Intra-acting bio-object: A posthuman approach to the player–game relation

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justyna Janik
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Object A ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Player Game

The main aim of this article is to explore how posthuman values and premises can change the approach to video game research, in terms of reframing the relation between game and player as a meaning-making process. The idea of the bio-object, which originated in Tadeusz Kantor’s avant-garde theatre, is introduced and reread in the context of the critical posthumanism and new materialism of Karen Barad, especially her concept of intra-action. By meshing together Kantor’s and Barad’s ideas, a framework is developed for conceptualizing the bond between the player and the video game object, pointing out how their constant rivalry is not only resolved in meaning-generative tension, but also intra-actively shapes their ontic borders. The game and the player become equal in this new unity, and the video game object stops being perceived as a secondary to the player and can be analysed as the equal partner in this relation.

(In)visible perceptions of objects (‘things’) during early transitions: Intertwining subjectivities in ECEC

2021 ◽  
pp. 146394912110279
Author(s):  
E Jayne White ◽  
Fiona Westbrook ◽  
Kathryn Hawkes ◽  
Waveney Lord ◽  
Bridgette Redder
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Early Childhood Education ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Object A ◽  
Childhood Education ◽  
Mediating Tools ◽  
Teachers And Parents ◽  
To Receive

Objects in early childhood education (ECEC) experiences have begun to receive a great deal more attention than ever before. Although much of this attention has emerged recently from new materialism, in this paper we turn to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological concern with the (in)visibility of ‘things’ to illuminate the presence of objects within infant transitions. Drawing on notions of écart and reversibility, we explore the relational perceptions objects are bestowed with on the lead up to, and first day of, infant transitions. Recognizing the intertwining subjectivities that perceive the object, a series of videos and interviews with teachers and parents across three ECEC sites in Australia and New Zealand provided a rich source of phenomenological insight. Our analysis reveals objects as deeply imbued anchoring links that enable relational possibilities for transitions between home and ECEC service. Visible and yet invisible to adults (parents and/or teachers) who readily engage with objects during earliest transitions, the significance of things facilitates opportunities to forge new relationships, create boundaries and facilitate connections. As such, our paper concludes that objects are far more than mediating tools, or conceptual agents; they provide an explicit route to understanding with potential to play a vital role in supporting effective early transitions when granted visibility within this important phenomenon.

Non-religious Players Asking Big Questions: Video Game Worlds Affording Affinities of Meaningful Encounters

2021 ◽  
pp. e20200012
Author(s):  
Heidi Rautalahti
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Qualitative Interview ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Interview Method ◽  
Search For Self ◽  
Game Players

The article examines player narratives on meaningful encounters with video games by using an argumentative qualitative interview method. Data gathered among Finnish adult video game players represents narratives of important connections in personal lives, affinities that the article analyzes as further producing three distinctive themes on meaningful encounters. Utilizing a study-of-religion framework, the article discusses meaning making and emerging ways of meaningfulness connected to the larger discussion on the “big questions” that are asked, explored, and answered in popular culture today. Non-religious players talk about intricate and profound contemplations in relation to game memories, highlighting how accidental self-reflections in mundane game worlds frame a continuing search for self.

The Head, the Hand, and Matter: New Materialism and the Politics of Knowledge

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 49-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Rekret
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Do So

This article seeks to examine the political connotations of a recent ‘material turn’ in social and political theory and its implications for theorizations of political agency. ‘New materialist’ theories are premised upon transcending the limits which social constructivism places upon thought, viewed as a reification of the division of subject and object and so a hubristic anthropocentrism which places human beings at the centre of social existence. Yet new materialist theories have tended to locate the conditions of the separation of mind and world they seek to overcome upon the terrain of epistemic or ethical error. By taking the work of Quentin Meillassoux, Jane Bennett and Karen Barad as exemplary, this article contends that new materialist theories not only fall short of their own materialist pretensions insofar as they do not interrogate the material conditions of the separation of the mental and material, but that the failure to do so has profound repercussions for the success of their accounts of political agency. This essay seeks to offer a counter-narrative to new materialist theories by situating the hierarchy between thought and world as a structural feature of capitalist social relations.

