archetype
Archetypes are commonly used when writing or designing characters, throughout all forms of fiction. Relying on Jung, tarot cards, keywords, or other forms of canons or clichés allows for participants to quickly get a mental representation of their character and to start connecting them with references.
The more evocative the title, the more inspiring it can become for a participant, who can connect it to characters they know, practices or representations. For instance, Jungian archetypes such as “the Jester” and “the Tyrant” or tarot arcanas such as “the Magician” and “the Crone” carry mysterious meanings. When projecting oneself into our character, the archetypes become loaded with self-description: what would you think of yourself to call yourself a Tyrant or a Magician?
Lone Wolves Stick Together uses both archetypes to inspire players and honorific titles in place of character names: Guide, Scout, Artist, Author, Scholar, Scientist. The latter are intended to reveal the social structure and pressure that is part of the universe of the larp. As described by Elin McCready in The Semantics and Pragmatics of Honorification when referring to the title “sensei”, “(...) it seems as if the existence of a specific hierarchy is what licenses the use of this title, despite its lack of substantial power or prestige: this suggests that what is at issue in determining whether an expression can be used as a title is whether or not it is associated with a social role which is in turn associated with a well-defined level of power and prestige, ie. a hierarchy.” (McReady, 2019)
absence
the absent characters
How to give weight and substance to characters that are not in play? How to keep their absence in mind?
the absent reality
Can we compose with the reality that we cannot perceive, while in VR?
Can we create while in real life for a reality we do not have technical access to and can only intuit?
How to encourage participants to engage with/interact with a sometimes unperceivable reality?
the absent facilitator
To appeal to media funds and industrial partners, experiences generally must carry the potential of being lucrative; mass produced. This is a very different setup from human-facilitated participatory play. How to design and create a play culture taking into consideration that human facilitation might not remain? How to be in the skin of this nearly-obsolete facilitator?
the absent participants
While there is always a part of speculation on participants, and while each play is a unique experience with individuals, iterative design and participatory work is very much a work with participants — with their sensibilities and bodies, their feedback and inspirations. This is a rupture with how Derrida considers writing, as needing to “be capable of functioning in the radical absence of every empirically determined receiver in general" bringing importance to the writer’s “signature”, as the manifestation of their past presence - and therefore, effective absence. ( Derrida, Jacques. Signature, événément, contexte. Montréal: Communication au Congrès international des Sociétés de philosophie de langue française, 1971). Participatory play and larp in particular is, on the contrary, only capable of functioning in the radical presence of its participants.
the absent functionalities
Designing and prototyping while speculating on what a technology is likely to become within a few years reach.
Designing and prototyping to represent what could be executed with a full production budget.
Playing while pretending to use non-implemented functionalities.
the absent collaborators
The specter of all the artists, technicians, supports, reviewers, playtesters, helpers that have contributed to each strata of the work.
action
What are participants or players able to do? (Action in game design)
How can they impact the system, with which consequences? (Action as interaction)
What are the participants allowed to do, when it is their turn to play? (Action in roleplaying games)
What happens once we enter the fiction or once we get the camera rolling? (Action in film and narrative forms)
acts
In participatory play, just like in any other dramatic form, acts allow emotional contrasts. Because acts are announced, we can breathe and renew ourselves - as writers, performers, players. The larp Just a Little Lovin’ by Tor Kjetil Edland & Hanne Grasmo stages the gay community in the USA in the early 80s and the arrival of aids. It is built in three acts, the names of which are sufficient to grasp the emotional curving of the 60 players during the full 3 days of play: “Desire”, “Fear of Death” , “Friendship”.
