14 March 2024
This workshop is an invitation to analyse, reflect on and conspire with and against modes of temporal worlding. Temporal worlding can be understood as the making and unmaking of worlds through infrastructures of time and temporal practices. Both of these vectors are often taken for granted with time referred to as something elusive, ungraspable, even ‘immaterial’. Yet the social reality of measuring and telling time undermines the notion of a ‘universally audible tick-tock’. From the first railway accidents to the logistics of global supply chains, the imposition of labour regimes and the affordances of high-frequency trading, the demand for synchronised clock time is inseparable from colonial conquest, militarism, financial and industrial capitalism. Within, against and beyond the social control of time, we find uneasy, weird and wayward temporalities produced through lived experience and counter-hegemonic histories.
Worlding presumes that the world is not as it should be and that it can be changed. Worlding can help us realise the constructedness of the world as it is presented to us, to understand and contest the material conditions we are determined by. Using role-play, nonlinear narration and collective worlding we will score alternative modes of timekeeping that nested between our existing temporal infrastructures. In the workshop, participants are paired and become one character with two bodies: player and avatar. Together, they go on a walk, in which the player directs the avatar and instructs their movement via voice call. The game play is facilitated through a narrative that overlays the real world environment of the players with a speculative framing using temporal navigation systems and narrative structures from games, films and literary devices. While the workshop investigates hybrid or remote interaction, it also introduces embodied forms of knowledge production, tuning into cyclical and linear rhythms that condition the body through somatic exercises.
Our aim is to experience and negotiate divergent conceptions of time as they exist within consensual reality. Negotiating the sometimes paradoxical patterns as well as conducive synergies that emerge between these temporal practices, we hope to develop the social and collective agency to launch operative fictions and heterogeneous worlds that have the potential to disrupt, undermine and reshape ‘our time(s)’.
Please bring: Laptop, smartphone and headphones (incl. mic)
Readings (recommended, not required):
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/ry92143lhxtz4ct8804hn/h?rlkey=f5es9rwmsisneroe2y4gdq6wn&dl=0
The workshop is developed in collaboration with Carina Erdmann, but will be facilitated by Steph alone.
Carina Erdmann is based in Brussels and Berlin and works on the intersection of game design and performance, researching (role) play, and collective (un)worlding as methods for social speculation. In different contexts and collaborations, she develops adaptive game architectures through which players (de)construct (unspoken) rules and act out alternative agencies.
Steph Holl-Trieu is an artist and writer based in Berlin and Vienna. She is interested in questions of materialist aesthetics, that is, the historical contingency of our modes of perception. Her work materialises between writing, sound, (role-playing) games, and is often situated within collaborative or collective settings.
In their collaborative work, such as
0ct0p0s.net, a platform for prefigurative play, they explore role play as a site for collective research. In 2022, they co-organised the role-played conference and workshop
Footnotes: Annotating the Future of Arts Education at Zürich University of the Arts (ZHdK) together with School of Commons. They have been commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and the Curatorial Collective for Public Art to create games within larger collective projects.