1999

Another body is possible / There is no body B.

Matilda Tjäder, curator at Minibar in Stockholm, invited the artist Susan Ploetz, Patricia Reed and me to talk in relation to Susan’s somatic larp The Guild. Here is my take.

minibar

I decided to talk under the title “Another body is possible / There is no body B.” This title paraphrases two slogans from the globalisation movement. I guess I set out to think about how these movements has influenced live action roleplaying.

The first one of these phrases – ”Another world is possible”, is connected to the late 90:ths and early millennial anti-capitalist, social movements that haunted the international meetings of financial capitalism – the World bank, World economic forum, European Union, G8 et c.

The second one ”There is no planet B” is connected to the climate justice movement and has been a mobilizing rhetoric in relation to the climate meetings such as COP 15 in Copenhagen, COP21 in Paris et c.

My speculative thesis is that we can understand or explore the role of the body through the imaginary structures of these political movements. And I will talk specifically about the role of the body within the context of Nordic live action role-playing, also known as larp.

The relationship to these social movements influenced the formation and development of Nordic larp. Larp was embedded in the counter-culture of late 90:ths. Many of the writers and organizers of larp were involved in anarchist and feminist organizations and initiatives, but also in occult circles.

So what did it mean that ”Another world is (or was?) possible”? I propose to go back to 1999 to answer that question. Someone has claimed that it was our generations 1968 and to me that makes sense. It was the year when The Battle of Seattle happened – a massive protest against the World trade organization. The feeling that capitalism had won on walk over against any other kind of political system was challenged. There was actually conflict again over where to go next. Everybody did not agree that free market global capitalism was the shit. And now post-2008 financial crisis it is pretty clear that the critique of these institutions was quite accurate.

In the cultural field of ’99 the movie The Matrix came out and proposed a radical constructivist view on reality. Reality was seen as a collective illusion, controlled by artificial intelligence, but this system could be challenged. In Denmark von Trier did The Idiots, in which a group of anti-bourgeois adults move into a house to seek their “inner idiot”, and thereby get over their social inhibitions. They basically form a larp where they act as if they were developmentally disabled, then they take their new selves to the public sphere to see what happens. These are two very different movies, but together they touch on some kind of zeitgeist. There are other movies that could be mentioned here, such as Cameron’s Strange days, Cronenberg’s eXistenZ and Fincher’s Fight Club.

idiots

Idioterne, Lars von Trier, 1998

 

At the same time, in the Nordic countries, the experimental larp scene had just formed. And by experimental I mean that it didn’t follow the genre conventions of fantasy literature. So if the cry of the global left was ”Another world is possible”. The response from larpers was – Yes! And we can show you how it is done. We can construct new worlds, new realities, new social modes of being. It was not that important exactly what these new worlds consisted of. It was the fact that they could be created. This mode was, in the radical larp scene, formulated as ”War on Reality”, making escapism into a kind of tool for resistance.

It might have to do with that I was 15 years of old at the time but I really had the sense that we could travel into other, parallel realities. This fantasy about creating other worlds defined the aesthetics of Nordic larp. And in order to create that other space we sought autonomy. Not autonomy in the Kantian sense really but in a social, spatial, timely sense. A sociological way of understanding this was that we created strong ”magic circles” or liminal spaces – social state of exception where the alienation of everyday life was challenged.

At this time there were actually fears among ”the grown-ups”, teachers, good Christians, et cetera that role-playing would work in the sense that you could role-play yourself into another state of being and not be able to find your way back. That would have been pretty cool. What we found out I guess is that role-playing works a lot more like a rubber band. You have to stretch it out to become someone you are not, but as soon as you release or relax you will be back to your normal self and not much seems to have changed. There are counter-examples of this though. Transformation can happen.

