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When at the Barcelona Zoo, I captured this ostrich going at a hopeless task again, and again, and again. It ties in, somehow, with my research into Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and the idea of playing man. I owe a debt to Huizinga’s observation of how the rules of law, war, philosophy and the arts are derived from ritualistic play. Ever since I’ve tried to capture those moments where free-form play becomes a ritual of sorts – not an easy thingto do,  but interesting.

These are my examples so far:

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Click here to view the embedded video.

What Googlers looked for, too:

• devoted to an explanation of how the rules of law war philosophy and the arts are derived from ritualistic play

I am thinking of ways to use the awesome cloud of images accessible to us from the ‘net. So I had a look at the Flickr API to see what the Flickr people allow us to do with random-grabbed images. Came across some inspirational stuff.  First of all, check out BigHugeLabs: Helping you do cool stuff with your digital photos since 2005. :-) Their stuff is cool – I grabbed some of my recent Vincent pics and put them into a couple of BigHuge algorithms: 

Then there are the  pimpampum people.  I came across their Memry game when doing research for my masters thesis (still to be played here). They do awesome stuff based on Flickr and Twitter, making games, maps and other intuitive interfaces that allow for playful  access to the cloud. Inspirational! Only I’ll have to wade through seas of code to make use of this opportunity. Something to be done during the winter months, when I can’t lay on street games.

When I started researching ‘art and play’ I soon came across Dutch historian Johan Huizinga and the term he coined: ‘Homo Ludens’ or ‘playing man’. Now I don’t know if this is coincidence or if it is my antennae being Ludens-sensitive, but I keep meeting this Playing Man everywhere.

Most recently in an interesting article titled ‘Love really exists: as an illusion’ by Coen Simon, Dutch philosopher and pubilcist. Found the article in my saturday newspaper – Dutch newspapers have no sunday issue, so we get the comfortable big ones on saturday. Simon quotes Huizinga (my -awkward – translation):

“Real culture cannot exist without a  certain game content”  writes Johan Huizinga in ‘Homo Ludens’. Just like lovers, who play the illusion of love in all earnestness, every culture is – in a way-  played. This game is of primary importance to mankind, because we ‘find a remainder of a problem at the bottom of each serious judgement’. “In logically thinking things through, man does not reach far enough”. He will not find the transition point from body to mind, nor from love to estrangement, nor from existence to non-existence. And when man has no unshakable point to stand on, he must play that he stands.”

The transition point from body to  mind – where does the body stop and the mind begin? Interesting question. Interesting take on the importance of  ’play’ too: if there are no absolute certainties, we must play the game of make-believe and pretend that there are.

Interesting idea, though not one I subscribe to. My training as a surveyor taught me to think in degrees of certainty – and within this framework, logically thinking things through is one of my favourite pastimes. That this process does not provide me with all the answers is something I have come to terms with:  I can happily exisit without absolutes.

The idea of trying to locate the point where the  body stops and the mind begins appeals to me, though. A lot of my work deals with perception -> the body feeding the mind information. And the question of what happens if the body tries to feed the mind information the mind does not expect, or does not choose to recognise. Most of the time, we see what we expect to see and hear what we expect to hear. Hence the games in unexpected places….

In April 2010 MaHKU hosted the very successful symposium ‘Doing Dissemination’, in which I played a humble part. Us students got to cook dinner, set tables and wait upon the guests, and if I remember correctly my team’s Salmon Norway Style was a great success. Inbetween, we got to sit and eat, too. With everybody switching tables between courses, the thing was a quiet nightmare logistically, but dissemination-wise it was tremendous.

