brynnashawalker

[brynnashawalker]

hyperreality gaming

i'm wildly excited by the idea of a video game constructing an experience of liveness, which seems to be the case with the video game representation of Marina Abromović's "The Artist is Present." in reading about the game, it creates a sense of the real experience by MoMA being open only during the actual hours of MoMA in NYC within the Eastern Time Zone only. otherwise, if you log in before or after hours, the game is essentially closed. furthermore, to approximate a living sense of the act of waiting, the times of others in line when they meet Marina face-to-face are randomized to be between 2 minutes and 8 hours. furthermore, if you step away for any length of time without moving forward at the correct time for the line to move, you are effectively kicked out of the line. beyond that, if you push the button to move forward too much, you're also kicked out for being too hostile or aggressive - so there really is no way to trick the system. you actually have to wait and live in the moment of waiting, not only in front of Marina, but also in line leading up to it. it is absolutely intentional to recreate the lived feelings of what it means to wait actively for something to happen. it seems to break every expectation of entertainment we expect from games.

i don't think i've ever really considered a video game could actually create a sense of something real. it's not what i look to video games for. but it's a very interesting consideration to actually examine durational performance through the art of gaming. it kinda blew my mind wide open to read this. i tend to think of user experience in video games as the kind of thing that extends only to how a person moves around a digital world, their level of agency, the amount of interactivity, and how that all translates to controller functions. i don't really think i've ever considered shifting how anyone is feeling or how their lived reality may be altered (outside of some concept of problem solving, exploration, education, or perhaps creating a sense of awe).

one thing this brings up for me is an opening that seems to be of far greater interest than anything else i've come across in video gaming. one of the main barriers i've run into as someone who enjoys playing video games but hasn't wanted to move into the space of creating them is that it hasn't seemed possible to create meaningful shifts within the lives of the people playing. with that said, i still want a sense of interaction somehow that isn't just between me and a program - so there's a question that comes up as to how this might be able to be applied to multiplayer games. i'm also curious as to how a multiplayer game could move out of a space of competition and conflict and into something else. i have played a few games that do this in exhibition spaces, but i've not yet been privy to a shift in reality. for the most part, i've only played multiplayer games that allow for open world exploration and working together to do meaningless tasks that don't seem to add up to anything. how can an interaction with characters in a world create a meaningful shift in mindset and mood? it's definitely something to consider further.

[brynnashawalker]

agency

i think the largest challenge i run into as an artist interested in agency, participation, and interactive play is that i cannot resolve the problem of what medium to do it within. i am so excited by the concepts of process drama, theatre-in-education, and Nordic LARPing, but in actual reality, i don't want to be in a room with other people (in a public setting) where others are afforded that much agency. and i've only once been to a LARP, and it bored me to death. D&D also leaves me wanting something, some sense of reality. i like the idea of play, but without actual responsibility or consequences, there may be a lot of engagement and playability, but nothing actually changes. and i think some computer games that engage high agency speak to me because i have the agency to change the way the narrative unfolds, sometimes even how the world is represented. and i like being able to do that in educational settings with process drama and theatre-in-education, but i just don't want to have to deal with such extreme dilemmas and climaxes all the time.

on some level, i want to be in the zone. i want a somatic engagement and anti-climactic and anti-dramatic practices that settle my system instead of actively adding to the stress of life. i want an almost third person experience while still maintaining a sense of agency. but i think i have always been a performer because i like being the catalyst of action and change. i enjoy a sense of agency and freedom - maybe because it's so hard to come upon in my own life. and video games feed something in me, especially Souls-style games, because they allow me to take out my anger on the world around as a queer and neurodivergent femme. and i get to kick a whole bunch of big strong men's asses, which makes me very happy. i feel a lot of retribution from that. but i also get bored after a while, and it really doesn't live up to the moment of encounter with another person or group of people that can exist on occasion within a theatrical setting.