The body was not so much at stake during this time. It was just seen as the ticket or vehicle to bring us to the other worlds. I think we had this idea that we could take ourselves out of ”the system”, the matrix, and thus be liberated. We just had to break apart from this social world. We didn’t realize that well how much crap we brought along with us into the fantasy spaces. Both in social and mental terms. We also didn’t realize the tactical or political potentiality in the fact that we brought our bodies back to real life.

Things changed though. For me personally it happened because I started to dance contact improvisation. And as soon as I started that practice I realized that some of the most profoundly transformative experiences I had in larps were connected to the body. By then, in 2006, I wrote an article together with Tova Gerge titled ”The Character, the Player and Their Shared Body.” This idea of a shared body might seem obvious to anyone, but at that time it felt like a revelation: it is actually our real, social body that we put into play, that we put at risk, that we charge with fantasies or desires tied to fictional frameworks. Here is an example from that article on how it could work:

”Mellan himmel och hav [Between heaven and sea] deconstructed sexuality and gender during several preparatory workshops. Individual expression was consciously disguised behind turbans and wide clothing. Hands and arms were recoded into erogenous zones; sexually neutral parts of the body became the only allowed tools for intimate interaction. The players were trained to look at what all people had in common and to find a beauty in every single person through concentrating on bodily aspects less occupied by media images then tits and ass. When a hand touches another hand it does not matter how it looks; when gazes meet, faces blur.
The participants were suddenly thrown into situations where they had physical contact with people they would normally, for one reason or another, never touch. As a consequence, very many of the participants were smitten with a poly-sexual analysis of human relations—and they took it into practise, because they had experienced that these ideas functioned. A big number of break-ups, amorous adventures, and attempts to establish new norms followed among the players.”

So if there is no alternate, second body then it can also be no alternate reality. Actually, another world is impossible, there is no other world, no other planet. There is only one, material reality and we have to take care of ourselves and each other across the borders that magic circles make up.

The strategies of autonomy and separation in larp has partly been replaced by other ideals. The Nordic larp community has started to affirm the fact that there is constant leakage or bleed as some would call it, between the fantasies of roleplaying and everyday life. So instead of asking ourselves: how can we get out of this world, we started asking ourselves how things can travel from the realms of fantasy into reality.

This image of reality resembles the idea that There is no planet B. We are stuck in that sense. At this point I think my talk could go in many directions and it will also do that. I have many questions around this subject. It also makes me wonder about the relation between larp and somatic practices, but also artistic practices. I will throw out a few different ideas and problems in relation to this.

Last autumn I was in Berlin for the Body IQ festival at the Somatic academy. One of the main topics of this week-end was ”How do we experience the formation and dissolution of a social body?” but they also posed the question ”How do our survival fears and external pressures, such as war, climate change, immigration, and economy, impact the development of collectives?” This is questions that are very relevant to take back into larp context. One of the teachers, Thomas Kampe, said something along the lines of that: ”It would make no sense to me to give you exercises that only work in the studio but not in everyday life”.

So in that, more or less therapeutic context there were ambitions that I would describe as anti-autonomous. Aesthetic ideals forming that are exactly about the continuity between real life and obscure practice. For example – do not change into training clothes! Don’t make yourself more comfortable than you are in your regular life. Just do the practice with the conditions that you have and that you are used to.

This new orientation in larp towards the body also contest a rather long lasting liaison to theatre and film as point of reference for the benefit of performance art, choreography and dance. I find that very exciting. If we compare a practice like contact improvisation with larp we find a lot of similarities: shared space, social agreements, collective improvisation, personal expression and some kind of immersion. But there are also massive differences. Dance happens in the body, role-playing has a lot of the time happened in the face, talking heads. The dance is silent, role-playing verbal, but maybe more importantly: dance focus on the moment while role-playing has been very occupied with the continuity of story. In contact improvisation there is a constant play between discontinuity and continuity. In larp I generally get the feeling that discontinuity is a threat. Everyone get together to fight the entropy that happens when different story lines develop simultaneously in different parts of the larp. In contact improvisation, or in a larp informed by dance or somatics we don’t need to struggle with that. The workings of theatre: dramaturgy, escalation of conflict, tropes and representation can be replaced with other aesthetic possibilities: presence, intensities, flow, scores and so on.