The five acts of Lone Wolves Stick Together repeatedly announced to the players are meant to trigger more variations in the characters’ questioning and positioning, going from Doubts, to Nostalgia, to Disillusion, Despair and finally, Truth. Popular psychology heavily leans on categorizing phases, such as the famous Kübler-Ross model also known as the “five stages of grief”, the Erikson’s phases of psychosocial development, expected phases of love etc. Those are certainly appealing because they simplify complex situations, but also perhaps because they are a statement in favor of our impermanence: we aren’t defined by a singular state of being or a singular state of mind, but by evolutions. Projecting ourselves in phases allows us to shift and decide for ourselves the coherences and incoherences of our characters, their evolving proximity or remoteness from us as players, overall, it facilitates our ability to change our mind on our character’s trajectory.
adventure
The journey, the wonder.
The disruption with everyday life.
The ephemeral and constricted.
“Adventure”, ce qui advient. (what unravels/happens) An adventure is always an exaltation of the subject. There might be a moment in life where we do not perceive the adventure anymore, where we do not perceive that exaltation can occur, where we feel condemned to repetition. We see our future (avenir) as a repetition. (Barthes, 1978) This can be depression, stagnation, boredom, and this is why we might need to be taken into an adventure - like the characters in Stalker & Lone Wolves Stick Together.
bissociation
Being both a character and a player (Stenros, McDonald, 2020)
Being both a physical body and an avatar
Bisociation is inseparable from space. We know which space our character is supposed to inhabit although it might be imperfect (a theater scene, a blackbox, a throne room using someone’s parents' furniture, a low-polygons VR prototype etc).
In the suspension of disbelief, we accept that the fictional part of our character lives in a fictional space we do not have access to.
adaptation
From a book (The Strugatski Brothers, Roadside Picnic, London: Macmillan, 1972) to a film (Tarkovsky, Andrei, Stalker, Moscow Film, 1979)
to a roleplaying experience (Lone Wolves Stick Together)
to lighter formats (LWST swim, LWST float)
This research however started from Tarkovsky’s films, which like Henry Miller writes describing the books of his life: “they were alive and they spoke to me!” (Miller, 1952)
Is it a fanfic? Is it legal?
Entering an art through another one.
affordances
What we can do
What our limbs and sensory interface can do and experience.
What we can do in VR
Because it is a virtual space, we can interact with otherwise non-interactable things - due to scale, danger, laws (both criminal and physical)
Because it is a virtual body, we can interact in different ways than what our real body allows us to do - due to shape, validity, strength, what folds, bends, squishes, flies, transmutes, etc.
What we can do using VR controllers
VR controllers are ambidextrous and recognize fingers positioning. This allows to represent some human gestures that do not translate as intuitively to screen and mouse or pad: spreading, molding, compressing.
What we will be able to do - speculative affordances
When we are not limited by controllers, what will we be able to do in VR?
ambient
Ambient music
“An ambience is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint. My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.” (Brian Eno, 1978)
Ambient gameplay
Gameplay that feeds into an atmosphere, similarly to ambient music.
Ambient narration
Perhaps that would be Beckett’s streams of thoughts layer noise, which create an atmosphere not through description, but through materiality - what he describes as “an unnecessary stain on silence”.
appropriation
As in making our own - appropriation of a character, of a story.
Appropriation of a concept in collaborative fields.
Appropriation of a media, of a field.
Appropriation of an institution.
Appropriation of a message.
authorship
Who is the author of what?
Collaboration between artists to create the frame
Participants as authors of their own story
Some artists consider that their work is what is left after an experience
How to crumble the status of the author without becoming a martyr for the cause?
belonging
Why we larp
Why we represent ourselves on social media
Why we play online
Why we explore fashion, avatars
Where does it feel like we belong? The perfect crowd, the perfect partner, based on the entire database of the wired humanity.
ambisonics
Full sphere surround sound, with sound sources at level of the listener but also above and under them. Ambisonics can be folded down to stereo automatically. Ambisonics can be used physically and digitally
analogy & apophenia
The human mind is not logical, it is analogical. (Hofstadter, 2013)
Providing enough material, finding enough hooks to excite analogical desires.
Creating clues, noise, chaos, to reach back to wonder. Emergence of interpretation, of play, of narration, of art; encouraging apophenia (perceiving connections between unrelated things) as a narrative device.
