Re: [-empyre-] benefits of practice to conventional research / could gamification save academia?
Interestingly though, until very recently these developments have only been Cybernetic by structure, not by name (mainly because it carried the smell of a hype from the past). [LASSE SCHERFFIG] How efficient is this sort of symbolic camouflage to disentangle a discipline (structures of thought, conceptual frameworks, methods) from the hype (of the past)? From another perspective: should the changing of names/labels (from KYB to INF?) be taken as a “superficially” administrative or as a “deeply” philosophical operation? Or is it one of these cases in which such separation makes no sense whatsoever? Is there any advantage in sticking to the old, overused/abused concepts, and forcing them to perform new operations? I generally feel uneasy with talking about benefits of artistic research, […] But of course both inform each other to some extend. [LS] I’m curious whether this information remains as a form of silent inspiration to the thesis, or if it is actually written down in some way. Do you refer to the artworks even in passing? If so, do you conceptually reframe them as experiments? How personal is (would be?) your account of them in any academic form (such as an essay)? the objects on a game's screen do not exist in the loops we created, although they exist (a) in code and (b) for us, i.e. as sign and signal. The game, however, functions without them. [LS] The game “functions”, but can it be /played/? And if it can’t, is it still a game? Considering the amount of material resources spent on these “objects” (memory, processing cycles, etc - which is critical in older console systems), how redundant they should be considered to the overall feedback structure entailed by the gaming system? (And: is this relation between “functionality” and “playability” in any form analog to the one between “conceptual structure” and “names” above?) News of the World is a nice example of circular causality because it bends the very rules that produced it (the demand for peer reviewed publishing). [LS] Reaching out to the other thread: should we take this rule-bending as a form of institutional critique? Can it have long-term effects, or is it restricted to opening space for a singular intervention? But exams and degrees are already gamification of education. And badge-based accreditation of achievement outside the academy is a way of reproducing this. [ROB MYERS] Ha, indeed. All the comments about “gamification” made me realise how it might be a most appropriate way to describe the particular economy of academic research we are already in. It brought to my mind a text on The Last Psychiatrist about a particular research project that went completely wrong, but nevertheless had a “quite positive publication output”. From its (self-congratulatory?) conclusion: “In general, the results could not be combined in an overarching model, and were thus disappointing with regard to scientific progress. In contrast, the end result in terms of publication output was quite positive: the majority of papers were presented at international conferences and published in highly cited journals and several students earned PhD degrees based on their work on the subject.” (The whole text: tinyurl.com/7fhsv9h) Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] practice as a means towards academic self-criticism / research as a curatorial enterprise
institutional critique is no longer associated with artistic practices only and is developing towards what has been termed as a 'transversal practice' [MAGDA TYZLIK-CARVER] And do you see institutional critique playing a central role not only in your curatorial practice, but also in your academic research? In practice, what tactics do you employ to manage the paradoxical relation between this political agenda and the “inevitable” outcome of an (institutional) validation? Another seemingly paradoxical relation I’d like to hear more about is that between commoning and curating. In your work, do you actively make an “emancipatory” effort to move away from “directed commoning” and towards “collective curating”? Or you try to pay close attention to how both vectors interact in the course of instituting? How much self-awareness is involved in this process? I don't want to be romantic about it, but what I would want to preserve for my own practice is the recognition that there is knowledge that is hard to categorise and then that it might become something else (another knowledge) after the process of translation into what we can understand through language. [MT] Just to clarify: would that be self-recognition (as the outcome of a learning process) or some sort of institutional recognition (e.g. the inclusion of such knowledge in the common academic tradition, a PhD title, etc)? I would be curious to see how do you relate these hardships of categorisation to the skype logs of the common practice project, which seem to be an interesting way of writing/ preserving that fully embraces the metamorphosis that result from translation (or a transport in time). Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] practice as a means towards academic self-criticism / research as a curatorial enterprise
Hi Johannes, Ioana, Gabriel, and all, Thank you for your comments and great questions. Not easy to answer, I have to admit, but I will give it a go. Johannes thank you for your response. Unfortunately I would agree, there is very little joy about/in academia at the moment and as we know there are many individual and collective struggles all around us and I am sure some on the list might be involved in them in different ways. But before I move on I want to make a little correction as in your writing mine and Ioana's posts were merged into one coming from the same person which perhaps suggests a proximity of our concerns, but as they were articulated by two different people I wanted to make that distinction. Ioana's questions are so well articulated and focused: 'How can I embody and live what I theorize, without letting it close down my possibilities of experiencing? How can I make of my performance-making practice a learning experience (that materializes in some kind of knowledge acquisition or understanding) rather than an application of the theoretical outcomes of my research? (How) am I to justify my art practice in relation to my theoretical research and demonstrate its relevance to the latter? (this question matters because mine is a theory-focused PhD; its outcome will be a dissertation)'. And I would be curious to hear more on this. Johannes, your post touched on so many important issues. What I enjoyed a lot was your description of what you called 'tough luck', actually it made me lough aloud, because I imagine this is exactly the kind of luck that most of those doing practice based PhD's have and again each of us deals with it in a different way. It seems to be an accompanying issue to work with on top of all the original questions that I started my PhD with. I am sure it is a widely shared experience. Magda, i would think your performance practices and the curating experiments are interface enactments and they are lived of course, and yet you might agree, they can be recorded, they can be edited, narrated, mythologized, and written up or down meshed with images... (Johannes) Another seemingly paradoxical relation I'd like to hear more about is that between commoning and curating. In your work, do you actively make an emancipatory effort to move away from directed commoning and towards collective curating? Or you try