Another question: If there is no body b, if we are always here in this very world with ourselves – how does change happen? Is there any social, physical or psychological effects to be gained from larping? How can it sometimes be so hard to change? Both in terms of changing oneself, changing who we are, but also in terms of political change.

What could be liberating with larp from a somatic point of view is that it doesn’t have to deal with therapeutic challenges. We don’t necessarily need to heal anything or be healthy. In that sense larp is clearly rooted in the aesthetic domain. We can make larps that utilize the body and somatic practices for artistic purposes. Scenarios that makes life not more bearable but more complicated or challenging. On the other hand, maybe we also want to heal? Maybe we need it? If history always has been a history of trauma then the storytelling of larp has followed the same logic.

This is a challenge. It seems that it is so easy to get hurt, but it takes so much effort to heal. I met some philosophers recently that talked about toast. It is so easy to make toast out of bread, but it is so hard to make a fresh bread out of toast. How can this thought be applied to political change? And I think about this question two-ways: Can we make collective acts that is impossible reverse? And also, can we undo the traumas, the stories, the history that has constituted our bodies?

How to go out of body & fuck with yourself

This is a rewrite of a blogpost published in swedish before. I made it for Inpex 2012 edition of the infamous silver bible aka. The Swedish Dance History vol. 4. It’s situated in the very end of the book btw.

10_tsdh-moss

What happens to our capacities to look and see when our senses are dominated by an image world? Who can we become? Video glasses are just about to hit consumer markets (although still pricy and bulky). Who knows if it will be used in everyday life, but anyhow it could definitely be a tool for artistic development. So let’s talk about the possibilities of enfolding visual immersion.

James Cameron, famous for for blockbusters such as Titanic and Avatar and a lot of crap had some interesting ideas too. To his merits one could mention the script for the Terminator movies as well as the commercial failure Strange Days (1996). It’s not a good movie, but it should concern us.

rodney-kingLA in flames

My guess is that Strange Days was written in the backwash of the LA riots in 1992, which followed a well known dramaturgy (frequently replayed during the uprisings in Europe as well as the Arab world in recent years). Four white cops beat up a black guy. They are all declared innocent by a white jury. An “amateur photographer” (so retro I know) captured the whole thing, which made the reality of the situation very obvious. The anger that erupted led to a wave of revolt, looting and general mayhem. 53 persons where killed during the riots, many of them shot by police and military forces. (Oh, memory is short.)

The LA riots in many ways foregoes the protest movements that grew during the nineties, such as the globalization movement. When state violence is visualized in such an inevitable way revolt will follow. The images are verification of a common experience of suppression, that can be shared through the imagery. Cameron probably had some presumptions because he set Strange Days in the future. More precisely the fateful night of new years eve 1999, at the dawn of a new millennia (#1 anti-climax of our lives). LA, which is also the stage of the movie, is depicted in a carnevalesque state of emergency.

strange-days

“This is not like TV only better”

At the center of the action is a new media technology circulating on the black market. The tech makes it possible to record short clips (think Youtube), containing all the sensory experiences that a person have when the recording happens. By mounting a helmet that sends sensory stimuli directly into ones brain anyone can relive or re-experience the same event from within.

The clip that sparks the plot contains a recording of a police assault as discussed above. Another clip was shot during a robbery and ends when the robber in a hitchcockian manner falls from a roof – the difference being that this time we follow the subjective gaze all the way down – POV.