Parallels between the journey of my characters and my research journey.
atmosphere
Creating atmospheres: relying on evocation, by layering sensorial and narrative content, endogenous and exogenous meanings, as opposed to fully defining a world.
Atmosphere as a means for emergence or play, of poetry of expression.
An atmospheric environment nurtures the ability to feel ideas and perhaps - but not necessarily - transmute them into something more concrete.
“This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are — until the poem — nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.” Lorde,1985. Available on Sen’s Anarchist Audio Library, last accessed October 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWDhui6UqmE)
atopy
As seen in Barthes’ Fragments of a lover’s discourse: atopy is the extraordinary experiences, the rarity. (Barthes, 1977)
audience education
Workshops, briefing, experience
Creating a community of listening and play
A culture of safety and lifting.
Also limiting the emergence of other options and creating a power dynamic.
alibi
It is because I am not engaging my own identity, reputation and vulnerability that I can behave differently.
Trolls also know this.
See Nordic Larp wiki definition: https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Alibi
bleed
What we bring of us into a character.
What the character leaves of them into us.
The emotions and feelings (infatuation, love, confidence, grievance, etc) that remain after engaging in a fiction.
body
What we are.
Also what our cognition brings us back to: a prosthesis, a ghost limb, whomever/whatever point of view we have in a dream, perhaps at times, for some, a digital live-rendition, an avatar.
boxes: blackbox & brownbox
In theater and in larp, we call blackbox a very simple black stage, generally leading to formats relying heavily on sound and light: the evocation of the scenery conjugated with the expression of performers or participants’ being sufficient to the experience. A blue light with the sound of sails flapping in the wind will be enough to summon the crepuscule on a boat, a chair in the middle of a spotlight with the sound of steps on a metallic floor will conjure the feeling of an interrogation room, etc.
These formats can comprise a lot of audiovisual cues and sometimes demand masterful live operating, especially if the story is soaked in fantasy or uses non-linear storytelling. The VR blackbox, as I imagined it, would not necessarily remain as minimalistic, but would allow a queuing system for audiovisual elements, customizable sets and scenes, with the option of exporting the project. All of this would make the coding more and more inconspicuous, allowing content creators to work without having to depend on more seasoned programmers.
brownboxing : The prototype world, the cardboard equivalent of greyboxing. The de-digitalized world, when without any resources we create a physical experience as an adaptation of a digital one.
selected themes
I also want to tell you what material I used (some of it I found intact, some of it was glued together, some of it transmuted) - perhaps you can see where it’s been used, perhaps not, but my intention is that you will be able to grab it too.
To share this material, I am using a sort of index of themes, or figures that are kept as notations. There are a number of quotes and references among these figures: I only sought there what I found useful to the angles that house my work.
Roland Barthes, who also advocates for notations and “fragments” finds redaction to be a “psychostructural issue” (Barthes, Cours au collège de France 1978-79, 257): going from fragments to non-fragments is to change our relation to writing, to enunciating, to even change who we are as subjects. I find that my process often involves piling up evocations that cannot translate into a fully redacted text, which would then be full of artificial connections and transitions.
As such, this document is akin to a nuancier/color chart for the themes and tools that I used the most/that held the most weight. When a word listed among those themes appears for the first time in the journey document, it will be underlined.
reality/reel
Lacan, the Real VS Reality: the real is what can be demonstrated but not seen, and reality is what is seen/experienced, what is obvious and therefore treacherous.
clinamen
Similar to “indeterminacy” in quantum physics, the clinamen is a swerve, at “no fixed place or time” that would happen in the motion of atoms; a necessary randomness that the hedonist poet Lucretius theorized to justify the possibility of spontaneous atomic collisions, as well as free will in the animal kingdom. Without this unpredictability we would be a series of automated mechanisms, unable to participate.
comfort/discomfort
Comfortable experiences, comfortable technologies, technologies to make life more comfortable.
Discomfort as the only way to overcome a difficulty, learning to be in the discomfort to face life events and finality.
