V. Procedural Analysis

     We Called It Earth was created as a way to experience inter-

 dependence (and connection) in the face of imminent collapse.

 Created during the pandemic, it explored digital means for multiple

 agents to inhabit a single body, and coordinate with each other to

 ‘save the world’. The procedures of the piece are ever-evolving as

 each performance brings up new ways of receiving and acting

 within the piece, but their current state is outlined below. 

      The facilitation is handled by myself, acting as a host. I gather

 people in a separate room from where they will play the game

 and   do a few short synchronization exercises. I then tell them a

 short story that lays out the narrative of the piece and places

 the responsibility for ‘saving the world’ on the actions of

 participants. After this, I explain the use of a game controller,

 how to log into the mobile phone component of the piece, and

 the rules of conduct. I then ask them, if they consent to those

 rules and would like to participate, to step into the performance

 space and begin the game. 

      There are only two rules in the piece:

1) This is not a theatre or a ‘performance’, per se.

It is a game. Speak up, feel free to yell, move around,

have fun! 

2) Sometimes the rules of how to play this game are

murky. Be supportive—help others if you can and be

kind if you can’t. 

     The mechanics of this piece are both physical and digital. It is

 designed to be operated with four game controllers at all times.   

Each controller operates a separate limb of the ‘collective entity’   

 (a cat leg,  a chicken leg, a set of bee wings, and a human arm).   

 Each  controller also has the ability to produce an expressive   

 sound with   the mouth of the entity (growling, whistling, opera,   

 and yawning). Both legs must be headed in the same direction   

 to achieve full speed and jumps must be timed correctly to

 avoid falling or attack. The arm is used only when a button

 appears, which triggers the text-based portion of the game. 

 Occasionally, the avatar will pass through a ‘limb switch’

 token which causes all the limbs to switch to different

 controllers. 

      On mobile phones, other participants have logged into the   

 game on their mobile phones and chosen an emoji to represent   

 themselves. At the top of the screen, an energy bar is displayed,   

 counting down with each move the avatar makes. This must be

 replenished by mobile phone sending positive energy points by

 choosing icons on their screen (which subsequently float up from

 the avatar on screen). 

     Additionally, the avatar sometimes encounters a chasm it   

 cannot cross, in which case a button is pushed that triggers a

 storytelling mode for mobile players. They must enter text, which

 falls from the sky to fill the chasm. Once the avatar can safely

 cross, the mode reverts to the platformer game mechanics. 

      At the end of each level, the avatar jumps to touch an image of a

  whole Earth, which triggers a dance party in the physical space. 

      The environment is a darkened space with brightly colored LED

 light strings outlining the area for the game controllers. A large

 screen appears in front of participants as the focal point. On the 

 screen is an image of space with broken bits of Earth and

 civilization floating on a pink grid. Plastic bags also occasionally  

 fly through the scene. The other planets of the solar system loom

 large in the background. 

      The narrative begins with a story about ‘The Separation’, which,

 due to an overwhelming desire for personal gain and recognition,

 caused the Earth to explode into a million disparate pieces. The

 story of the game picks up when a small number of these pieces

 decide to come together again and form the ‘collective entity’. It is

 foretold that their stories will cause a new world with a new name

 to take form. 

Participants maneuver the avatar together during We called it Earth at the Connective Symposium

 *You can access more information about the artists and this piece by

 clicking here. 

     Acting as a participant in a work of art is, by design, a highly

 individual and subjective experience. Having no insight into The

 House of Seasonal Cleaning beyond the workshop and supporting

 documentation, I have only two selves with which to observe and

 investigate the procedures of the piece: 1) as an individual from a

 specific cultural and experiential context and 2) as a participant that

 acted inside the ‘magic circle’ that Liana Psarologaki and Amanda

 Hodgkinson created.

     It is important to note that the procedures of a participatory piece

 create multiple subjectivities through the enactment of processes.

 This creates both a player-subject connected to the rules and playing-

 subject, or “the cultural and moral being who voluntarily plays,

 bringing to the game a presence of culture and values that also affect

 the experience” (2011, p. 63). In The House of Seasonal Cleaning, the 

 player-subject is the part of me that has a relationship with tidying up

 my apartment. 

      The facilitation is handled by both researchers. It includes the

 following processes: A short presentation about the research and

 significance of cleaning, a paper handout with a selection of poems

 about tidying up from famous authors, a sheet with the rules of

 participation (along with a verbal explanation), and an invitation to  

 collect paper and marker and find a place to write. Both facilitators

 also walk amongst participants, encouraging them to write, keeping

 track of time, and eventually helping to place the poems they create. 

     The rules are as follows: 1) Participants must think of a specific

 domestic space, imagine cleaning it (implements, smells, sounds,

 sights), and write it down as a poem, and 2) they are asked to im-

 agine a house mapped on the stage of the theatre. They are then  

 instructed to place their poem in the house at its most likely location. 

     The mechanics consist of: 1) Finding a marker, paper, and location

 in the theatre (mostly on the stage) to sit and write comfortably, 2)

 writing and perhaps drawing on an A3 white sheet of paper with large

 permanent marker, 3) placing the poems on the stage in their most

 likely location, and 4) walking around the created ‘house’ informally,

 reading poems and chatting with other participants.