I thought Strange Days was more or less forgotten, but when I checked for it in my book shelfs it shows up here and there. Bolter and Grusin describes the fictional media technology pretty well in Remediation:

“This is not like TV only better,” says Lenny Nero in the futuristic film StrangeDays. “This is life. It’s a piece of somebody’s life. Pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex. You’re there. You’re doing it, seeing it, hearing it . . . feeling it.” Lenny is touting to a potential customer a technological wonder called “the wire.” When the user places the device over her head, its sensors make contact with the perceptual centers in her brain. In its recording mode, the wire captures the sense-perceptions of the wearer; in its playback mode, it delivers these recorded perceptions to the wearer. If the ultimate purpose of media is indeed to transfer sense experiences from one person to another, the wire threatens to make all media obsolete. Lenny mentions television, but the same critique would seem to apply to books, paintings, photographs, film, and so on. The wire bypasses all forms of mediation and transmits directly from one consciousness to another.

The media thus conceals itself, experience seems instant, what Bolter and Grusin call immediacy. Immediacy is described in relation to an opposing mode: hypermediacy, where the medium presents its own mediumship, such as when the camera is revealed as a camera by blur or image distortion. Oddly enough, hypermedia seems to be an equally successful strategy to create credible and compelling images, but that’s a parenthesis in this context.

strange-days-poster

Abuse turned inside-out

The sensory clips in Strange Days are raw, uncut and often violent or erotic. They are recorded on cassettes susceptibly MiniDisc-looking. There’s a really disgusting scene that is hard to rid off your mind. A man put a recording device on himself and a playback device on a woman, then he ties and rapes her. She looks at her body from the outside and how he approaches it. She can also feel how he is enjoying the abuse. Thus, she becomes co-driver in the body of the raper, and is forced to enjoy the situation through him. This makes the abuse even worse.

strangedays-2000

This gap, to see yourself from the outside, to be a body that has disconnected from the consciousness is of course a daunting and exciting condition that obviously meet certain trends in media development, but in Strange Days it is taken to its extreme. My hacker friend Leo told me about how the shady group Hack Canada experimented with relatively simple techniques experimented to re-stage the setup.

Telepresence and wetware hacking

single-modeHC have a section where they describe various attempts to hack the brain, one of them is TelePresence Bi-Autoerotic Intercourse:

Remember that scene in the movie Strange Days where the killer used some bizarre futuristic neural recorder technology to transmit what he saw and felt to his victim as he raped and killed her? So from her perspective it was like she was raping and killing herself, and getting-off on the act. Well, there won’t be any rape or killing here, but I realized I had all the gear kicking around to do something similar to this. Using a Virtual Reality Head Mounted Display and a miniature video camera, a person can see themself having sex from their partners’ perspective. Telepresence Bi-Autoerotic Intercourse… phuck yourself.

In the above setup, one can visually experience how it is to fuck with oneself while physically staying in ones own body. The hacker crew underlines that the kick is all about moving the consciousness out of ones own body.

Foremost, the sensation of telepresence when viewed through an HMD is quite mind-blowing. It’s as if you have left your body. The disembodied feeling is further complicated upon seeing oneself from another person’s perspective. When the camera wearer holds their arms out and starts coming at you, and touching you, ones mind really takes a twist. The other persons arms seem like your own, and suddenly you feel very vulnerable and trapped, it’s like assaulting yourself and you can do nothing about it. Very disorienting. Don’t get me wrong, it is great fun and great entertainment.

The setup can also be doubled, so that both parties see the situation from each other’s perspective:

dual-mode

Anyway, back to the sexual experience. Holding the Camera and viewing from a variety of disembodied third person perspectives is very stimulating and unique. Many intriguing variations are possible and it makes for good foreplay since regular forms of foreplay are restricted by the bulkiness of the HMD. Now, as far as how stimulating you will find all of this depends largely on your intellectual openess and your level of priggishness.

There are not many artists who have started working in this direction yet. An exception I found was Me and the Machine by Sam Pearson and Clara García Fraile. They made a nine-minute film as seen through video glasses and simultaneously “portrayed” sensory by a dancer. How well it works is hard to see from the documentation. Perhaps the gap between the viewer’s movements and camera movements are too big to fool the brain, but our mind is generally good in making sense out of diverse input.