Balancing both, comfortable enough to contribute and be present, with elements of discomfort to be truthful to reality and to offer means of growth.
de-digitalization
Connected to brownboxing: adapting digital experiences into physical ones. It can be translating a video game into a physical game, a digital interface into a process that is applied in an embodied routine, a virtual tool into a physical one, etc.
change
Breaking the alphabetical order because here change must come after choice, just like Truth came after Despair.
"Changer, donner un contenu à la « secousse » du milieu de la vie – c’est-à-dire, en un sens, la nécessité de se donner un nouveau « programme » de vie (un programme de vita nova)." (Barthes, 1979)
Translates roughly to: "To change means to give a meaning to the "jerk" of the middle of life – in other words, the necessity to give ourselves a new life "program" (a program for a vita nova)."
connection
The most popular videogames are social games. We play to connect. SoMe reveals the same unquenchable thirst for connection. Connection is probably among the most meaningful and precious of our human aspiration. How can we foster genuine, helpful, meaningful connection?
By inhabiting characters that have strong connections with others and/or that find their way towards connection, we open the possibility of connecting as players and of learning our own mechanisms of connection.
constructivist knowledge
By playing and testing, I see what my project truly is. Knowledge piles up and layers as often as it is experienced. Although it shapeshifts, the research becomes more real and more itself through iteration and analysis
conspicuous Design
Revealing the technology, which involves storytelling and game design, to allow participants to keep a sense of agency beyond the fiction. They can remove their VR headset, they can decide not to engage with another type of media, they can shape the story, they can decide the path of their character (for narrative reasons, for personal reasons, for transformation reasons, for aesthetic reasons, etc).
contrast
We understand contrasts. Dark & bright, legato & staccato, curves & lines - they are simple and fast to integrate.
Using contrasting colors creates more perceptible shapes in a low resolution environment and enables a sense of style and aesthetics when we cannot rely on a deeper structural work on shapes and colorimetry.
As players, contrasted emotionalscapes also make our interpretation of a role easier. We reach a category of emotions, or a rough state of mind, and then in time we can find the subtleties.
duration
How long does a section, an act, a scene, a full experience last?
How long can we play an uncomfortable sound, or a sound at an uncomfortable level for?
How long do the players get to make their final decision: is the character entering the Chamber?
How long to get comfortable enough in a character?
How long to get comfortable enough with the technology and the interface?
How long can I let a scene run, knowing it requires a big effort for the players to find topics of discussion as their characters?
We are often asked to shorten VR experiences, but slowness is needed to find a sense of belonging and agency within the storyworld.
fade out, low volumes
Brian Eno said “a fade out gives the impression that somewhere, the music is still going on, it suggest an eternal music” (source: a note on a napkin)
illusion
What poses as reality, whether it is acknowledged to be an illusion or not.
In immersion theory, it often refers to the virtual environment or the realistic sets. (Grau, 2004)
In magic, it is a manifestation of the unreal - the illusionist is either someone with some complex mechanical device that can lure an audience into perceiving what is not there, or someone with the magical supernatural power to create virtual realities.
For Winnicott, illusion is related to infant play and adult ritualism “I am therefore studying the substance of illusion, that which is allowed to the infant, and which in adult life is inherent in art and religion, and yet becomes the hallmark of madness when an adult puts too powerful a claim on the credulity of others, forcing them to acknowledge a sharing of illusion that is not their own. We can share a respect for illusory experience, and if we wish we may collect together and form a group on the basis of the similarity of our illusory experiences. This is a natural root of grouping among human beings.” (Winnicott, 1971)
journey
Method, in greek methodos, means journey. A bit akin to Tao, which is the way: the way towards and the end of the way. The journey is similarly both the method and the accomplishment.
character cognition
In VR, the character’s interface represents the character’s cognition. This incredible power of changing our perception of reality has been used to treat phantom limb, phobia, and sometimes, more impressively so, tremors.
