From August 2022 to February 2023, Varia Library and Rotterdam Electronica Depot hold Read & Repair events on the last Saturday of every month. We invite you to visit our space, make yourself comfortable, read or repair some things together, and share thoughts and ideas. For this event a vegetarian lunch prepared by Sara Hamadeh will be served in the hour between workshops.
For this month, we will be exploring the theme Dissecting the Game.
READ
Date: Saturday, 26th November 2022
Time: 11:00-13:00 CET
Location: Varia (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam)
LUNCH
13:00 - 14:00 we share a free, catered lunch. Please email us if you have any dietary restrictions at readandrepair@varia.zone.
REPAIR
Date: Saturday, 26th November 2022
Time: 14:00-16:00 CET
Location: Varia (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam)
READ
The Read will be guided by NDNMK Solutions.
Life and the world, for many, lacks enchantment, purpose, community, and perhaps a level up system. The fake news industrial complex has been able to cater to these needs for some people. Communities like QAnon function similarly to alternate reality games(ARG) and to cults in their communication and psychology. By gamifying reality, conspiracy theory communities provide many with stories to make sense of current day anxieties. We’ll read texts relating to game theory, (neo-) mythologies, magic, and animism for you to gently incorporate into your belief system.
NDNMK Solutions, Est. 2020, is a recycling facility with an agenda...
REPAIR
The Repair will be guided by Lídia Pereira.
Videogames create worlds. Often, those worlds mirror our own, reproducing certain ideals and values as norm through their narrative, game play, design, etc. This session begins with an invitation to the participants to critically consider those worlds, identifying the key points and elements through which specific videogames circulate political, cultural and social values. How do the games we play every day vehiculate ideology? Using this knowledge, participants are then invited to intervene upon these videogame worlds through the writing, drawing, collaging, etc. of fan fictions, using the original text to re-construct these worlds or reveal crucial aspects they might be hiding in plain sight. At the end of the session, participants will have begun to create a narrative with their interventions upon these universes and the results may be as diverse as creative writing, the generation of new games in the form of text-based adventures, comics, mini-graphic novels etc.
Requirements: Please choose a videogame you know well ahead of the session.
Lídia Pereira (1990, PT) studied at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (MA Media Design and Communication) and at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto (BA Communication Design). She is currently a PhD candidate at the PhDArts program, a collaboration between ACPA, Leiden University and the KABK in The Hague. Her practice bridges the fields of graphic design, art, digital media and infrastructure, critical theory, and publishing.
Our August 2022 to February 2023 programme is funded by Gemeente Rotterdam.