Well, we can only find out by starting to experiment with it. In short: Turn on, tune in, drop out.

Märkliga dagar – videoglasögon & videovåld

Vad händer med seendet när det domineras totalt av en bildvärld? Mitt arbete med avatarerna och det faktum att videoglasögon nu är teknik tillgänglig på konsumentmarknaden (även om den är dyr och svårhanterlig) gör att det känns angeläget att tänka lite kring den estetik som har och kommer att kunna utvecklas runt den typen av inneslutande bildmedium. Vi börjar i LA ’92.

James Cameron har inte bara gjort blockbusters som Titanic och Avatar. Han har både klassiker och stolpskott på sin meritlista. Till meriterna hör att han skrev manus till Terminator-filmerna, de mindre smickrarna delarna av hans karriär är ex. Rambo och pirayafilmen med den smaskiga undertiteln “De flygande mördarna”. Camerons intressantaste film var (såklart) ett kommersiellt misslyckande.  Det är verkligen inte en fantastisk film, men den bär på en del intressanta idéer.

Los Angeles står i lågor

Strange Days spelades in 1995 och utspelar sig i LA. Den är antagligen skriven med LA-upploppen 1992 i färskt minne. Upploppet följde en vid det här laget välkänd dramaturgi. 4 vita poliser misshandlade en svart kille och friades för tilltaget av en vit jury. En “amatörfotograf” (som man kallade det på den tiden) hade dock filmat förloppet. Ilskan födde en omfattande våg av revolt, plundring och förstörelse. 53 personer dog under kravallerna, många sköts till döds av polis och militär och ett par tusen personer skadades.

LA-revolten föregriper på många sätt de proteströrelser som växte under nittiotalet, såsom globaliseringsrörelsen. Samma medielogik har också varit aktiv under den arabiska våren. När statens våld blir synliggjort sprider sig upproret, bilderna tydliga bevis på en gemensam erfarenhet av förtryck. Cameron hade nog sina föraningar. Strange Days utspelar sig nämligen i framtiden – den ödesdigra nyårskvällen 1999, på tröskeln mot det nya årtusendet. LA skildras som ett karnevaleskt undantagstillstånd bestående av festyra och upplopp.

“This is not like TV only better”

I centrum för handlingen står en ny medieteknologi som cirkulerar på svarta marknaden. Tekniken gör det möjligt att spela in korta klipp (tänk Youtube), innehållande alla sensoriska upplevelser som en människa får medan inspelningen sker. Genom att ta på sig en sorts hjälm som skickar sensorisk information rakt in i hjärnan kan någon annan sedan återuppleva samma händelse. Självklart innehåller filmen en inspelning av ett polisövergrepp såsom redogjorts ovan. Ett annat klipp är inspelat under ett rån och slutar med att rånaren på hitchcockskt manér faller från ett hustak, med skillnaden att vi denna gång får följa med hela vägen ner, i point-of-view.

Jag trodde att Strange Days var mer eller mindre bortglömd, men när jag rotar lite i mina gamla böcker dyker den upp både här och där. Bolter & Grusin beskriver i Remediation den fiktiva medieteknologin ganska väl:

“This is not like TV only better,” says Lenny Nero in the futuristic film StrangeDays. “This is life. It’s a piece of somebody’s life. Pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex. You’re there. You’re doing it, seeing it, hearing it . . . feeling it.” Lenny is touting to a potential customer a technological wonder called “the wire.” When the user places the device over her head, its sensors make contact with the perceptual centers in her brain. In its recording mode, the wire captures the senseperceptions of the wearer; in its playback mode, it delivers these recorded perceptions to the wearer. If the ultimate purpose of media is indeed to transfer sense experiences from one person to another, the wire threatens to make all media obsolete. Lenny mentions television, but the same critique would seem to apply to books, paintings, photographs, film, and so on. The wire bypasses all forms of mediation and transmits directly from one consciousness to another.

