The AnthroGames event was held on January 25, 2020 at ViZ-Laboratory for Visual Culture, Plateia Theatrou 10, in collaboration with the gallery Automatic Transmission and the exhibition-research project Playing Ground.
PSL cohort 2019 invited the public to play and to talk about the subversive potential of critical games as tools of cultural critique, conduits of creative expression and new forms of argumentation, pedagogy and literacy. |
Games designed by the cohort of Pelion Summer Lab 2019 as a public experiment first presented in Makrinitsa were "rebooted" at Viz, in the center of downtown Athens, along with the active participation of the public, followed by an open discussion, anchored by short interventions by:
Penelope Papailias (anthropologist), "The game as experiment"
Petros Petridis (anthropologist), "Gamification, critical game and education"
Manolis Patiniotis (historian of science and technology), "Game and virtual reality"
Kostis Stafilakis (artist, art theorist), "The artist as game master: Devising the memetic in the age of post-irony"
& the designers of the games themselves of course!
Penelope Papailias (anthropologist), "The game as experiment"
Petros Petridis (anthropologist), "Gamification, critical game and education"
Manolis Patiniotis (historian of science and technology), "Game and virtual reality"
Kostis Stafilakis (artist, art theorist), "The artist as game master: Devising the memetic in the age of post-irony"
& the designers of the games themselves of course!
The key questions driving the AnthroGames event are the following:
- Can the "critical game" provide an alternative mode of disseminating theoretical thought, as well as a new mode of research for the contemporary situation? If though games have a "critical" dimension (if, on the other words, they have a "point" and an "agenda"), does that mean that they lose the element of subversion, the ability to be open to co-creation with the public, their flouting of "rules" and avoidance of "objectives" and "ends" (non-linearity, surrealism, pleasure) that we associate with "free play"? Or, perhaps, in the intersection between structured game and unstructured play, could critical games enable those elements to enter academic knowledge production in provocative ways, enabling them to become tools of resistance and social change?
- Can the game, given the central role of performance (scenography and staging of the "event", the active participation of players and designers [whose roles often reverse], aesthetic and sensory expression and experimental replication) constitute an organic point of contact and exchange with contemporary art practices. Can the critical game provide a playful and emancipatory structure that contributes to the empowering and autonomy of players through practices of co-production and cultural expression?
- What possibilities does the critical game offer -- through collaborative, empowering and open experimental methods and activities -- for the blurring of borders between teaching and research, between professors and students, between knowledge production and dissemination, in the liminal spaces where academia meets broader publics?
- Can the "critical game" avoid being instrumentalized and co-opted by the neoliberal "serious game" fad and the gamification of many aspects of everyday life? Or, alternatively, might the critical game constitute an empowering mechanism of resistance, calling into question particular - often imperceptible -- structures of power in the era of the datafication of the self and platform capitalism?
Curator of the event: Christina Petkopoulou
ViZ – Laboratory for Visual Culture is an initiative of Labs 11 & 12 of School of Fine Arts, which is supported by the Onassis Foundation and Develop Athens of the Athens Municipality. Automatic Transmission, founded in 2019, is a platform for interdisciplinary collaborations that has contemporary art as its point of departure. Pelion Summer Lab for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities, an initiative of the Laboratory of Social Anthropology (EKA) and the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology (IAKA) of the University of Thessaly, was founded in 2017. The three games that will be played are the following: Databoo is a game about how we perceive, use and share our data in the digital environment. It takes place on the open-source platform for narrative gaming Twine, as well as in any public space in which the game is played each time. Databoo was designed by Marilena Drymioti (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Antonis Koukouladakis (Panteio), Mariana Manousopoulou (EKPA), Alexandros Papageorgiou (University of Thessaly), Yiorgos Smyrnaios (Open University). Soundchain is an interactive sound game based on a sci-fi story. The game invites players to focus on the sonic environment, collectively re-staging a sound archive for the future. The aim is to create a creative field of affective engagement and critical reflection on the process of producing archives in the age of the database. Soundchain was designed by Eftychia Vardouli (Panteio), Ismini Gatou (University of the Aegean), Tasos Karadedos (University of the Aegean), Antonis Koukouloudakis (Panteio), Eirini Lazaridou (University of Thessaly), Nanuka Iashvili (Bard College Berlin), Kelly Mulvaney (University of Chicago), Nicholas Smith (Univ. of Toronto), Anni Valajärvi (University of Helsinki). Todo is an anthropological role-playing game about cultural stereotypes -- and the possibilities for their deconstruction. It was designed by Christina Antoniadou (University of Thessaly) and Thasos Tanagias (University of Thessaly) for the course "Anthropology and Games", taught by Dr. Petros Petridis at the University of Thessaly, and first presented at the Data-Stories Confestival in June 2019. For bios of the 2019 cohort, see here. |