For the duration of one course – and I forget which – I had the honour of sitting next to Nicolas Bourriaud, of ‘relational aethetics’ fame. I was reminded of this because I found this  picture of our table in the most  recent issue of MaHKU’s very own art magazine: MaHKUzine #9 (I am i quoted in one of its articles). I distinctly remember asking mr Bourriaud a question about the absence of religion in his work, me having just read Gadamer who points at religion as a common ground between people and a significant force in the field of aesthetics. Quote from my blog ‘the relevance of the beautiful’:

“…… aesthetic perception does not reside in the individual, but is part of something larger, is rooted in the relation between the individual and the society she lives in. This is why any shift in the way the individual relates herself to [the whole of] society effects aesthetic perception. Gadamer’s essay, page 7: “So long as art occupied a legitimate place in the world, it was clearly able to effect an integration between community, society, and the Church on the one hand and the self-understanding of the creative artist on the other. Our problem, however, is precisely the fact that this self-evident integration, and the universally shared understanding of the artist’s role that accompanies it, no longer exists.”

Don’t think that mr Bourriaud is particularly interested in religion – his answer was along the lines of ‘the effects of religion are so self-evident they don’t need any treatment’. This was more a conversation stopper than an answer, really, but me being inexcusably polite, I let it rest at that and we moved on towards other topics. Have never been able to understand why religion is a non-subject in modern art. Note: this is changing – check for instance the work of Dutch artist Marc Mulder.

Anyway, it was inspiring to be  vis-a-vis with a great thinker. Read more about his contribution for Doing Dessimination here.

A quote:  Perhaps the main character in the political arena today is the irresponsible subject, the subject who does not own citizenship for several reasons. Because he or she is an immigrant, because he or she is illegal, because he or she is far away from political decision making and what they address. It seems that we all have become irresponsible and out of touch with effective political measures. We seem to be indolent in front of the progression of the logic of neo-liberalism all over the world; we seem to be spectators facing an image industry producing more and more images for us; we seem to be puppets in a theater play whose directors appear to be far away from us; we live in a civilization where the decision to fire people from a factory where they have been working for the last thirty years might have been taken by someone living in Miami or just someone somewhere in the world, someone who never had any close experience with the work they did. So, distances are increasingly consequential. The impression of a world where people are purely passive, where people are no longer active actors, creates an imagery affecting the current dissemination of the field of culture. When you take the history of the avant-garde and the history of left-wing thought over the last fifty years, it is quite obvious that the main theme is the abolition of the barriers between the actor and the spectator, between the producer and the consumer. That was more or less the theme of my book Postproduction (2002). The abolition of the distance between the artist and the beholder is similar to that; it is the activation of a will to suppress the barriers between the active and the passive. The distance and abolition of the barriers between activity and passivity has been the real theme of the last fifty years.

It seems that the abolishment of the notion of distance – effect of the Internet and the 24hrs economy – encourages passiveness. It’s like the effect of  having eternal life:  why do things today when they can be done in an eternal tomorrow? Whyget moving when the notion of distance is moving towards extinction?

Had an email yesterday from Annette Balkema, one of our MaHKU teachers, letting me know that she refers to my work in an article she wrote for MaHKU’s Journal of Artistic Research. I’ve blogged about Annette before, she was the first real-life philosopher I ever have been taught by. And very illuminative it was! She has also helped me tremendously by pointing me towards Gadamer’s treatise ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’, a work in which Gadamer deals with the connection between art and play.

So I was really pleased to hear that Annette had used my work as an example in her article. It is titled ‘Doing research in the age of digital clouds: the academy strikes back‘. In it, she deals with dissemination as ‘the latest buzzword in the world of the Net’ and the latest model for undertaking and presenting artistic research. She makes a move from Deleuzian rhyzomes and interconnectivity to the morphing interactions of swarms. I refer to swarms in my essay, and I intend them to be my new research subject. So this is very interesting indeed!