Along the Lines of the Occupation

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 130-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Cristiano ◽  
Emilio Distretti
Keyword(s):  
Augmented Reality ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Green Line ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Pokémon Go ◽  
East Jerusalem

Augmented reality enables video game experiences that are increasingly immersive. For its focus on walking and exploration, Niantic’s location-based video game Pokémon Go (PG) has been praised for allowing players to foster their understanding and relationship to surrounding spaces. However, in contexts where space and movement are objects of conflicting narratives and restrictive policies on mobility, playing relies on the creation of partial imaginaries and limits to the exploratory experience. Departing from avant-garde conceptualizations of walking, this article explores the imaginary that PG creates in occupied East Jerusalem. Based on observations collected in various gaming sessions along the Green Line, it analyzes how PG’s virtual representation of Jerusalem legitimizes a status quo of separation and segregation. In so doing, this article argues that, instead of enabling an experience of augmented reality for its users, playing PG in East Jerusalem produces a diminished one.

Quantum Creativity: Afracting New Materialism in the Anthropocene

2021 ◽  
pp. 107780042110666
Author(s):  
jan jagodzinski
Keyword(s):  
Creative Destruction ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Quantum Level ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Dominant Position ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Karen Barad

This essay engages the vicissitudes of new materialism at the quantum level, attempting to differentiate what I take to be fundamental differences in the theoretical positions of vitalist theories as developed by Karen Barad and Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the Anthropocene. I treat matter at the quantum level to differentiate conceptions of apparatus and assemblage. It is argued that one should not treat them under the same signifiers. There is the question of creativity that runs through the essay which also raises questions concerning an “affirmative” Deleuze, the dominant position when it comes to the arts, humanities, and pedagogy. Against these particular developments, anorganic life as in|different comes to fore where issues of creative destruction must be faced.

Virtual Psyche in Play and Tending the Collective Unconscious

2016 ◽  
pp. 156-179
Author(s):  
Susan Marie Savett
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Game Design ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Archetypal Psychology ◽  
Collective Unconscious ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Pivotal Point ◽  
James Hillman ◽  
Video Game Design ◽  
Insight Into

Knowingly or unknowingly, games manifest archetypal forces from the unconscious. Through play and fantasy, unconscious content of the psyche is able to express its deep longings. Hypnogogic landscapes of videogames provide immersive realms in which players enact psychological dramas. Game designers reside on a unique axis from which their work with the imaginary realm can create profound psychic containers. At this pivotal point in our culture, digital games hold tremendous influence over the creation of new myths, lore, and possibilities. This chapter investigates archetypal psychology concepts of Carl Jung and James Hillman for insight into 21st century realm of virtual play and its relationship to the collective unconscious. It focuses on how games provide a means for bringing individual and cultural unconscious impulses into consciousness through personification, pathologizing and meaning making within virtual play. It aims to introduce an alternative lens to bridge psychological dynamics with the video game design.

Werewolf Wollstonecraft

2020 ◽  
pp. 253-274
Author(s):  
Chris Washington
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Gender Identities ◽  
Dynamic Power ◽  
Karen Barad

The judicial bestiary at the heart of eighteenth-century politics has long been evident in Enlightenment social contract debates, as Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theories of biopolitics show. In this essay, I argue that Wollstonecraft is nonetheless the first thinker of ‘true’ werewolf out-lawry in her final novel, Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman and in her letters to Godwin. In the novel, Wollstonecraft leverages what we now call new materialism as a feminist critique of heteropatriarchal society. Wollstonecraft’s new materialist thinking also scrambles gender across even human and nonhuman distinctions. To counter microcosmic familial and macrocosmic state heteropatriarchy, Wollstonecraft theorizes what I am calling, following the example of wolves and werewolves, not a family but a ‘pack’. The pack manifests as new spacetimes through what Karen Barad terms “quantum entanglements” that produce love between subjects and subjects but that never strives to reproduce binaristic pairings that reproduce the sovereign family. A pack, as Wollstonecraft’s texts demonstrate, emerges from processes of co-creation that iterate new subjects and objects without dynamic power structures structured around stable gender identities or human and nonhuman power relations.

