It’s straight out of a Don Delillo novel: A few hours after television producers set up a replica of Occupy Wall Street for the filming of a new episode of Law and Order Special Victims Unit, the real Occupy Wall Street announced plans to occupy the fake one. At 11:30 p.m. the call to occupy the set went out on Twitter. It’s located at nearby Foley Square and includes a replica of the OWS kitchen and library as well as numerous tarps and tents. “They’ve delivered us this perfectly wrapped Christmas present with a bow on top: They rebuilt our camp,” OWS organizer Jake De Groot told me shortly before the announcement went out. “How could we not go and take it?”
Amazing. This is a nice sequel to “#Occupy as Live Action Role-playing” (my take or barthel’s when it was republished).
ekstasis:
Joanne McNeil at Rhizome opened her post about #OWS with this: “On a quiet night, Zuccotti Park feels more like a LARP than a demonstration. Everyone deep in character with a specific task…” We have knowledge, but nothing to do with it; skills, but never opportunities to use them; time, energy and no way to put them to productive use. Our surplus is a virtual one, so we put it to virtual use.
…[and then some other things]
There’s maybe something about privilege exposed by this description, too, which speaks to criticism of occupy’s non-representation of certain groups. I don’t know what to say about it here, except that it’s really awesome when one post encapsulates several separate strains that I follow on tumblr that didn’t seem like they talk to each other much even when they ought to.
Tribute For Jack Layton - College Street Bike Lane Toronto (by Martinho)
(Originally published on ourpennilesswrite.)
Manhunt was invented in Toronto in 2003 by Matt Collins, and for a while it seemed like it was part of something. I started running Manhunt in Edmonton in 2005. Access All Areas was published by the zine Infiltration. Montreal hosted a variant of the increasingly popular and hackneyed “zombie walk” as a hilarious and spontaneous intervention into sword-fighting LARPers at the tam-tams. A couple of kids called newmindspace started running huge capture the flag games in downtown Toronto and New York City and attracting hundreds, then thousands of participants, and you know about flashmobs. Something was happening.
Today my performance practice is in a big way about challenge and competition, even when its not directly about games. Its about arbitrary division and awkwardness, and forcing the audience to make choices. I play the violin and I play hide-and-seek. My work is urgent and political and shaped by its surroundings, and back in those days I thought that all of the games and game-related performances springing up on city streets were too. Nowadays I’m not so sure.
This is a long one →
Brody Condon, Lawful Evil performance at the LA Art Fair 2007.
via Mark Allen Dot Com. Background at tmpspace.com; allegedly a video work of this exists but not online.
It’s a compelling idea, certainly. I’ve been covering video games for more than 10 years and am especially interested in the “serious games” movement; I believe whole-heartedly that wonderful things can happen when people play. But gamification advocates do not preach the beauty and power of play. Perhaps without knowing it, they’re selling a pernicious worldview that doesn’t give weight to literal truth. Instead, they are trafficking in fantasies that ignore the realities of day-to-day life. This isn’t fun and games—it’s a tactic most commonly employed by repressive, authoritarian regimes.