Mediet döljer alltså sig sjävt, upplevelsen framstår omedelbar, vad Bolter & Grusin kallar immediacy. Immediacy beskrivs i relation till en motsatt framställning – hypermediacy – där mediet visar upp sin egen medialitet, t ex när kameran avslöjas som kamera genom oskärpa eller andra bildstörningar. Märkligt nog kan hypermedialitet vara en lika framgångsrik strategi för att skapa trovärdiga och övertygande bilder, men det är en parantes i sammanhanget.

Ett ut-och-invänt övergrepp

De sensoriska klippen i Strange Days är råa, oklippta och ofta våldsamma eller erotiska. De spelas in på kasetter misstänkt lika Minidisc. Det finns en riktigt vidrig scen som man inte släpper i första taget, men som också ställer det här påhittade mediet på sin spets. En man sätter en inspelningsapparat på sig själv och en uppspelningsapparat på en kvinna, sedan binder och våldtar han henne. Hon ser alltså sin kropp utifrån och hur han närmar sig henne och njuter av övergreppet. Hon blir alltså medpassagerare i våldtäktsmannens kropp och tvingas njuta med honom. Detta gör på något sätt övergreppet än värre.

Det här glappet, att se sig själv utifrån, att bli en kropp som frånkopplats sitt medvetande är förstås ett skrämmande och eggande tillstånd som såklart svarar mot vissa tendenser i medieutvecklingen, men som i Strange Days tas till sin spets. Leo tipsade mig om hur ett gäng kanadensiska hackers experimenterat med relativt enkel teknik experimenterat med scenen.

Telenärvaro och våtvaruhacking

Hack Canada har en avdelning där de beskriver olika försök att hacka sin hjärna, ett av dem, Telepresence Bi-Autoerotic Intercourse, är inspirerat av Strange days:

Remember that scene in the movie Strange Days where the killer used some bizarre futuristic neural recorder technology to transmit what he saw and felt to his victim as he raped and killed her? So from her perspective it was like she was raping and killing herself, and getting-off on the act. Well, there won’t be any rape or killing here, but I realized I had all the gear kicking around to do something similar to this. Using a Virtual Reality Head Mounted Display and a miniature video camera, a person can see themself having sex from their partners’ perspective. Telepresence Bi-Autoerotic Intercourse… phuck yourself.

I ovanstående uppställning kan man alltså visuellt uppleva det som att man ligger med sig själv medan man kroppsligen stannar i sin egen kropp. Hackergänget menar att kicken ligger i att flytta medvetandet ut ur sin egna kropp.

Foremost, the sensation of telepresence when viewed through an HMD is quite mind-blowing. It’s as if you have left your body. The disembodied feeling is further complicated upon seeing oneself from another person’s perspective. When the camera wearer holds their arms out and starts coming at you, and touching you, ones mind really takes a twist. The other persons arms seem like your own, and suddenly you feel very vulnerable and trapped, it’s like assaulting yourself and you can do nothing about it. Very disorienting. Don’t get me wrong, it is great fun and great entertainment.

Uppställningen kan även speglas, så att båda parter ser situationen ur varandras perspektiv:

Anyway, back to the sexual experience. Holding the Camera and viewing from a variety of disembodied third person perspectives is very stimulating and unique. Many intriguing variations are possible and it makes for good foreplay since regular forms of foreplay are restricted by the bulkiness of the HMD. Now, as far as how stimulating you will find all of this depends largely on your intellectual openess and your level of priggishness.

