Posted: February 23, 2012 | Author: Dan | Filed under: game studies, playing with reality, presentations | Tags: Anthropology, game studies, pervasive games, PhD, ritual, Turner |
In September the lovely folks at playARK in Cardiff asked me to come speak at their festival. They videoed me fiddling with their lighting set up and showing footage of half naked cricketers.
Posted: September 2, 2011 | Author: Dan | Filed under: BT Residency, playing with reality | Tags: a machine to see with, blasttheory, DCRC, pervasive games, Pervasive Media, PhD, ritual, Turner |
SPOILER ALERT: Don’t read any further if you want to experience A Machine To See With, especially at the Brighton Digital Festival this September. Which of course you will be doing if you can.
A Machine To See With is an incredibly liminal experience and uses liminal symbolism and evokes communitas in a variety of manners. I believe that it is the manipulation of these which gives this work its affect and power.
From the very first instance you, as a participant, are directed to step out of the everyday and perform a very transgressive act, robbing a bank. You are told to ignore any other interruptions for the duration, you aren’t you anymore you are this new, different person living on the edge. Instantly you feel like you have crossed a threshold and you aren’t like everyone else, you are following a script, concentrating on fleeting instructions that wont be repeated and scanning the crowd sticking out. Feeling conspicuous hustling along clasping a mobile to your head.
The script purposefully evokes the sense of being in a film through describing the locations of cameras, the types of shot you might be in and the very fact that your eyes are a machine to see with. The participant is put in a film set as they describe the buildings around as just flats and the people as extras. You are put beyond just being inside a story to actually being in the filming of a film. The fiction of the robbery is mixed with the very clear reality around you. to It feels very much like being in a deconstructed film. The audio is somewhat like listening to a film script, complete with location details and scene direction whilst at the same time your eyes are the camera picking up the shots. When the script describes something and then you see it there is a frission; a subjunctive pleasure when the world of make-believe bank robbers IS the world around you.
The locations themselves are wonderfully liminal. Early on you enter a toilet cubicle to reflect. Public toilets have a great sense of taboo about them, they are places to excrete and leave, or hang around for illicit sex. They are not comfortable places to loiter. Even being asked to visit a toilet in a pub without asking is crossing a line. Using the top floor of the car park tower is brilliant. It is the meeting place between the ground and the air, another sky pier in Brighton. When I did the piece it was empty and very cinematic, another break from the everyday streets. It was an ascent into the heavens and standing on the edge of the sky. Although I didn’t get to enter the car myself (I was testing), the symbolism of entering a strange, parked car is very much breaking a social law, another transgressive act. One that harks back to Blast Theory’s use of the limousine in Uncle Roy. They use other highly symbolic urban geography, such as getting you to navigate back alleyways, stand on the edge of the car park, circumnavigate the periphery of the bank and just before entering the bank the lead stands on the edge of the pavement getting ready.
Your partner, and the pairing of strangers is very, very important. The two of you shouldn’t know each other, but you meet up to rob a bank. You are drawn together in a complicit, transgressive act. There is a sense of communitas, a breaking down of the regular rules of society, you are both here to commit a crime. In the performance you are meeting a stranger, you have no idea who they are, what their status is, but now you are both to be criminals, outsiders, the archetype of crime film bank robbers. You are playing out a modern myth cycle, that of the heist, the crime movie. In the same way that ancient rituals would often be accompanied by recitals or performances of myths, so in this you hear and enact a contemporary mythic journey.
The experience is totally entrancing. Although I was only taking part in tests and not the full performance I felt in a very heightened and agitated state. Very much on the edge. The tests we were doing are there to eliminate disjunctions and tweak the subjunctive nature of the piece to help it create an ‘as if’ world. The pleasure in hearing this piece as if you are in a script or the movie itself is very intense and enjoyable. The sense of being outside the everyday world and different from all the “extras” around you is palpable and fascinating. But I think best of all is the build up to the final crossing of the line. The whole piece is a 45 minute build up to the final, climactic entry to the bank. It is all exceedingly well choreographed and my heart was thumping at the time I approached the bank even though I knew exactly what was going to happen, that I wouldn’t be doing it, and that I would be told to run before entering the bank. The climax of A Machine to See With is all about leading you to the edge and then yanking you back. It is a cliffhanger in a very real sense.
