Night White Skies

This week is a conversation with curator Boris Magrini about the 'Radical Gaming' exhibition currently at the House of Electronic Arts (HEK) in Basel Switzerland.

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Night White Skies is a program about our design futures as both the environment and our human bodies are now open for design.

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Thanks to Richard Devine for the use of several sample permission.

'Rehearsing our Feelings'

When it comes to trying to plan for the future, various tools are used to help us with the process. If you have a series of appointments to attend in the coming months, you'll likely use a calendar to schedule time and place. If you plan on building a structure or a landscape, you'll likely turn to drawings to define shapes and qualities. But you could lump these two examples together (the scheduling of time and the representation of a shape) as tools that help you deliver something you know you already want. In many ways, they are both instructions to manage something you already know. We're of course aware that this isn't exactly the case. The tools we use for design have proclivities embedded within them that inform the decisions we make while using them.

But maybe we're missing the whole point here when discussing how to represent the future for people. Instead of showing them examples of how it might look, (one form or shape being better than the other) we instead need to allow people to experience a future that doesn't yet exist. There are various reasons why this could be of importance. It's possible that pressures like climate change, new forms of communication, social dynamics and an evolving human body are going to be delivering a near future so different from what we know today that there is a need to rehearse potential futures now. As my guest today, Aubrey Anable has said, 'rehearsing our feelings'.

Video games are a medium that allow the player to experience environments and social scenarios in ways that other representation can't. This is in part because they can often be played many times with different outcomes each time. And these varied experiences within games give players an active interaction that is spatial, has aesthetics and often social, moral contracts embedded within. This concept of 'rehearsing our feelings' is a way for people to be embedded in unknown realities that could very well help prepare us for a future that is uncertain. A future that might require difficult choices in how we live in a changing climate, how we engage ecological anxiety, or even how we might live together (wink wink). Rehearsing our feelings, our expectations and our imaginations for what the future might hold is likely going to include the strengths that video games can offer.

Aubrey Anable is assistant professor of film studies at Carleton University, Canada. Anable’s research is broadly concerned with film and media aesthetics in North America after 1945 with an emphasis on the ways digital computers have changed visual culture. Her book Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) provides an account of how video games compel us to play and why they constitute a contemporary structure of feeling emerging alongside the last sixty years of computerized living. Her articles have appeared in the journals Feminist Media Histories, Afterimage, Television & New Media, and Ada. She is currently co-editing The Concise Companion to Visual Culture (Forthcoming from Wiley Blackwell).

Also try...Ep. 065 _ Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett _ ‘How Emotions are Made’

There is probably no bigger name in science fiction in the last 50 years than Kim Stanley Robinson. Robert Markley (who I’m speaking with today) wrote a book with that very title, 'Kim Stanley Robinson' that looks at his work. The book looks at the works including the alternate histories of The Days of Rice and Salt, the future through the Mars Trilogy, as well as books like Shaman that take place 30,000 year in the past before written language. Ultimately, the work looks at how we as a species and civilization might move forward as we come to grasp the pressures facing us today.

Robert Markley is Trowbridge Professor and Head of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His recent books include The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600-1730 and Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination.

Michael Benedikt is an ACSA Distinguished Professor of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the Hal Box Chair in Urbanism and teaches design studio and architectural theory. He is a graduate of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and of Yale University. Although he has practiced at small scale, he is best known for his writings and lectures. Architecture Beyond Experience is his ninth book. He also edited and contributed to fourteen volumes of CENTER: Architecture and Design in America, on a wide range of topics.

Some of Benedikt's writings can be found at http://www.mbenedikt.com. The event and publishing activities of the Center for American Architecture and Design can be found at http://soa.utexas.edu/caad. The ISOVIST app for OSX and Windows, written by Sam McElhinney of UCA Canterbury, can be downloaded from http://www.isovists.org.

This week’s conversation is with Jessica Charlesworth and Tim Parsons and we are talking about their design work which explores some of the key social, ecological, and technological challenges of our time.

Parsons & Charlesworth is an art and design studio that develops tangible worlds as discursive tools for critically appraising urgent issues. Co-founded by Jessica Charlesworth and Tim Parsons, the studio’s investigative, research-driven, speculative approach uses installation, sculpture, designed objects, writing, photography and digital media to explore key social, ecological and technological challenges of our time, including climate change, the future of work, and the ethics of technology. Their current project, Multispecies Inc. manifests the output of a fictional group of ecologists striving to cohabit with other species with the help of advanced technologies.

https://parsonscharlesworth.com/

www.nightwhiteskies.com

www.seanlally.net