Konstnärliga implikationer

Det är inte så många konstnärer som har börjat jobba åt det här hållet ännu. Om ni har tips får ni gärna kommentera nedan. Ett undantag är Me and the Machine av Sam Pearson och Clara García Fraile. De har gjort en nio minuter lång film som man ser genom videoglasögon och som samtidigt “gestaltas” sensoriskt av en dansare. Hur väl det fungerar är svårt att se utifrån. Kanske är glappet mellan de betraktarens rörelser och kamerans rörelser för stora för att lura hjärnan.

Avatarer och eXistenZer

“I’m not sure. I’m not sure here, where we are, is real at all. This feels like a game to me. And you, you begin to feel like a character.”
-Ted addressing Allegra, eXistenZ

Avatarer är i hinduisk kontext de kroppar som tas i besittning av gudarna när de behöver uträtta sina ärenden på jorden, men används i modern mening ofta om representationer för personer i virtuella världar. En kan också tala om besatthet och maskbärande i termer av avatarism (vilket använts i verklighetsspel som Maskspel och Prosopopeija). I lajv fungerar rollerna som spelarnas avatarer (även om spelare och roll delar samma kropp). I dramatisk handlingsanalys ses rollfigurerna, kanske lite mer långsökt, som åskådarnas avatarer som utför handlingar i deras ställe.

Avataren som figur aktiverar frågor om kontroll, makt och subjektivitet. Vad innebär det att betrakta sin egen kropp som en avatar? Vad händer när vi låter en yttre kraft ta vår kropp i besittning? Kan vi själva vara den kraften för oss själva eller varandra? Kan avatarer användas som instrument för att skapa nya gemenskaper?

Jag har inga svar på frågorna, men har börjat klura på det i relation till olika projekt och idéer som bubblat runt den senaste tiden. Det här är ett ofärdigt och möjligen rörigt försök att tänka kring frågorna.

En hjälp för att begrunda avataren är filmen eXistenZ från 1999 av David Cronenberg. Det sägs ju att ’99 är vår generations ’68, ett år laddat med vissa kulturella erfarenheter. Redan 1983 undersökte Cronenberg vad videomediet gjorde med vårt seende i den relativt stökiga men kultförklarade Videodrome. I eXistenZ utforskar han på olika sätt datorspelens estetik och subjektiviteter. Över båda filmerna vilar en mörk psykoanalytisk ton där kroppen står i centrum. Mötet med den virtuella världen är inte transcendent utan kroppslig, för att inte säga köttig.

Själva förutsättningen för att spela eXistenZ, som inte bara är titeln på filmen, utan även titeln på det spel de spelar i filmen, är att man kopplar in en organisk maskin (se ovan) rakt in i ryggraden. Spelet kräver alltså att spelaren öppnar ett nytt hål in i sin kropp för att kunna uppleva den virtuella verkligheten som verklig, något som föranleder viss penetrerationsskräck hos traineen Ted, som måste få en “bioport” installerad.

Jag tror dock inte att vi ska läsa filmen som att den handlar om hur dataspel fungerar, utan snarare hur verkligheten fungerar i en värld av dataspelare. Filmen innehåller sedvanliga meta-vändningar av typen spel i spelet, dröm i drömmen, men dessa är lika lättförutsedda som i Matrix, Inception, osv och spelar inte någon viktig roll utöver att påminna oss om att verkligheten struktureras genom våra fantasier. Det är inte verkligheten som håller samman vår världsbild, utan fantasierna. Verkligheten är alltför komplicerad, mångfacetterad och traumatisk. Så det är när vi står utan strukturerande fantasier som verkligheten rasar samman.

Så det är snarare den andra delen av det inledande citatet som fångar min uppmärksamhet. När spelarna börjar betrakta varandra som spelkaraktärer så händer något med deras relation. Detta är förstås välbekant i levande rollspel, sociala roller sätts på undantag, och filmen kan lätt ses som ett sorts mörk schizofren version av lajv. Men att använda roller, scheman och mönster för sitt handlande är vanligt förekommande även i vardagslivet.