In fiction, this could mean creating an artistic expression of someone’s cognition, trying to convey ours, trying to convey some neurological specificities; in other terms, another way of approaching character creation.
chronology
A linear journey to allow time jumps, to project the end and make the choice to change one’s mind.
Chronology in text, to forget as little as possible. To situate events and influences within their context.
dreamlike
The hazy, somewhat confusing or interrogating, construction of dreams or surreal scenes in art feel truer to the human experience than a clearly structured, perfectly legible scene.
A similar idea can be found when Tarkovsky comments that “the pattern of life is far more poetic than it is sometimes represented by the determined advocates of naturalism” and as such, art structured on poetic form is not more artificial than naturalistic art.
“Sometimes it feels to me like I'm walking around in my mind.
It's not about depicting the real world with its rules and people and trees, a world where pictures and sounds from the outside are turned into signs and symbols and sketches. Chalkroom is a place where meaning gets made. It's basically a story machine. And in VR you're everything, the actor, the viewer, and the creator, just the way you are in your dreams really. You're the one who's making up the worlds and you're watching yourself while you're doing it. Why is it always raining in my dreams.” Laurie Anderson, on Chalkroom (Anderson, 2021)
einfühlung - aesthetic sympathy/empathy
Einfühlung or “feeling into” refers to the imaginary projecting of ourselves into another body or environment (Vischer, 1873). Historically related to panpsychic ideas, it was designated to describe feeling into portraits, sculptures, or even objects and non-human representations of life.
A sense of coherence allows me to summon this ability to “feel into”. Through the sensibility of another body or a character I can understand, I rediscover the world; on an emotional, psychological, political and aesthetic level.
Einfühlung or “feeling into” refers to the imaginary projecting of ourselves into another body or environment (Vischer, 1873). Historically related to panpsychic ideas, it was designated to describe feeling into portraits, sculptures, or even objects and non-human representations of life.
A sense of coherence allows me to summon this ability to “feel into”. Through the sensibility of another body or a character I can understand, I rediscover the world; on an emotional, psychological, political and aesthetic level.
emergence
Some quotes.
“Magic is not created - magic emerges. (...) Each moment bears the potential for magic to emerge.” Schiemann, 2021
“An outcome known in advance, with no possibility of error or surprise, clearly leading to an inescapable result, is incompatible with the nature of play.” Caillois, 1958
“Emergence implies that properties or programs appear on their own, often developing in ways not anticipated by the person creating the simulation. Structures that lead to emergence typically involve complex feedback loops in which the outputs of a system are repeatedly fed back in as input. As the recursive loop continues, small deviations can quickly become magnified, leading to the complex interactions and unpredictable evolutions associated with emergence.” (Hayles, 1999)
magic
Magical world as Thibault Schiemann puts it “magic is the assumption that there is more to this world than what is possibly conceivable (...) Magic is not a coherent system of knowledge but the acknowledgement that all systems will remain incomplete and faulty. (...) Magic means to playfully surrender to the Infinite Mystery.” (Schiemann, 2021)
Magic circle: the social contract that separates the play space from the mundane space, it answers its own rules and provides a sensation of togetherness and safety.
Some want to bomb it to invite play and resistance in everyday life (Brown, 2021).
Chaos magic: Slipping on the side of our common beliefs to accept a different reality. A voluntary stepping into the magical world.
industry
The main avenue to fund new media projects and to lead a career in film and/or technology. Being part of the industry means having a business model that aligns with its expectations of profitability and innovation. “The industry” is also a network, a doxa and a sociolect.
improvisation (collective)
Building up on each other’s imagination, muscle memory, experience, references, which gradually evolves as we play. Like Laurie Anderson says in her Norton lectures “it’s like we’re building a giant ship in the air and it appears out of nowhere, made of notes and you can turn it around and move it and just make it disappear”. (Anderson, 2021)
choices
Choices are typical player interactions with the fiction and the narration, generally resulting in a system feedback - or else the gameplay will be dissatisfying.
