Abstract
Starting from with an autoethnographic perspective, merging the creation of the Digital River installation (VV.AA., Catálogo Jovens Criadores’97. Edições Clube Português de Artes e Ideias, 1997) and the concept of the Playmode exhibition in Portugal (Gouveia, Play and games for a resistance culture [Brincadeiras e jogos para uma cultura da resistência], Playmode Exhibition Publication, 2019) and Brazil (Gouveia, The strange world of Playmode Brazil: playful sounds and complex critical speculations [O estranho mundo da Playmode Brasil: sonoridades lúdicas e especulações críticas complexas], Playmode Brazil Publication, 2022), I will tell a personal story to inquire into the role of interaction technologies and the internet in shaping our contemporary artistical and cultural playful reality. The goal is to suggest that our perception relates to gaming technologies and that the internet plays an important role in defining us as global and planetary citizens. There is no precedent in human history for such dissemination of information and connectivity before the spread of networked playful technologies. That fact made us consider the role of interaction in our lives and how it changes our physical and artificial environments. Moving from a personal and political journey to a broader context, where the age of integrated arts and technologies merge with play to find possible ways to survive on a damage planet. Feminist theories, dark ecology and open possibilities promote dignity and care for future survival. Speculative feminism avoids grand narratives and certainties, emphasizes vulnerability and coexistence, and for that matter can be a tool to stimulate humility and respect among humans and other species. Play and gaming can integrate women’s studies to generate convergent and sustainable futures. Speculative arts-based research deals with processes instead of objects, with the aim of instigating resistance against modern delusions.
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Notes
- 1.
We can consider that there were previous precursors of the global world movement in colonial and capitalist economic strategies, but this is something beyond the scope of this text. For more information about the concept of the global village please see, for example, McLuhan and Powers (1992) and Page (2002).
- 2.
According to Robinson (2020, p. 30), this division consists in several separations and classification systems like “geological matters (ice ages and extinction events, etc.), technological (the stone age, the bronze age, the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution), dynastic (the imperial sequences in China and India, the various rulers in Europe and elsewhere), hegemonic (the Roman Empire, the Arab expansion, European Colonialism, the post-colonial, the neo-colonial), economic (feudalism, capitalism), ideational (the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Modernism), and so on.”
- 3.
Porto Catholic University School of the Arts: https://artes.porto.ucp.pt/ (Accessed 10.07.2022).
- 4.
https://www.lmu.edu/ (Accessed 10.07.2022).
- 5.
Turkle (2021, p. 337) recently criticized how the “social-media business model evolved to sell our privacy in ways that fracture both our intimacy and our democracy.”
- 6.
https://etoy.com/projects/toywar/ (Accessed 21.07.2022).
- 7.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble (Accessed 21.07.2022).
- 8.
https://www.eff.org/ (Accessed 21.07.2022).
- 9.
https://www.tourvirtual360.com.br/ccbb-playmode/. @CCBB Brazil.
- 10.
For an updated version of the role of manifests in contemporary artistic practices please see J Lack, (Ed. 2017), Why Are We Artists’? 100 World Art Manifestos, UK and elsewhere: Penguin Random House Classics.
- 11.
https://ruangrupa.id/ (Accessed 27.12.2022).
- 12.
If nineteenth-century civilization can be summarized, for Ortega y Gasset, in two major dimensions, liberal and technical democracy, a symbiotic copulation between capitalism and experimental science, we must also consider that not all technique is science. The Spanish author’s criticism of the specialization of science is vast, even going so far as to state that science needs humans to specialize, but that it cannot itself specialize or, in other words, in politics, in art, in social uses, in other sciences, specialists can take primitive positions of great ignorance, becoming hermetic, esoteric and satisfied within their limitations and, in this sense, approaching the humans of the masses. Thus, it is concluded that specialization can suffocate both science and the state and that, for this very reason, both must be combinations of blood and languages, mestizos and plurilingualism, places of convergence where natively separate groups are forced to live together. It is therefore considered that the state should contain, above all, a program of collaboration and dynamism.
- 13.
Haraway thinks in terms of a heritage of histories and worlds situated in a concrete context in which activist practices of the arts and design integrate, in public places, diverse people and, sometimes, other creatures and species. For most species and communities, play was the most powerful and diverse activity for reorganizing old things and proposing new ones. Thus, new patterns, feelings and actions for creativity emerge that can be triggered safely and/or through conflict and collaboration. Haraway also suggests that we nurture a vital memory and that we don’t forget the foul smell in the air from the burning of witches, that we don’t forget the murder of human and non-human beings in the Great Catastrophes of the Plantationocene, Anthropocene and Capitalocene. For that purpose, we should mourn the dismemberment of the world and we may have to learn how to talk to the dead.
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Gouveia, P. (2024). The Digital Playful River, a River Out of Eden: How the Internet Shaped my Planetary Perception. In: Alexandre e Castro, P. (eds) Challenges of the Technological Mind. New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55333-2_9
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