#new materialsm

[transmutationisms]

materialsm or idealism or thoughts on the dichotomy?

i mean it's a false dichotomy in that presenting it solely on philosophical terms doesn't historicise the distinction being made---meaning, there are histories to each of these positions & how they come to be defined and used, & how the distinction between the two positions comes about. that analysis itself needs to be materialist in nature bc i am team historical materialist. but ofc these are kind of crude terms in the sense that, again, they're flattening a lot of social and historical specificity into just two 'camps'. like, in what sense can we say that plato and thomas kuhn and max weber and st augustine are united.... these are all idealisms and yet obviously the social commitments are quite different, they wouldn't necessarily recognise one another as acting on the same 'side' of a universal immutable debate, &c. plenty of avowed 'materialists' also fail to engage in the type of analysis i'm asking for here, eg this is sort of a defining failure of the 'new materialism' / 'speculative realism' that was trendy a few years back. so again like, gun to my head yea i'll pledge fealty to the materialists on this but i'm specifically defending a materialism that is historical & historicised, as well as a historicism that is materialist / 'social'

[slaaneshfic]

Proposal: There is no reason for you to live: assimilation, disintegration, and affect in queer horror games

I feel like its been a long time since writing one of these. it hasn’t, but it was really hard getting my head back into it after writing my annual progression document (which i will post after this. its a monster). I think thats why this is so messy, and has so many footnotes (I even double pasted the bibliography in the doc i submitted. ugh just kill me now)

Title: There is no reason for you to live: assimilation, disintegration, and affect in queer horror games

Abstract: This paper examines the ways in which instability and affect are deployed in queer horror video games, the relationship of these tactics to post-structuralist, feminist, and queer theories of gender, and speculates on how play, horror, and instability can further our idea of gender and kinship.

The relationship between the overwhelming experience of seeing too much, and the restricted tension of not being able to see enough is important to our experience of horror. Philosopher Eugene Thacker goes as far as to propose that the “horror genre is really defined in the space between these two poles, in the passages between them” (Thacker, 2015). Horror can be understood as not just witnessing bodies changing and collapsing, but as witnessing and negotiating our perceptions doing the same. In this paper, I argue that such slippery encounters are pushed further in queer horror games, and that these radically destabilise power structures around gender and sexuality through their potential to prevelige queer desire, different bodies, and different experiences. Queer horror games reconfigure the ethics of the dominant power, transforming the player’s relation to abjection, intimacy, and stability.

Philosopher Patricia MacCormack identifies in this active, emotive, speculative, experience of horror, the becoming “Ahuman” which is the ecstatic encounter with an “asignified world” (MacCormack, 2012). In this paper I pursue the ways in which the Ahuman can be understood within three recent video games which could broadly be labeled as “queer horror”. The video games in question are: “No World Dreamers Sticky Zeitgeist: Episode 2: Aperitif”, “Soma”, and “The MISSING: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories”, (Heartscape & Rook, 2018; Hedberg, 2015; Suehiro, 2018).

Drawing on the writing of philosophers Rosi Braidotti and Gilles Deleuze, and psychoanalysts Felix Guattari and Luce Irigaray, I examine how collapsing bodies, unstable landscapes, and overwhelming sensation perform at different levels of the audience encounter with these three games (Braidotti, 1994; Deleuze, 1986; Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, 1987, 1994; Guattari, 1995, 2005, 2011; Irigaray, 1993).

This instability of bodies within the games, and the instability of our encounters with the games themselves, are finally extracted from game design to be considered in terms of contemporary queer, post human feminist theory (Adams, 2018; Goard, 2017; Hedva, 2016; Hester, 2018; Ireland, 2017; Kirksey, 2018; Winters, 2016).

Bibliography:

Adams, M. (2018, October 18). ‘What Keeps You Alive’ – an era of hope for queer horror. Retrieved 2 November 2018, from https://genderterror.com/2018/10/18/what-keeps-you-alive-an-era-of-hope-for-queer-horror/

Braidotti, R. (1994). Of Bugs and Women: Irigaray and Deleuze on the Becoming-Woman. In C. Burke, N. Shor, & M. Whitford (Eds.), Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought. New York: Columbia University Press, New York.

Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press.