to pay close attention to how both vectors interact in the course of instituting? How much self-awareness is involved in this process? (Menotti) I would be curious to see how do you relate these hardships of categorisation to the skype logs of the common practice project, which seem to be an interesting way of writing/ preserving that fully embraces the metamorphosis that result from translation (or a transport in time). (Menotti) I situate common practice and my research around curating within what I consider to be a new context for curatorial strategies with reference to social technologies that claim to redistribute power relations. Common practice critically operates in a network environment and pragmatically points to the specific problems characteristic to network society which are labour organisation and its condition (free and immaterial labour) in the environment in which creative co-production of knowledge takes place non-stop and contributes to creating what often has been defined as digital and immaterial commons as well as new forms of enclosures which also accompany this process. Thus in my research around curating and commoning (understood after De Angelis as 'the social process that creates and reproduces the commons') I take into account the new context which is defined by the changing character of production which becomes biopolitical production invested in production of subjectivity. In that context the question of recording is hugely important indeed because it is about what I record and if I record at all (in which case it is a tough luck when it comes to my PhD, though hopefully I will come up with some solution) . On the other hand there are already recordings of the session which are available on the wiki where the common practice is stored, in theedited versions of skype text chat conversations, as well as original chat discussions, wiki history which follows changes, etc. It seems to me that the only way to interact with those, outside of the actual session as it is happening, is through mythologizing, narrating, interpreting, etc. I am not sure what is meant by the concept 'directed commoning'. More explanation would be. Common practice is not about curating collectively either. The research is about investigating the conditions (social, technological, institutional, political) in which curating takes place versus a desire (yes, utopian most likely) to on one hand not to be subjugated to those conditions and at the same time not to subjugate others to them. Linking curating with the concept of the commons is probably not a tactic
Re: [-empyre-] benefits of practice to conventional research / could gamification save academia?
I think we need another word for the opposite of gamification, maybe there already is one, and a pedagogy and ethos that can contribute to the formation of solidarity, critical awareness, and life-sustaining activity. Gamification tries to turn play into a productive activity what about turning productive activity into occasions for play? On a cultural level, we are in the habit of thinking these are the same things, but one is about capturing energy and turning into money the other is about taking wage labor and setting it free. In an academic setting, this involves turning students away from the narrow conception of education as certification for employment, held into place by debt. The alternative is an education which recognizes these formal disciplinary structures, but teaches students how to understand disciplinary structure, how to subvert it, and how to create spaces of social dialogue, exploration of common interests, and the collective pursuit of the good. A second thought is that many of our concepts of gaming are heavily influenced by the impact of electronic gaming. While much of it is increasingly social, and this is good, electronic gaming also has shifted broad cultural practices of gaming in an individual direction (single player mode). While games have always contained the potential for competition, the contractual nature of gaming has counterbalanced the competing need for individual subjectivity. An individual can only engage others in the contest insofar as he or she can convince them to participate in the social activity of gaming. As any Monopoly player discovers, however, once the game begins to privilege a certain player and the possibilities for meaningful participation diminish, the game gets boring and the game ends before you or your friends are made totally penniless. This dynamic is not as strong in electronic games, participation falls very heavily on the solo player who chooses to play or not to play, and almost every game has a solo mode. Even the multiplayer games are not as easily held into place by the social negotiation between players agreeing to play for a time (though this does happen). You leave when you get bored. Gamification erodes the aspect of social agreement that is present in traditional gaming (and the playfulness, even, of electronic gaming), and in its place, erects a solo-player, merit driven economics to social behavior. It wraps activity in a fairly transparent currency with no value beyond our decision to buy into this new form of compensation in exchange for more direct forms of compensation (shorter workdays, better wages, reliable healthcare and shelter, ergonomics, collective bargaining, etc.). The old marxist critiques of religion are probably better applied to gamification. The opposite of this tendency is what is needed. People have done this to a degree. It is an art, poesis. DeCerteau describes it in the Practice of Everyday Life (an argument which has been appropriated by a culture industry anxious to merge governmentality with participation). Davin On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 4:59 AM, Gabriel Menotti gabriel.meno...@gmail.comwrote: Interestingly though, until very recently these developments have only been Cybernetic by structure, not by name (mainly because it carried the smell of a hype from the past). [LASSE SCHERFFIG] How efficient is this sort of symbolic camouflage to disentangle a discipline (structures of thought, conceptual frameworks, methods) from the hype (of the past)? From another perspective: should the changing of names/labels (from KYB to INF?) be taken as a “superficially” administrative or as a “deeply” philosophical operation? Or is it one of these cases in which such separation makes no sense whatsoever? Is there any advantage in sticking to the old, overused/abused concepts, and forcing them to perform new operations? I generally feel uneasy with talking about benefits of artistic research, […] But of course both inform each other to some extend. [LS] I’m curious whether this information remains as a form of silent inspiration to the thesis, or if it is actually written down in some way. Do you refer to the artworks even in passing? If so, do you conceptually reframe them as experiments? How personal is (would be?) your account of them in any academic form (such as an essay)? the objects on a game's screen do not exist in the loops we created, although they exist (a) in code and (b) for us, i.e. as sign and signal. The game, however, functions without them. [LS] The game “functions”, but can it be /played/? And if it can’t, is it still a game? Considering the amount of material resources spent on these “objects” (memory, processing cycles, etc - which is critical in older console systems), how redundant they should be considered to the overall feedback structure entailed by the gaming system? (And: is this relation between “functionality” and