A final, symbolic choice for the characters to reveal a more fundamental question. For instance, do I enter the Chamber or not? This really means do I still want a shortcut, knowing those do not work or have I matured enough to face the difficulties of my life.
Choosing (between options that are presented to us, preferably by a third party) is easier than inventing or figuring out - we often suggest alternatives instead of formulating a dilemma in its entirely. We suggest options to participants to alleviate their creative load and anxiety.
A design question: how to facilitate invention? Must it be facilitated?
Can we train ourselves to make choices through resilient gameplays? For instance gameplays where what has negative consequences also comes with meaningful developments and gameplays where failure is celebrated or gameplays where taking stances is valorized.
A choice, generally is a choice to change or to attempt to stay the same.
coincidences
Perhaps another version of apophenia, projects come often with their share of coincidences. It is what makes it feel like a righteous pursuit, like something important and bigger than ourselves is at stake, although irrationally so.
In my case, I stumbled upon a series of coincidences when engaging with Tarkovsky’s material that gave me enough energy to go through a very theoretical part of the research.
drift
Dérive, chaos magic & psychogeography
Cultivating the emergence of play, meaning and direction in a space by seeking for clues and practicing voluntary disorientation.
event
A phone call happens when the players arrive in Disillusion. It is here to disrupt the narration, and it comes with a painful realization.
It is close to what Barthes describes as “l’actif de la douleur”, the active part of pain: something that can be a decisive fold, an necessary grievance that marks the “middle of one’s life”, separating it into two halves: before the event and after the event.
opera
“Work” in latin
Konstantin Stanislavski as “dramatic, rhythmic action while singing”
Opera singing comes with a heightened emotionality, creates this fantasmagorical space where the athleticism of the voice and the affects that are transmitted by the human to human contact that is the voice pushes the audience to connect to the emotionality.
Faces are often too small and remote to convey those emotions, instead, the voice itself does the work.
Audiences come to see an opera, but understanding what happens at all times tends to be the privilege of a few. The scenography, direction, piled up to the libretto and interpretation gives out an idea of the dramatic progression, and, generally the most dramatic events are recognizable, but specific meaning and lyrics are often lost.
Privilege of music: to create an emotional narration that escapes our innate proportion to intellectualize.
This works best in my opinion with forms that do not entirely rely on vision. We intellectualise more what happens when bodies are in motion on a stage, through dancing, or when abstractions shift and pile up, like through art films.
I do think however that there can be some of these operatic qualities in abstract or semi-play; in the interpretation and flow of interaction with other participants, especially when soundtracks heighten emotionality.
mask
Masque de réalité virtuelle (VR headset in French)
Theater masks, sock and buskin, Noh, Commedia dell’Arte, classic Greece, ritualistic masks to embody spirits in various cultures. What allows us to keep a character or an entity’s face but changing the performer.
The screen behind which we hide, the digital anonymity, the hindering of facial expressions.
Social masking, racial masking; how one performs one’s self differently according to different contexts. (Goffman, 1956) (Fanon, 1957)
mediatic catharsis
A theory: Larp and video games often act as a ground for media catharsis. The geek community is particularly subject to extensive consumption of audiovisual mainstream content and thus, we store huge amounts of “cult references”, of signature aesthetics, of characters quotes and of high drama narratives. All of this mediatic input gets exorcised during roleplay in immersive settings.
milieu / environment / paysage état d’âme
In French, the word “milieu” refers to environment, setting, social environment, medium as understood in physics.
Paysage état d’âme translates to “state of mind” (state of soul, literally) landscape. A romantic theme in painting and literature: when the character’s emotions are so powerful that they manifest as weather, when there is no delimitation between the inner scape and nature.
promethean shame
“Gunther Anders concept that points at the inferiority complex we experience when we face the intricacy and performance of the technologies we have created; a shame we escape by avoiding any comparison to them - which includes our attempts at understanding them. Helplessly, we get used to machines thinking and executing for us, to the point we also lose track of our pragmatism and our faculty to foresee their impact on our lives. Our human abilities, both cognitive and emotional, cannot conceive the scale in which the things we create can operate.” (Lipsyc, 2024)
synesthesia
Through the years, I was successively interested in synesthesia (experiencing a sense as another one, such as hearing colours, tasting sounds etc) and aphantasia (the inability to form mental images, which is my case), before realizing that I was simply interested in how different our minds are and how that affects how we communicate and relate, both to each other and to arts. There is no singular cognition and neurology, and no shortcut towards being clear, significant or impactful to all.
