Initially, the steps the player took were supposed to lead to a compiled PDF of the archival information they’ve encountered being compiled. The current version of the game doesn’t facilitate that, due to time and knowledge constraints. I hope to continue working on this project to implement that.
Sound also took on a larger role after the second public moment, as I noticed that some people do not want to play the game, so much as they want to see other play it. To still be able to reach that audience, I thought the sound could be something that reaches them even if they have never touched the keyboard. The role of sound also became more important due to the collaboration with NDNMK Solutions (who created all the soundscapes and sound effects).