While I was away a new friend asked me to tell them what kind of art I do. I felt confident saying I was a researcher, a painter, a fabric artist, but I hesitated at game designer. They caught the hesitation and told me not to doubt myself. They were right to call me one it, I had been doubting my self all weekend. But, in that singular instance, it was not so much hesitation of weather I could or should call my self a game designer but weather I wanted to.

These days I think of my self as a pedagogist, a creator of ontological tools, a map maker to foreign thought processes than, a skill builder for ideological survival in an age of constant assault. I’ve worn these descriptions uneasily, even as game designer fit less and less. They are, in themselves, another place where I was waiting for people to get it with out ever really communicating it.

How could people get it if I didn’t bring them in first. Delicate transcendental work has to be seen (haha) to be believed.

Today’s offering is a look at the start of my bliss list, with a focus on projects which are only masquerading as games.

A Selection from my Bliss List:

Spider Publishing

This is going to be an “analog protocol”, or more simply a set of rules, for sharing published materials in an extended network of people.

Its core feature is making a distinction between direct transfer (passing on a Zine or book in a way where conversation is necessary) and nodal transfer (putting it up online, selling it at a fair to whomever might come by, sending a pdf to a large group at once). As soon as you state that material must be passed direct only a whole world of methods and cool side effects become apparent.

Suddenly you need publishers, librarians, sommeliers for underground writing. Stores that wish to sell them need secret need to know menus. A piece of writing published this way travels not only with personal recommendations but also with the feeling that by holding it you have become a part of something.

Though We Tried to Warn You (otherwise known as the 9/11 Opera)

This is a piece of aleatoric theatre in the legacy of John Cage and his contemporaries, a piece which could be played in the living room or on a stage. In it a set of four players recounts their impressions of the day a great disaster took place.

The disaster itself changes from performance to performance, as do the specific details of the players characters (though the broad strokes remain). The players are given the names for their speeches such as “a monologue about the man who lost his tongue that day”, and the order in which they should come, but are asked to improvise and build on each others details.

I hope to create a structure in which people may speak from their hearts, their empathy, their explorations of the world. I want my actor-players to break free and speak without care to my instructions, speak from the wreckages of their own disasters. I hope that giving them the masks of characters will give them the power to do so safely.

The opera is ideally set to William Baskinki’s the Disintegration Loops—a suite of long atmospheric songs released and framed by Baskinki’s Experience watching the destruction of the twin towers from a Manhattan rooftop. But I’ll settle for any 1h15 minutes of mournful atmospheric music.

Playgrounds #1 through #6

The first entry in this series (play Mountain) has already enjoyed some underground success. It is in fact completely playable. But I have not yet figured out how I want to frame, and by framing teach, the more philosophical aspects of this project. So its still on my shelf.

Each of the six planned games are based on one of the six playgrounds artist and landscaper Isamu Noguchi designed during his lifetime, so that as you play through them in order your understanding of his pedagogy deepens at the same rate it did in life. Though only two of his playgrounds were ever brought to fruition, he considered them some of his greatest works. As do I.

Noguchi believed, as do I, that children did not need play designed by adults to prepare them to be adults, instead they needed play which allowed them to approach the world at the scale of a child. He believed, as do I, that the motion of playing children as they passed over landscapes of elementary shapes and textured surfaces would produce imaginative play far beyond what could be explicitly planned for.

In days like this I think its more important than ever to provide places, games, methods, for people to imagine in ways that you, the builder of the space, cannot imagine. How else are we to face the great unknown that is our world reshaping itself below our feet.

Other Notes:

• I’m so glad you all liked the idea of the bliss list. Its one of those small reorientations that I think can really help get organizing moving. As S. said in a comment its grown out of group life, but I’m excited to see what it can do in people’s practices.

• If you end up creating a bliss list I’d love to hear about your experience with it, now or later.

• Previous and Next buttons are coming back. you’ll see them populate in the archive over the next few days. I had trouble manually adding them on the ipad I travel with, but I’m home so I can get back to it.

More tomorrow,

Weaver

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