i've been really into Grotowski lately, and i want to find some way to blend worlds. i want the "i and thou" elements (citing Martin Buber) of intimacy, but i also want a comfortable space at home, but i also want the anonymity afforded to have enough oversight to curb bad behavior, but i also want agency. i just want a game where everyone plays hard and buys into the circumstance together. i think Mafia is the best place i've found that. and i got really into Among Us for a while in private games with friends. and i want to figure out how to build a ritual that doesn't require same-space rules of the Eurocentric world, but where there is also accountability. and i really don't know how to move the dial forward on that. but right now, i'm defaulting to playing with my friends with some input from onlookers, who are largely witnesses. and yet, i always want more.

[brynnashawalker]

spiritual media

the idea of walking into a world i create is incredibly exciting to me. i have heard playwrights referred to as gods. there is something about devising where you create a world and then live in it, and there's something truly spiritual in that concept. our souls have agency in a created world that may not exist in the real one.

with that as a starting place, i'd like to propose that media informs our imaginations. i cannot possibly know what the act of reading must have been like when people had never seen the massive amounts of images that have constructed our knowledge of the world and effectively brought us up. it has been stated by some media theorists that media raises and informs us way more than any parent, teacher, or peer does in this day and age. in some ways, media creates us. and if we then start to create the media that is creating us, we collaborate with our own spirituality. if we then engage extended reality or tracking devices to influence and interact within the media landscape, if we take a step into technology, we are coming into closer and closer contact with god. the god we know anyway. this network of systems that is bigger than we can possible imagine. maybe not so big as the literal universe, but we spend way more time in our screens than in the world. most of us, anyway.

i struggle with virtual reality because i feel so alone within it - even when i meet up with friends in virtual space. i like the idea of conspiring, of breathing together with others, and to be separate from my partner, for example, just highlights how alone i feel. i don't want to get closer and closer to the screen. i want the screen to invade more and more of my physical reality. i don't want to go inside. i want to be in and of the world, but augmented within alternate realities. and yet, i don't want to be limited to my body. i think avatars are meaningful for me because they are ways to place something within into tangible existence. i don't want to escape or to disappear. i want to change. i want to feel a sense of my body shifting, but not at the exclusion of reality. i want to be immersed in something new. shadow work has always spoken to me because there is a representation of me, which is malleable. i can shift the form, the size, the meaning.

i don't know where that leads, and i don't know if it's possible to have a sense of that liveness in virtual realms. but it's interesting to consider. as a trans person, we first need to reimagine our inner life, then the world around us to match that reality, and then we begin to literally recreate ourselves. i have always felt that when i transitioned, i became my own mother. i gave birth to myself. i created life where there was none prior. before then, there was only survival. to remaking yourself through media is to literally reconstruct every aspect of your viewpoint and universe. and the old self doesn't die exactly, but it transforms. imagine if the butterfly mourned the caterpillar. i'm fascinated with this idea of reimagining. of constant shedding of larval stages into something new. at least in the realm of play. through play, we expand what is possible. we make the world that much larger for ourselves. we do more in this life than survive. we become our own spiritual leaders.

[brynnashawalker]

games, rituals, contests, and civilization

i feel like a complete idiot. i've been kicking around at this idea that play, ritual, and spirituality are inherently linked for how long? too long. and yet, it has never really occurred to me that the "Olympic games" are called as such, that death matches and tennis matches share the same word, that the battle of the sexes is a common game that people play within other games, that "the game of chance" is inherently religious in nature, that dice are a object shared between gaming and religion, and so many other things that i'm sure aren't popping into my brain at this very moment. i came into this idea thinking it would be hard to find parallels between spirituality and play, and yet they are all over the place. i'm just so accustomed to a civilization where we are all alienated from ourselves and our labor that winning at the game of life has lost any sense of play and only seems to be a question of capital and survival. but obviously, survival is interconnected with testing one's limits - and any ritual test is also a game on some level.

