Description
On Game Structures is an interdisciplinary platform for querying the logic of artistic, epistemological and economic moves and strategies. In art, science and philosophy, as in social praxis, every position is always an intersection of past moves. And every new move, in turn, alters the existing structure by altering the relationship between the structure’s constituent elements: time, space, rules, goals, and modes of interaction. This dynamic interpenetration of play – as emergent activity – and games – as coagulated structure – is, in this issue, explored in scholarly and artistic ways. Examples of the hybrid tropes the contributors engage with are liminoid social rites, playbour (the neoliberal fusion of play and labour), mathematical-musical recursion, Taqiyyah (the Islamic jurisprudence which embroils truth and falsity), porn-sports, and phantasmal ludicity.
ISSUE CONTENTS:
Introduction by Natasha Lushetich & Mathias Fuchs
PART 1 : GOALS, RULES, OBSTACLES & CONSTRAINTS
A Game without Rules by Ken Friedman
Recursive Game Structures as Emergent Post‑capitalist Creative Strategies by Piotr Woycicki
The Ludic Logic of Tragedy by Freddie Rokem
Agonistic Objectification : Choreography as a play between abundance and lack by Goran Petrović Lotina
Playing with Constraint : Performing the OuLiPo and the clinamen-performer by Oliver Bray
How Philidor Helped Rousseau Judge Jean‑Jacques : The narrative grammar of chess in Rousseau’s Dialogues by Florian Vauléon
Liminoid Invitations and Liminoid Acts : The role of ludic strategies and tropes in immersive and microperformance dramaturgies by Joanna Bucknall
PART 2 : SPACE AND TIME
Butoh Translations and the Suffering of Nature by Sondra Fraleigh
Worker : The iteration game or coming out of the eternal return by Barbara Roland
That Obscure Object of Desire : John Nash and the general theory of the second best by Abhay Ghiara & Matthew Goulish
Philosophy becoming Para-Textual : Plato’s Phaedrus, a memory pharmacy by Aaron Finbloom
Alternative Trajectories : Structuring play through videogame physics engines by CONOR Mckeown
PART 3 : SYSTEMS AND METASYSTEMS
lude et labora : Notes on gamification at work by Vincenzo Idone Cassone
Phantasms of Computability by Markus Rautzenberg. Trans. Mathias Fuchs
Taqiyyah, Language and Game : On Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Contra Diction: Speech against itself by Mi You
Language and Worldviews by Peter Hewitt
A Collaborative Game by Matthews & Allen
Holy Corners Golf Club (2010–14) : Golf balling as foreplay by Gabriella Daris
World Factory by Zoë Svendsen
REVIEWS
Considering Performance as Biopolitical Critique by Luna Dolezal
Schooling the Spectator in O by Kristen Cochrane
Notes on Contributors
Front Cover Image: Erwin Wurm Der Taschenfabrikant 2003.C-print 140 cm × 115 cm. Photo courtesy of Studio Erwin Wurm.