Sites of Subjectivity: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and Dance

2004 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-130
Author(s):  
Virginia Spivey
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Object A ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Robert Morris ◽  
Dance Theater ◽  
Art Object ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
The 1960S

Robert Morris's danceSite(Fig. 1) premiered in February 1964 at the Surplus Dance Theater in New York City. Choreographed and performed by Morris,Sitealso featured the visual artist Carolee Schneemann and several sheets of four-by-eight foot plywood. Although it may seem odd to include these wooden panels among the performers, they assumed an active role in the choreography. Ironically, it was Schneemann who provided the background scenery. Nude and covered in white paint, she sat motionless throughout the performance, recreating the pose and persona of Edouard Manet's famous 1863 painting ofOlympiawhile Morris manipulated the large wooden boards. In a graceful duet with inanimate partners, Morris spun the rectangular planes from a point on the ground, maneuvered them around his body, lifted them over his head, caressed their even form as he slowly moved his hand across one edge, and balanced the panels on his back as he moved across the stage. Not only did Morris never dance with Schneemann, he did not even seem to notice her.In a career spanning over forty years, Robert Morris has produced theoretical articles, paintings, videos, installations, and environmental art in addition to his work in dance; nevertheless, the American artist remains best known for his Minimalist sculptures of the 1960s (Figs. 2 and 3). Like the works of his colleagues Donald Judd and Carl Andre, Morris's spare, geometrical objects of that period were three-dimensional and called attention to issues of site and artistic context. They also resisted past artistic conventions based in subjective methods of composition, expressivity, and metaphor. Morris, however, distinguished himself among this group of visual artists by the emphasis he placed on the viewer's bodily relationship with the art object, a distinction that derives directly from his unique involvement in avant-garde dance.

Comic Books, Video Games, and Transmedia Storytelling

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 34-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlie Ecenbarger
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Comic Books ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Additional Information ◽  
Transmedia Storytelling ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Book World ◽  
Walking Dead

This article illuminates the transmedia storytelling techniques in The Walking Dead comic book and video game. Telltale Games' The Walking Dead localizes itself within the comic book world of The Walking Dead by acting as a transmedia storytelling device and using intertextuality comics to assist game players with meaning-making. By participating in the game, Telltale rewards players with additional information about The Walking Dead universe, as well as creating a contingent but separate narrative that expands upon the existing Walking Dead world. This exploration of The Walking Dead offers insights into the specific methods that are being employed by creators to further engage the audience in the transmedia storyworld.

Speaking to the dead: Images of the dead in contemporary art

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary O'Neill
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
The Body ◽  
Photographic Images ◽  
The Dead

In this article I explore works by three artists in which we can see images that relate to bereavement. In the work of the first two, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook and Andres Serrano, we can see photographic images (still and moving) of human corpses, which have been criticized as morbid and unhealthy. However I argue that it is not in fact images of death or the dead that are problematic but those images which present or evoke evidence of the emotions associated with death, and create a situation where we imagine the circumstances of our own deaths or the death of those we love. Images of the dead are acceptable as long as they do not cause pain to the living, as in a video game fantasy or a fiction, or are seen as other and distant. In the second group of works, by Gustgav Metzger, The Absent Dead: The Surrogate Body, the body is not present either because the death has taken place at a distance, either in time or geographically, or both, and a new site must be created. In this section, I discuss Metzger’s auto-destructive art and argue that these works, through their ephemerality, embody a form of ‘meaning making’ and a possibility of the benefits of grief as described by Parkes.

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