i think part of my challenge in seeing these things is that i don't play the games society plays - or i do perhaps, but i play them incredibly poorly. or maybe i don't. i like to play the game of controlling men, even though i'm not really attracted to them. but i do like the game of dominating them and seeing the look in their eyes when they are, for lack of a better phrase, under my spell. so, i suppose i do play at winning on some level. i've often thought that there are fewer (known) femme serial killers because it's really not all that challenging or infrequent in life that we witness the look of powerlessness in men. often, it comes with a kind of simultaneous anger, which is a bit scary. but it doesn't take getting them to the point of near death to see that glint of fear that is present within the loss of complete control. or maybe holding someone by the balls is a point near to death. but because death and sex seem so intrinsically connected, even the mere hint of sexuality and power seem to be enough to strike a look of fear or vulnerability into even the most butch of men. and the game perhaps is enough of a reminder that social reality is maybe not as real as it seems. it's also now occurring to me that sexuality has common ties with games, and many people play intentional games within the context of sex and that power play and roleplay are very real. and given that these things are related to bodies and something beyond bodies, in playing we probably come into contact with the spirit in a way we otherwise avoid in the daily life or grind of society.

and yet, i really want to avoid this sense of winning and losing around gaming. it feels very binary to me, and much as i do live in a femme experience of the world, i long for more meaningful play outside of it. before i transitioned, i was fascinated with sexual play and winning and losing, but after transitioning, i feel like i have won - and what's next? and while i still marvel at times at a playful kick to the balls (at least in media - and especially in these times when i feel so demoralized by the broligarchy), it largely feels to me now to be relatively boring. or maybe it isn't boring and i'm just getting older. or maybe i long for a new kind of play as a lesbian. on some level, i don't know how to play without binaries because that's what society is built upon. but chance is a kind of game that seems to kind of rise above. and i suppose allure isn't really as binary as i think it is, either. maybe i'm just losing my own sense of allure or barely got to capitalize on it because it took me so long to transition, and so i feel a kind of mourning for the play i didn't get to exploit in my life. and coming to playing and to games so late in life, i feel like i missed my youth completely and am almost too late to find it - although that's probably total bullshit. it's interesting to consider.

[brynnashawalker]

otherwise meaning making through queer play

i’ve been obsessed with authenticity so long as i can remember. there’s a pressure in our culture to accept nature or “what god gave us.” it’s always seemed to me to operate in direct contradiction to anything out of the ordinary. as a multiracial, queer, trans, neurodivergent, disabled femby, my life is anything but ordinary. 

i’ve been on a lifelong search for a space outside of the patriarchal cisheteronormative world. i played a lot as a child, but i could never seem to play well with others. there were too many expectations laid on us even as kids. mostly, i played by myself. some of my earliest memories were pretending to be Madonna while i sang along to music videos. when i wasn’t living out my life fantasies of body swapping in my mother’s closet, i imagined i was Rogue or Jubilee or Jean Gray in X-Men. at other times, i played video games and took great giddy pleasure from kicking ass as Chun-Lee especially in Street Fighter II. i always played femmes, and i think i knew myself better then than for so many years after. but i wasn’t playing a traditional concept of womanhood in any case. it was always on the fringe, and other kids didn’t really put up with it.

as i grew older, i was drawn to the promise of the theatre, where i spent most of my life. but the promise always had fine print. theatre has to make sense. it’s expected to “hold a mirror up to society.” we play out reality, and while there is some room for stretching what is possible in the social world, the box of theatre still reflects the world we live in – and as such, it is a slightly more expansive version of the cisheteronormative patriarchy. eventually, as i found myself more and more boxed in, i couldn’t take it anymore. i started playing femmes in theatre. it was a testing ground. but the femmes that were written still held up traditions of the binary, of what it is to be a woman in this society. i couldn’t relate. i feel a lot of the same things and have gone through a lot of the same experiences, but it’s weird when you live in the margins of society. the world is just a little more skewed, and i never had any role models who felt like my kind of skewed.