     The environment is a blackbox theatre with projections on a

 cyclorama. The voices of the artists are amplified. During the

 workshop, large slides of cleaning-related images are projected over

 the entirety of the back wall. 

      The narrative is about a nameless group of individuals connected

 visibly to a space through the hidden and ubiquitous act of cleaning.

 This narrative emerges from reading the poems of the co-created

 ‘house’. 

     In their program description, Psarologaki and Hodgkinson

 emphasize the values of connection, community, visibility, hope, and creativity.

“In the opening up of the often-silent domesticities of

life, cleaning and writing can allow us to discover the

unnoticed places in selfhood and community. By con-

sidering the cultural invisibility of cleaning through cre-

ative practice, we can reconnect the fragmented

narratives of home and ways of being in the world” 

(Hodgkinson and Psarologaki, 2022, p. 21).

      By drawing attention to the act of cleaning during this participatory

 workshop, the creators surfaced phantasms associated with the

 images of dirty spaces, brightly colored spray bottles, and uniformed

 labor, and cheerfully invited participants to reassign the meaning they

 might have subconsciously attached to these things. Instead of

 seeing dirt and waste as something to hide for fear of embarrass-

 ment or to dismiss its removal as an occupation of the uneducated,

 unliberated, or poor, the act of cleaning became a rich experience of

 caring for a home; a process that, while often carried out in solitude, n

 nonetheless creates a bond through its ubiquity that connects people

 by highlighting their relationship with their architectural spaces. 

Participants discuss the poems comprising the 'house', The House of Seasonal Cleaning by Liana Psarologaki and Amanda Hodgkinson

 *You can access more information about the artist and this piece by

 clicking on the following links:

artist website | symposium publication

     In order to draw focused attention on phantasms, an artist might

also intentionally provoke participants by using procedures of

 disempowerment. In Reyhaneh Mirjahani’s piece, she uses this

 strategy to “investigate the problematics of the western cosmopolitan

 liberal idea of agency” (‘Connective Symposium Programbook’, 2022,

 p. 15). The procedures of this piece were as follows: 

     The facilitation included a small introduction to Mirjahani’s

 research on lose-lose predicaments in the sociopolitical sphere, a

 paper handed out to participants with a map of connected lines and a

 sheet of multiple-choice questions. She then explained the rules, kept

 track of time, and asked participants to place their completed  

 diagrams on the bulletin board. After two rounds, a discussion about

 the experience was facilitated.

     The rules were as follows: Participants began with question 16,

 the ‘entry point’ of the diagram. They were then asked to trace a line

 in a particular direction based on their answers to multiple choice

 questions. Each answer led to a different subsequent question

 accompanied by the question number. The ‘game’ would conclude

 once either time ran out or all possible options had been exhausted.

 At the end of each round, participants pinned their sheets to a bulletin

 board. 

     The mechanics were fairly straightforward. Participants were asked

 to read a question and then choose an answer (out of 2-3

 possibilities). Their answers would correspond to a particular path on

 the map, which they would trace using a marker. The questions were

 structured in such a way that one could easily be led in a circle,

 making it impossible to continue the game. The second round

 repeated the rules of the first, this time with groups of four or five

 participants playing together. They would have to verbally debate and

 agree on the answers before selecting them. 

     The environment was a small white conference room with a large,

 rectangular table. There were no aesthetic elements save for the

 diagrams displayed on the bulletin board. 

     There was also no narrative. Questions were asked with neither

 context nor prescribed sequence. 

     The most memorable element of this piece for me, as the playing-

 subject, was to note how the lack of context and meaningful choice

 provoked conflict among participants, as well as heated pushback on

 the artist during the follow-up conversation. Without common ground

 provided to make a decision, players supplemented narrative by

 bringing in their own politics and culture-specific experience to

 advocate for their preferred options. It was highly charged, and a

 dramatic contrast to the creative and polite conversations that took

 place at other moments of the symposium. 

     As the player-subject, however, I found it fascinating and effective to

 see that Mirjahani’s steadfast refusal to cater to participants’ needs  

 for context generated visible agitation. Although it was nowhere

 explicitly stated what her intended underlying values were, 

 questioning authority when faced with bad options seemed to emerge

 when paired with the other aspects of her interdisciplinary research. 

Mirjahani states in her research questions: 

 “… the project inquires into how artistic practice can lead viewers to question, discuss and understand the existence of agency within such dilemmatic choices. Furthermore, the experience of the inquiry is meant to raise this open question: If in some situations we lose agency, which systems are depriving us of it?” (Mirjahani, 2022)

      Rather than demonstrating a way to connect with each other as a

 community, An Experiment on Agency #7 seems to imply that

 attempts to do so might sometimes be premature, and can perhaps

 only be approached once the systems that withhold agency have

 been rejected. It might also suggest that our connections to these

 systems creates a form of agency rendered impotent by

 decontextualizing and oversimplifying choices in a way similar to

 Nguyen’s concept of value capture (wherein values are represented in

 a simplistic manner in order to create the appearance of addressing

 them meaningfully).

Completed diagrams from An Experiment on Agency #7 by Reyhaneh Mirjahani