The final scene is also very rich, but I don’t want to go into detail here. But it again brings back Blast Theory’s fascination with strangers and again evokes the feeling of communitas and tries to get at authentic human relations. The piece ends rather abruptly in a place you really didn’t expect to be and in a state of mind you really also didn’t expect to be in.
Posted: August 16, 2011 | Author: Dan | Filed under: BT Residency, playing with reality | Tags: communitas, DCRC, ethnography, pervasive games, PhD, Turner |
The last piece of the puzzle, but the thing to really convince me about this ritual process and anti-structure schema, is communitas. During my ethnography and interviews of the last year the single, stand out, common feature seemed to be the social aesthetics. The most pleasurable aspect for players was to actually play with real people and the descriptions of this fits well with communitas, one of Turner’s key additions to the ritual process.
Communitas, that feeling of togetherness that occurs during liminal and liminoid activities. That feeling of oneness during music festivals, hen nights or civil war. It’s that drunken “I love you man” statement. It is also probably the sense of oneness that helps convince someone to join in the looting when everyone else is doing it.
[It is a] “Moment in and out of time,” and in and out of secular social structure, which reveals, however fleetingly, some recognition (in symbol if not always in language) of a generalized social bond that has ceased to be and has simultaneously yet to be fragmented into a multiplicity of structural ties.
According to him there are two models for human relations. The everyday, structured, hierarchical, differentiated social systems with status, identity, evaluation, politics. But also the social characteristics which emerges in liminal space, with barely rudimentary structure, participants undifferentiated, identities broken down and a communion of equal individuals. Turner adopts the term communitas rather than community to differentiate this new ritual state. Beyond the structures of society are not just the Hobbesian war of all against all, but also spontaneous communitas, before roles and regulation crops up. It is also very similar to Hakim Bey‘s Temporary Autonomous Zones, or what as Turner is quick to point out, “hippie happenings.”
This description of communitas attracted me because it matched well with the sense of enjoyment that people report from playing street games. The kinds of responses I had revolved around the enjoyment of working in a team, the directness of human contact/interaction and the sense of loss at the dissipation of a game, and the dissipation of the shared experience. No other pleasure seemed as important or as common as this sense of communitas.
Posted: August 9, 2011 | Author: Dan | Filed under: BT Residency, playing with reality | Tags: Anthropology, blasttheory, DCRC, liminoid, PhD, ritual, Turner |
Turner makes the liminoid distinction in From Ritual To Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play. He does this to differentiate between similar types of activity that occur in pre-industrial and industrial societies. There are activities in modern, global, industrialised society that appear to be very similar to pre-industrial ritual. Religious events, music festivals, theatre, play and games all fit into this category. They tend to follow the same anti-structure that ritual follows.
However, apart from many of the other differences, Turner charts two main differences. The first is that all these activities don’t necessarily result in social state change, they may, but most often things go back to normal, no matter what happened during the liminoid experience. The other, and I think key difference that all this hinges on is the aspect of choice. For pre-industrial societies the rituals are necessary, there is no choice in the matter, the individuals and society must go through them, they have no choice. And on most counts they are not nice experiences for either the participants and/or the social group around them. In one example of a circumcision/manhood ritual, adolescents are excluded from the tribe and must resort to stealing food to survive. If they are caught they are beaten. They are outside society, and outside the laws and so can and must do this successfully to survive. They have no choice in this, and those they steal from also have no choice. It is not a pleasant experience for either side.
Contrast that with most street games and the aspect of choice becomes clear. Players of these games choose to take part in what are generally pleasant and nice experiences. If they were more challenging they would be unlikely to come back for more. And quite contrary to the much discussed aspect of players/public not know who is in or out of the game, generally these games are quite clear about that and involve a high level of awareness and choice from non-players. From experience it is generally quite difficult to get passersby engaged (though this has a lot to do with locations) in games, they may not know it is a game, but they do know it is something they don’t want to be involved in. These games are nice, and unless they are nice to the public they don’t get involved.
