Watching Screens at Night: an Interactive Essay
An interactive essay (emphasis on "essai" or attempt here) that was the result of me smashing some frustrations around video game discourse right into the strains of philosophical weirding I've been into lately. The main text I riff off of is in the title of the bitsy, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh's "Night: A Philosophy of the After-Dark" published by Zero Books.
Did this particular piece as an impulse from the #BitsyEssayJam, so thanks to Emilie Reed and Critical Distance for the occasion.
Made with (excessive) use of Pixsy, an image-to-bitsy tool, and, of course, Bitsy itself.
ADDENDUM: Took advantage of the extension of the submission to do another copy-editing pass and fix some typos and c+p errors.
Comments
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are u suggesting we should be witches, not gamers
It's not the worst place to start! (although if the mid-late 10's are any indicator, witch is also prone to being an archetype that can be sold to you along with "gamer," leaving us with the problem of a static subjectivity and archetype instead of a motion, a rhythm, a becoming...)
There was a line I entertained comparing the assembly of consoles and booting up games to summoning demons, but I couldn't quite cohere that (that would probably be a post/essay in and of itself).
There are a couple of ways that the role of the Witch can offer off the top of my head to the relation of video games...1) taking a queue from Emilie Reed (Infinite Snake Machine), see how formulas and cosmologies and models from the Medieval/Early Modern era (re)organize or illuminate the inherent organizing principles and motions of any given video game, 2) the various alchemical recipes and witches brews require a chimerical assembly of parts from the natural world, with the concern of "does this concoction work towards this purpose," putting a particular focus both on the gathering of parts (hair of the person to be enchanted, eye of newt, essence of sulphur...) and how the motions and logics of those parts boil into each other to create wyrd dream logics...
a) being coherent doesn't feel necessary esp. with what you're talking about
b) lol i meant like wiccan/pagan witches not halloween witches i know a witch or two
That is true, that is very true...
Also, nice! Then yes, it is a very good place to start that we should be witches instead of gamers.