Faking synesthesia, which was an early artistic pursuit of mine and a motivation to explore immersive arts, remains the symbol of that early VR excitement to me: twisting one’s cognition, rewiring temporarily one’s mind, not to pursue a more efficient way to function in the society but for the sake of wonder.
transparency / secrecy
Definitions from the glossary of Larp Design: Creating Role-play Experiences, for the Knudepunkt conference 2019.
Last accessed on Nordiclarp.org, october 2023.
https://nordiclarp.org/2019/09/03/larp-design-glossary/
“The use of transparency in larp design is to purposefully let participants know things their characters would not know. Common ways to add transparency are to let participants read more pre-written characters than just their own, to divide the larp into acts with announced themes, or to tell participants what is going to happen during the larp before it starts.”
“The use of secrecy in larp design is to purposefully prevent participants from knowing things their characters would not know. Common ways to add secrecy are to give participants secret character goals and motivations, and to include surprise happenings during runtime.”
reality/reel
Lacan, the Real VS Reality: the real is what can be demonstrated but not seen, and reality is what is seen/experienced, what is obvious and therefore treacherous.
recording
"The new technology promises all the things that documentary representation promised ever since: objectivity, full and truthful representation of events, only this time augmented by an additional dimension. A 3D point cloud is no longer a flattened image, missing depth and extension. It is a copy with a volume, dutifully replicating the shape of the initial object. " (...) What emerges is not the image of the body, but the body of the image" (Steyerl, 2012)
Recording a larp
Losing the hic et hunc.
Scanning is like a photography, it takes a moment out of its context.
ritornello
When I told Trond Lossius about the soundscapes and music variations I was looking for and the desire to layer the theme throughout the acts, with the return to the Woods, he said this was similar to a rondo. Looking at it more closely, I found that I often opt for that classicism, the ritornello.
Later, reading Barthes, I came across his notion of rhapsody as research.
roleplaying
As social and identity hygiene
As a collaborative practice
As an expression of playfulness
As artistic performance
tangibilia
As Barthes uses it: sensual objects which appear in literature with romanticism (oranges, orange trees, gloves). To me, this sensual layer is crucial to the well-rounded sensation of immersion. The evocation of an object, the opportunity to seize it, gives more significance to our body. (Barthes, 1979)
utsuroi
"The very fragile moment that separates and joins two states of one thing." For instance the moment a soul has left a thing but remains suspended in ether before reintegrating something else. The moment a thing is in between two names (Barthes, 1979)
replayability
The quality of an experience to be replayed - it should therefore have a robust system that allows a multiplicity of experiences. (branching narratives with different endings, different characters to play, procedural content, complex strategy games, etc).
Also: a concept that falls within considerations of utilitarianism, commercialisation, sustainability.
What we create should benefit more people for less ressources engaged (we reuse material from run to run, we play the same online game, etc), which is difficult to reconcile with imperatives of production for the creators (you need to be creating all day to make a living, thus work on new content) and with creative pulls (often so, those who create feel a constant urge to create more).
rhythm
How much intentionality can there be in rhythm and game mastering, when considering emergent play, participation and co-creation?
war dance
Group performances that are reenactments in face of a struggle and lead to celebration
War dance, reenacting combat, celebrating valor and conquest, getting courage when at war
Drag and balls, reenacting femininity, celebrating queerness and flamboyance, getting proud when discriminated against
woods
William Basinski was also inspired by Dante's Selva Oscura
Norwegian mysticism
Being lost in a forest.
A theme for Tarkovsky
A theme for Laurie Anderson