Rather than a clear binary, there is more of a continuum from liminal to liminoid. For example there can be obvious peer factors in ensuring that people take part in what could be seen liminoid activities. This is not to say that street, or pervasive, games can’t be more liminal. In fact one of the things that really interests me about some of Blast Theory’s work is in the aspect of choice, and the sometimes uncomfortable experiences that choice, or lack of it can bring. Pieces such as Ulrike and Eamon Compliant and Kidnap really play with choice and have produced distinctly uncomfortable experiences. There is plenty of room for critical engagement between choice and liminoid experiences.
Posted: August 3, 2011 | Author: Dan | Filed under: BT Residency, game studies, playing with reality | Tags: Anthropology, Culture, DCRC, game studies, games, huizinga, play, ritual, Turner |
In game studies returning to Huizinga has a slightly religious quality about it. Like going back to the source, or font of wisdom. Quoting from Huizinga is a little like quoting from scripture, his work has that place in the discipline and authors expect it to have the force of gospel. It is also like scripture in that there is a poetry to it and everyone gets their own thing out of it. My turn.
Now in myth and ritual the great instinctive forces of civilized life have their origin: law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom and science. All are rooted in the primaeval soil of play. (Huizinga, 1949, p5)
In Homo Ludens, he charts the parallels between ritual and play. He shows that many of the key formal characteristics are similar and quite definitely says that ritual comes out of play. If play is to be taken as performance and mimicry then that goes against what Turner says in the Anthropology of Experience, in that ritual doesn’t come out of performance, but out of redressive social activity. Which leads on to Chapter 3 of Homo Ludens, where Huizinga discusses play in its function to explore and construct social structures. This works nicely with Turner’s take on ritual being a place to break down social structure and experience relations through the anti-structure of communitas.
Huizinga’s first characteristic of play is that it is free and voluntary. Which makes it unlike a rite of passage according to Turner. Play becomes liminoid rather than liminal in that there is a choice as to whether you do it or not.
His second characteristic of play is that it is outside “ordinary” life in its character, duration and location. This is exactly the liminal aspect that rituals achieve and so there is functional similarity here.
Play creates order and there are rules to play by. Having a three year old makes me very aware that so called paidia, or free play, has very definite and unbreakable rules. Again rituals have very set, symbolic structures that give them power and practicality. Turner’s anti-structure is intended to be the set of rules that function inside liminal processes, not just the negation of structure.
Finally play has no material interest, or the achievement inside a game does not carry over into the real world. This is always a hotly debated aspect of games, and has largely been debunked. Ritual by its very nature causes a real world change in the participant(s). They go from one life stage to another, experience crises or cross the boundaries between seasons. The effects of ritual is very closely tied into the real world. However liminoid experiences are those that are only expected to make a change in the individuals perceptions and not have a wider social-structural effect.
In Homo Ludens, Huizinga hit on some interesting similarities, but was too quick to jump in to equating play and ritual as having similar social functions. Through Turner’s communitas, anti-structure and liminoid distinctions the similarities and differences can be discussed in a more nuanced way. Turner never mentions Huizinga, but I would be surprised if he had not encountered the work, and I would be interested in knowing his opinions.
Posted: August 2, 2011 | Author: Dan | Filed under: announcements, BT Residency, playing with reality | Tags: Anthropology, blasttheory, communitas, DCRC, liminal, liminoid, pervasive games, PhD, residency, ritual, Turner |
For this residency project I’ll be using the work of Victor Turner. There are three broad, interrelated and interconnected aspects of his theory of Ritual and Liminality that I’m interested in.
- The Ritual Process: The three part, pre-liminal, liminal, post-liminal, cycle of ritual experience
- Communitas: The feeling of togetherness and solidarity during a ritual activity
- Liminal vs Liminoid: The relationship between necessary rituals in pre-industrial societies and elective liminal-like activities in industrialised society
These are ordered as the chronologically appeared, but have to be taken together as a way to analyse pervasive games. The three part ritual process itself originates with the french, formalist ethnographer and folklorist Arnold Van Gennep. Turner doesn’t really go out of his way to differentiate his use of the three part process from Van Gennep, and seems to use it straight out of Rites of Passage (1909). In one of his earlier books, The Ritual Process (1969), Turner describes his concept of Communitas, based on his observations of the Ndembu and analysis of other ethnographers work. Over a decade later, in From Ritual To Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (1982), he describes the liminal/liminoid distinction as he becomes more interested in performance studies and the developed world.