throughout this process, i studied acting to a nauseating level. and we were always trying to unearth our most visceral, pure, unadulterated selves. and i became more and more and more confused. because nature defied me. and the truth of my life and experience just wasn’t there. it wasn’t until i started medically transitioning that my body began to resonate with me in a way that felt whole. the concepts of authenticity and logic were always held up in acting. they always grated on me. clearly, logic is coded language for what is accepted in our whitewashed and binary male-centric society. but authenticity is so much more pervasive. and the second wave of feminism i was raised in hurt more than it helped. because to stress biological difference is to simultaneously deny my whole existence. i didn’t know it intellectually, but my body sure knew. i spent years trying to accept what others perceived in me, training to get to the core of myself – and really, it only took me further and further away.

i started to wonder at a certain point: what the hell is authenticity anyway? well, according to The Authenticity Hoax by Andrew Potter, it’s essentially a driving obsession in our culture that essentially replaced the god concept back when it fell out of fashion and we started to move past enlightenment and towards modern day work-life balances. and so our call to nature is basically a primal expectation that we have in response largely to the Industrial Revolution where work alienated us more and more from nature, and from ourselves. it has become one of the primary yearnings for us all, and for me especially.

there is something interconnected about nature and play. children play in nature. and yet, the concept of nature is at odds with those of us who live otherwise lives. when young children engage in games, often they play in relation to adult themes. they are literally adulting at times, playing house or war or whatever else coheres with binary representations of gender. but there are no queer roles in society. and so playing seems to have less meaning towards growing up and more towards finding other ways of engaging. as such, perhaps play is the spiritual connection that queer people seek that replaces the call to nature. we have a call towards something else, and we only seem to arrive at it through play. it’s no wonder there are so many queer and trans gamers. i want to develop some research around this concept and see what kind of writing i can build around it. because for me, play is a spiritual experience, perhaps even a necessity, and i am tired of thinking of it as an afterthought or something that needs to be relegated to young people only. play is as necessary for survival to me as food.

[brynnashawalker]

dancing with myself

watching Jacolby Satterwhite create queer work that extends out of the frame and into real life, it strikes me that i view public space as dangerous and violent. i'm not sure why i think that. maybe it comes from the "if you see something, say something" kind of rhetoric that has been instilled in all New Yorkers over the years. we have been trained to be suspicious of one another. when i am in public space, i always feel as if i am about to be attacked. certainly, Trump and his cronies aren't helping in that regard. but what if performance wasn't limited by any constraints at all? what if going out in public and imagining some kind of queer paradise were an end in and of itself?

i question for myself, what exactly am i waiting for? i think i've held onto some belief for a long time that the process of being an artist involves first having a clear idea, then getting others on board, then convincing a whole lot of others to come engage with the idea, perhaps even to pay for it. but i also want to do free work. i don't like the idea of monetizing my work. and yet, why do i feel the need to hold onto the industrial constraints of agreed upon time and place? it's not like i'm any safer in a theater. people have been killed in theaters, too. but i suppose they aren't arrested. and i am afraid of police first and foremost on the street, i suppose.

i suppose that on some level, this is a city of happenings. we can go out into public space and have an immediate audience and then realize whatever we imagine in digital space in real space. life just doesn't occur to me as a kind of canvas i can play with. i feel like i missed my calling as a visual artist somewhere and that maybe i should go in that direction. i think i need to feel like the body is something to play with, not to escape from. embodiment, for me, has been mostly an avatar-inspired concept of changing into something or someone else. what if it were using my body as a material for play? i have these desires to paint on my body, but then i don't want to clean up after. i don't want to deal with reality. and maybe digital space is the way to do that. but it feels so lonely to make art in the middle of the night by yourself and then share it self consciously later.

even to consider that perhaps you do make art in the wee hours and invite people to come, but then you continue making art while they are there. why do i feel like art is this pristine thing, made once and only once? it's either live or recorded. what if it's both? what if it never stops?