A couple of quotes:

from Annette W. Balkema, DOING RESEARCH IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL CLOUDS

Doing Dissemination – the butterfly , the cloud, and the researcher.
In Dissemination, Derrida refers to swarming and a swarm of bees in the context of the movement of dissemination where language is deployed to elucidate such a flowing movement. “Language becomes that state of beginning speaking up from all sides, whose soundless effects are immediately going to reverberate on that linguistic hinge or pivot: comparison”, Derrida assentingly quotes Sollers Numbers, a textual tissue weaving through Dissemination. Dissemination and interconnectivity could encounter through a mobile bridge in order to speak up from all sides but they cannot simply be compared. Therefore, let’s reload the swarm, that “motif” or “focal point of condensation” as “sites of passage” – a Derridean vocabulary connected to concepts in order to prevent them “to be elevated into a master-word or a master-concept” – and see what that brings about.We must cancel the bee and fill the movement of swarming with butterflies. What does a reloaded swarm filled with butterflies tell us?   There are several butterflies all linked with movement and motion. There is a butterfly associated with systems. Not Deleuzean open systems of interconnectivity, but systems connected with chain reactions – more like Derridean-style disseminating and streaming chains. There is a butterfly in chaos theory creating the metaphor of the “butterfly effect” pointing to the notion of sensitive dependence in initial conditions where “small differences in the initial condition of a dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the stem.” There is a poetic butterfly whose flapping wing could produce tiny changes in the atmosphere altering, delaying, accelerating or preventing the path of a tornado. That poetic butterfly was once summarized as ‘Does the flap of a butterfly’s wing in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas’? There is a slow motion butterfly polymorphing into fascinating patterns of variation and coloration. It must have been the butterfly’s flapping wing that created an atmospheric transformation in the digital world. Without noticing, without knowing, we moved from interconnecting digital superhighways to clouds of bits of information hovering above our real and virtual worlds disseminating into cloud cultures and cloudcomputing – a paradigm move from client-server to Internet-based computing. One could get retro-minded and point to cloud control – but that sounds like a space oddity connected with Major Tom and ground control. To Marcusean one-dimensional beehive minds shrunken by continuous Twittering and Hyving. To Freudian personalities imprisoned in their Facebook Ego’s.

She then uses my essay as an example of the world of visual art research today: “ But that is not the world where our current generation of researchers live. They live in a world sensitive to the flapping wing of the butterfly – sometimes causing tiny changes, sometimes tornadoes. They relate to the soft motion and movement of morphing in cloud cultures where clouds morph from the cumulonimbius, to the cumulus fractus, or the cirrus uncinus. They start out as Deleuzean vocalists answering the question of What is Cooking? with diagrams, trajectories, and maps. But ultimately they create blogs with disseminating, polymorphing chains of topics where Asimov’s strip switchers, Gadamer’s “Relevance of the Beautiful”, and Algorithmic Behavior could be issues disseminating in a gameshaped blog.18  (www.everdienbreken.org/game)   All those topics, all those patterns entail fleeting clouds of information. We have left our speeding, interconnecting, digital information superhighways. We are softly floating – at least for a while – in fleeting, digital, morphing clouds disseminating polymorphic forms of information.“

A PDF of MaHKUzine no 09 is  to be found here.

from  Everdien Breken, ME AND YOU GAMES

A basic notion in Basbaum’s work is that the artistic gesture of making boundaries visible by crossing them has little effect on the control structure of the network, because the network will simply transform around the gesture. The network can only be perceived in motion, action. If there is to be an artistic resistance to the control society, ‘auto-poetic or self-renewing machinic’ environments’ are to be created that expose modelization of behavior, preconceived flows of experience, hierarchies of command and control. In this kind of environment, the artist only proposes action. Action that is then taken up by the collective, the players, of whom the artist may be one.

This collective works together not according to hierarchical principles but as a swarm: a decentralised, self-organized system. Participants follow very simple rules, and local interactions lead to the emergence of intelligent behavior by the group. Obstacles and boundaries are detected, avoided and overcome by the swarm’s agile movements. Control is built in in the algorithm that guides individual behaviour: the rules of the game.

The game/essay quoted is to be found here. Try and find the matching cards titled ‘Me and You Games’ and the full text becomes available.