2nd semester FINALS – Hybrid Ludic Assemblage
HYBRID LUDIC ASSEMBLAGES EX GAME – FOLLOW THE WHITE RABBIT THROUGH THE LABYRINTH!
Artistic play is the experimental testing and subjective experiencing of alternative possibilities. Play as a participative process can show us paths to positive change, and new forms of future society, politics and empathetic togetherness.
Through the conscious breaking of rules, the transformation of regulated systems and the acceptance of ambiguity as qualities of games, a new understanding of the global challenges of our time can emerge. At the Angewandte Festival 2022 (an open house of the University of Applied Arts Vienna) an attempt was made with works from the Master Studies Program, Experimental Garne Cultures, to redetermine notions from games and culture, where necessary to redefine them, where meaningful to rethink, reinvent or rediscover them. In the first hybrid game assemblages of the program the focus is on changing established dynamics of the game—in ludic dispositions between human and non-human actors. The aim of the “Garnes Exhibition,” conceived as an activities area, is to reflect critically on the effective social power of games and to develop prototypes of innovative game concepts and approaches.
The opening was the experimental game Drones Rabbits in the Otto Wagner post-office savings bank, the location of the studios and the department of Experimental Garne Cultures. As part of a situational game in the impressively transparent banking hall, the author Barbi Markovic recited her text Unity, which had been inspired by her experiences during her freshman year. A participative “Garne Cafe was created, which oscillated between an analog game board and a virtually generated one, between an actual labyrinth and a performance—a playing field as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk for social intervention. Artistic, digital and installation games as symbolically and politically charged technical objects and components of a critically used Al in the exhibition space comment on and illustrate the social game where the rules have to be constantly renegotiated—in part to make them more tolerable in a world with changing climatic and global realities.