[brynnashawalker]

comfort and care in digital realms

i've been obsessed lately with comfort and care. in fact, i moved away entirely from a practice of drama to a practice of peace. for the last two years now, my work as an artist has almost entirely been subsumed with the question of how performance can practice a kind of life that cannot be experienced outside performance. for me in this moment as a queer and trans person, that means stepping outside a world of oppression and into a world of affirmation. i have no idea how and if that can become an artistic endeavor or if i even care about art anymore at this point in my life. i also wonder what art even is and what it means to be an artist.

i know i want to build worlds to live in. it feels spiritual. it feels meaningful. but i don't know how and if that relates to others in the outside world. i don't know what medium i live in. all i know firmly is that i do not live in this one. in less than a month from now, i have a 40-hour performance that i plan to engage in as a thesis for my program in performance and interactive media art. it feels like a joke. i'm creating a live game of sorts. it's for me. on some level, i don't know why we create art for others. i don't know why audience is such a consideration in the world. i am constantly between this world and another world. i had thought the world of education was a place to resolve that struggle. but as i move more and more in the direction of academia, i feel meaning slipping almost entirely through my fingers.

i think i want to write on some level, but i have no idea what about. i keep finding these little pockets of learning that exist in the margins, and they feed me for a time, but i am feeling more and more irrelevant. i wonder if relevance is a necessary component of life. is playing around with avatars or gaming, is that living? does a life of escape become meaningful at some point? is that what we do as people primarily? what is the performance of everyday life? why do we play as children and then leave that to do other things as we get older? why does life need to become so damn important? i watch videos of esoteric artists, and they seem content with this marginal thing on the outside. how do we make meaning if our lives are lived in isolation, subsumed by alienated labor?

[brynnashawalker]

the filter bubble

in the current political moment, i am absolutely horrified. i have been living in a filter bubble, and it has recently been popped. a "filter bubble" refers to the phenomenon where we are separated from views and ideologies that disagree with us in online space, and as a result we live in bubbles that filter out any viewpoints that don't comport with what we believe (or really what we engage with online) and are surrounded by those who agree with our culture and ideology. as it pertains to me life, i am a multiracial, neuroqueer, trans femme. i have been residing in the bubble of academia for the last five years. i have been living in NYC that whole time. i don't know a single person who openly supports Trump. and i also remove myself intentionally from anyone who doesn't support an affirming environment for me because life is hard enough without that crap. so, on top of social media giving me only one version of reality, i also construct my life to be as queer friendly as possible.

occasionally, i have arguments with people. my partner's parents are a good example. they don't get the trans people, and they don't really get queer, either. for them, the primary goals in life are success and fitting in. for me, my primary goal is driven very heavily by a hunger for learning and pleasure activism. within that, i set out to queer everything i do to try to locate myself in tangible reality and create something that feels meaningful in a world that is currently trying to legislate me out of existence (hence the lowercase writing). my partner's parents refuse to acknowledge a third gender of any kind, and they have told my partner they won't be using "they/them" pronouns ever for any reason and insist on holding onto their idea of who my partner is based on their upbringing and the things that have been assigned and ascribed to them. their parents also misgender me. we've had several conversations about it. they're "working on it." my partner is resigned to ever feeling seen by them. before the election, we all talked at length about their parents' issues with the economy and the democratic party and how they are ignoring the working class. they still seemed to vote for Kamala, but they sure sounded like Trump voters to me. they live in Buffalo. things are a bit more simplified in their lives, and they are quite a bit older.