Goard, S. (2017, December 8). Making and Getting Made: Towards a Cyborg Transfeminism | Salvage. Retrieved 31 December 2017, from http://salvage.zone/in-print/making-and-getting-made-towards-a-cyborg-transfeminism/?utm_content=buffer05aec&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Grosz, E. (1993). A thousand tiny sexes: Feminism and rhizomatics. Topoi, 12(2), 167–179. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00821854

Guattari, F. (1995). Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Guattari, F. (2005). The Three Ecologies. London ; New York: Continuum.

Guattari, F. (2011). The machinic unconscious: essays in schizoanalysis. Los Angeles, CA : Cambridge, Mass: Semiotext(e) ; Distributed by the MIT Press.

Heartscape, P. C., & Rook. (2018). No World Dreamers Sticky Zeitgeist: Episode 2: Aperitif [Windows].

Hedberg, M. (2015). Soma. Frictional Games. Retrieved from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3255592/

Hedva, J. (2016). Sick Woman Theory. Retrieved 26 November 2018, from http://www.maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-theory

Hester, H. (2018). Xenofeminism. Cambridge, UK Medford, MA: Polity.

Ireland, A. (2017, March). Black Circuit: Code for the Numbers to Come - Journal #80 March 2017 - e-flux. Retrieved 1 October 2018, from https://www.e-flux.com/journal/80/100016/black-circuit-code-for-the-numbers-to-come/

Irigaray, L. (1993). An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Cornell University Press.

Kirksey, E. (2018). Queer Love, Gender Bending Bacteria, and Life after the Anthropocene. Theory, Culture & Society, 026327641876999. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418769995

MacCormack, P. (2008). Cinesexuality. Aldershot, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

MacCormack, P. (2010a). Lovecraft through Deleuzio-Guattarian Gates (Vol. 20). https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2010.0008

MacCormack, P. (2010b). Mucous, Monsters and Angels: Irigaray and Zulawski’s Possession. Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 1, 95–110.

MacCormack, P. (2012). Posthuman ethics: embodiment and cultural theory. Farnham, Surrey, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

MacCormack, P. (2016). Lovecaft’s Cosmic Ethics. In R. Campbell (Ed.), The Age of Lovecraft (pp. 199–214). University of Minnesota Press. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1b9x1f3.15

O’Sullivan, S. (2001). THE AESTHETICS OF AFFECT: Thinking art beyond representation. Angelaki, 6(3), 125–135. https://doi.org/10.1080/09697250120087987

Thacker, E. (2015). Tentacles longer than night. Charlotte, NC: John Hunt Pub.

Winters, B. (2016, July 11). On The Recuperative Power of Interactive Horror. Retrieved 5 February 2018, from https://deorbital.media/on-the-recuperative-power-of-interactive-horror-eb6fcb9a47dd

[annasofiabaldocchi-blog]

brainstorming with bart and Ieva

Friday before having feedback from Pepijn I ask my lovely colleague bart and leva to do some brainstorming with me for my prototype and also to see their reaction to the new scenario. 

Ieva told me to fix few things in the scenario, just delete the “she” and put it more general so that it’s looks more like that we don’t know if is a object or a human. 

We believe that the most interesting thing it will be to stick with the funeral, even if we brainstorm also with the daily life but it’s more interesting like this. 

Recycle: bring it back to raw material 

Treat it as a person 

Breakfast together?

“We are what we buy”

MATERIALSM

You have your soul in your object

IMMORTAL

Scan your object

SCAN-3D MODELS-BADGE 

[merelvisse]

At collegeart/conference in NYC today. Attending sessions on Senses and Spaces, Islands, New Materialsm and many others. Collecting & deepening ideas for my project on Care Ethics and Artistic Practice.

[kksingh11]

Historical Materialsm

Its law of movement of mankind! From one of the economic, political, social order to another one. The new one is born from the womb of the old one as the old had taken birth sometimes back and must have an end! The new, in same fashion, gives way to another new social order.

Base is economy, the production system, the productive forces and relation!

However, the change does not occur on its own but the emergent forces must destroy the old to usher the new one!

Presently, the working class is the most advanced class of mankind since its birth! Its historical task is to demolish capitalism and bring socialism!