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Exeter, 6 October 2006

I am back in my office, trying to do deal with what seems like an insurmountable number of emails, while the game rings. I am at the Boarded up Shop and I am told that a fete is starting at the Rec. I take this is a direction and go to the REC which is described as a vast expense of balding grass. There is a vicar and MOMO, VANCEY, STAN, and SUNSHINE, STAN and VAUNCEY are talking about cream teas. SUNSHINE tells VAUNCEY his face is all green – perhaps, he wonders, he needs a tissue. I realise that asking other players what they see might produce interesting results and decide to use this question later today. I also remember the Berlin operators telling me that STAN was another 'interesting' player. So I'm glad that at last I meet them.

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Students keep on knocking at my door. Did I have a good Summer? Is it true I am not teaching them this year? What is this story about us working with neuroscientists in Barcelona? How is my daughter? Can we meet again? Soon? Now? It’s great to have them back and see our wonderful new building buzzing again with life.

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A flurry of messages follows. I ask what a fete is and STAN offers a brilliant explanation (the best I’ve had, actually, since living in this country). There's something in this figurine's use of language which is phenomenally vivid and evocative. So at last I learn something about British culture. I’m also trying to work out what I need next week in Germany. Although I will be formally on compassionate leave, I will try to continue this documentation because I feel an interruption would defeat the purpose of the excercise. I don’t know now if I will be able to, which depends, largely, on whether I’ll be able to get access to the internet, and whether I’d want to, which depends on my nerves, burying another family member so soon after my own father’s death in July. There are a lot of practical things to do - bank, lawyers, doctors, bills, utilities, things to clear, people to talk to, the funeral... so finding the time to write will be tricky. It is awfully sad to go through the belongings of someone you loved who is no longer alive.

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Nick Kaye comes to get me. I have asked for an impromptu meeting with him and Michael Wykes from Research Office. I respect Michael’s opinion highly and want to test the structure of the e-science bid with him. Luckily, he thinks, it’s very clear, very strong. Nick also hears about it for the fist time. We discuss exciting details and I remember that I must send it all off to Steve Benford before I go to Hamburg on Monday. I worry about my capacity to carry out all the things I am meant to do. There is a postgraduate orientation day and the Presence Project research students are presenting. Both Nick and I are there, with other colleagues and our new student Liz Swift from Void. The game rings a few times, and so I end up explaining Day of the Figurines to everybody. We also discuss how to read (or rather when to read and when to skim), what to look for, how to position ourselves within the subject, how to reposition ourselves within the field, how to narrow the field down, how to explore around it, how to talk to supervisors and, most important of all perhaps, how not to be scared of failing, getting lost, and asking for help. I remember that it must be arond 2 in the game and BARNEY said the sauna opens at 2. I decide to head straight for it.

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I get home and start preparing dinner - something I love doing. At the same time, I arrive at the sauna. I am amazed! There is some coffee here. I pick one up and drink it immediately. I am still feeling run down and DALE is here who tells me he has eaten much wonderful couscous and needs relaxing. At last I can ask my question, about what I look like and get the answer I deserve given where I am.

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While I play the game, I open an email from Trampoline starting a game rumours column. There are many familiar names and this produces a strange uncanny sensation. I am thrown back to what the game is in Berlin and must reflect on the difference about my experience of the game here and what it was like to play the game over there. First of all, the theatrical dynamics that are (still) present within the world of the game originate at the destinations table. By looking at the table and the monitor, not to mention the augmentations, a player, operator or spectator is able to have sense of overview of the game. They could, for instance, single out players whose game is more ‘interesting’ to watch. Back in the UK, away from the spectacle of the game, playing, I feel, is a more lonesome experience. Most of the time, I find that my figurine moves from one destination to another, encountering, if at all, one or two other players who, at their best, send one or two messages back. Sometimes the phone doesn’t ring at all and nothing happens for ages.

Reading the newsletter, I worry about the fact that such a complex game is somehow being reduced to something between a soap opera and a chat room. I also find that, taken out of context, the players’ exchanges appear even more estranging than they are within the world of the game. For instance, I spend most of the game trying to encounter other players. When I do so, they are usually disengaged (more so lately) and when they are engaged, conversation is often either brief, to the point, or, on occasion strangely alienating, even hallucinatory. This makes me wonder abut the fact that the theatrical beginning of the piece somehow sets a theatrical mode that some figurines then feel obliged to play by. So, whereas some players are clearly at ease with role play, often initiating, stirring and directing, literally other players around the game, others, adopting a more passive role, are often quiet, non-responsive and even disengaged.

I am thrown by the fact that the game data are being used for publicity reasons. This must also have to do with the fact that I have just published a book which, among other things, tries to deal with the complex matter of data ownership. I feel, yet again, displaced and genuinely out of balance. Following an email exchange with Steve Benford whom I seem to continuously rely on in order to position my thinking on this piece, I decide that I must write something about this, though there is a way in which the relationship between the game and the outside world is beginning to behave like a fold (more on this is a few days). I guess that at last I have had my first truly uncanny experience in the game. I must be precise here. Sigmund Freud’s definition of the uncanny as ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’ 1981, vol 17: 220), the German word heimlich designating, broadly, both the ‘familiar’ and ‘the secret’, thus heimlich being ‘a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich’ (226). There is something here, in this act of repositioning, in this 'homecoming', that is crucial for presence research. I’ll come back to this later next week.

To follow my game tomorrow go to Day of the Figurines 7/10/2006

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