recently, i came across Bill Maher on Pod Save America, talking with Jon Lovett. to my surprise, the half of the argument against the democrats that i haven't heard is that instead of the economy, their focus is entirely on virtue signaling and identity politics. Bill explained that they'd changed, not him, and that he's still a democrat, but they've gone far too left and radical. i'd heard that sorta, but only as rhetoric and nonsense - not from other democrats. since then, i've looked a bit more into it, and it turns out that we seem to be having a kind of resurgence of backlash against political correctness. apparently, a significant portion of the country on both sides believe that the dems have gone too far and that their language should not be changed just because trans people want basic respect. those people are actually on board, it seems, with the "revolution of common sense" that the Trump and co are raining down on us. and for me, i am beginning to question everything. it makes me so incredibly sad. and i can see how digital media has been constructed to create a sense of false agreement community and sow divide.

[brynnashawalker]

alt-auterity

i've recently learned about this concept of alt-alterity as i am exploring alternate worlds for interactive installation and gaming. "auterity" in Latin refers to the state of being different or other. "alt-alterity" is the concept of otherness as becoming so common that it creates a new normality where there is no sense of otherness but a kind of idealistic future in which we can co-exist and cohabitate with a sense of interconnectedness. as a queer person, i have no idea how i feel about that.

on some level, i like the idea of being an other. i feel like that's the whole thing with being queer. in fact, even the recent imposition of the religious right outlawing more than two genders (or sexes because gender and sex to them seem to be one in the same) has kinda lit a fire under my belly, and i feel just a little bit more awesome than i did when trans life was becoming a bit more normalized in society. there's something about me that likes being a rebel or being otherwise, and i'm honestly not sure how to locate myself outside of that concept.

with that said, i don't want to be in actual communities with people who are othering or where i am the only queer person present. so, i do long for a utopia, but i think the feeling of a small community of queer people is important to me for the fear of losing touch with myself. perhaps i'm totally wrong, though. it does seem kinda exciting to consider a world where i could just be normal and wouldn't have to feel different. but i think that the trauma i've lived in is an important piece of me, and i wouldn't want it to disappear. i suppose, though, if there were a world where trauma was expressed and normalized and we could all mourn our collective oppressions, that is a kind of alt-auterity that speaks to me. and in fact, i look to build that in classroom settings all the time. it would be interesting to consider that as a primary focus of an interactive installation.

[brynnashawalker]

play and games

i've been a performer for a long time, but the performer/audience relationship always falls short for me in both roles. i've grown more and more fascinated with play, games, and participatory immersive experiences over the years. but while i enjoy video games, i want more interactivity, and while i enjoy play in live space, i want something more accessible in virtual or hybrid space. i've been stuck in the realm of medium for a long time. space bedevils me - and i suppose that is not surprising since it is so colonized in our world.

reading about world building is starting to open up some new ideas for me. as i come from a theatrical background where story is the driving feature, it's hard to imagine a space and a context for play. i spent a few years studying applied theatre, where i started to open up some possibilities building worlds, introducing drama, and facilitating collective dilemmas to problematize social reality. that was all well and good, and in fact rather exciting, until the world started moving sideways again towards fascism. and my ongoing inner conflict is between wanting to create and foster queer spaces and believing in healing through sharing collective trauma and simultaneously not wanting to exist in reaction to dominant culture or really to engage in conflict at all. and so, expression has become a primary feature of my work, but i don't know how to expand that expression out into a world building space.

it's interesting to consider other ways into a world - like point of view is an especially interesting query. are we looking at the world as people, as animals, as plants, as robots, as . . . i don't know what might be possible. for a long time, i have been interested in Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott and the metaphor of what it is to be an outsider, an aberration, a third life form, a sphere residing in a binary world of total flatness. i wonder if there is some way to harness this into a simple game that might be engaging somehow. there is something about a game like Among Us that feels accessible - maybe because i've played Mafia and games based on it. the rules are simple, the graphics aren't particularly fancy, there are ways to communicate during play, and it basically just becomes a context for the players to challenge one another. and then there's the whole abusive element to it, promoting all kinds of messed up behavior. that's a subject for another whole blog.