I eXistenZ händer att karaktärer loopar, fastnar, säger samma sak om och om igen:

ALLEGRA: He’s gone into a game loop. He won’t come out of it until you give him a proper line of game dialogue.

Jag har ofta den här typen av känsla även i vardagen. Extra tydligt blir det till exempel när en blir upprings av telefonförsäljare, som följer ett interaktivt manus, eller i en chattsupport där de första meddelanden skrivs av en bot: “Hej och välkommen!” “Vad har du för problem?”, efter en minut kommer en mänsklig support in i chatten och tar botens plats. Telefonförsäljare blir också en sorts mänskliga avatarer för försäljningsmaskinen. Mitt mål vid sådana samtal har blivit att försöka rubba försäljaren ur denna bana, för att på något vis hitta en mänsklig relation och påminna om en annan sorts subjektivitet (kanske är detta naivt).

En annan scen (ur verkligheten) som påminner mig om denna problematik såg jag när två personer möttes på Götgatan, den ena försäljare av mobiltelefonabbonemang, den andra medlemsrekryterare från en välgörenhetsorganisation, klädda i respektive organisationsuniform. Båda misslyckades med att bli del i den andres manus och ur detta misslyckande skapades ett möte.

Jag inser att en uppdelning i playing och non-playing characters (personer) är både skrämmande och farlig. Självklart måste vi hålla gråskalorna i åtanke här. Varenda morgon när klockan ringer är jag själv i non-playing modus. Om jag ska göra någonting så är det utifrån automatism, handlingar som jag på förhand vet ska utföras och därför inte behöver ta beslut om (klä på mig, borsta, sätta på kaffet). Men att måla upp gråzonerna räcker inte för att begripa och avväpna problemet. Marx snurrar ju runt dessa frågor redan 1844 i och med alienationskritiken i sina Ekonomisk-filosofiska manuskript, men det verkar som om alienationen ser lite annorlunda ut idag, eftersom den på något sätt förutsätter ett någorlunda konsistent subjekt som kan brytas ner och delas upp. Idag föds vi in i matrisen/existenzen/verkligheten utan den förmoderna historia som Marx hade i ryggen.

Estetiken i filmen skiljer sig från lajv på ett par punkter som öppnar nya och spännande möjligheter för verklighetsspel, lajv och deltagande performance i allmänhet. Lajv har varit väldigt besatt av så kallad 360°-estetik, där alla element, roller och miljö tillsammans ska bilda en fulländad värld, utan sprickor i kanten. eXistenZ liknar mer ett MMO: spelarna tilltalar ständigt varandra såsom spelare, men när de vill interagera med spelvärlden så måste de behandla den som om den vore verklig. Spelets NPCs (non-playing characters) svarar inte på tilltal om de inte tilltalas som roller:

ALLEGRA: Start by repeating your last line and include his name so he knows you are talking to him.

Strukturen kommer från dataspel och i viss mån bordsrollspel. 2 WoW-spelare kan diskutera en räd utanför spelets fiktiva ramar, men när de väl skrider till verket gör de det inom dessa ramar. Skillnaden är att eXistenZ avatarer har kroppar, de skulle kunna vara verkliga personer, och jag tror att vi ska förstå dem som verkliga.

Med eXistenZ-estetik skulle man kunna jobba med en aktiv publik som är sig själva, men som måste köpa storyn för att kunna närma sig den. Publikpositionen närmar sig då traditionell suspension of disbelief, såsom den ser ut i andra medier, vilket sänker tröskeln för deltagande. Att aktivt leva sig in i roll, värld och berättelse på det sätt som lajvare gör är ofta alltför omständigt och energikrävande för att de flesta personer ska vara intresserade.

En publik skulle även kunna styras med t ex ljudinstruktioner, som t ex Lundahl-Seitl jobbar i Symphony of a missing room, utan att någon 360°-illusion bryter samman. MindFeed fungerade också lite enligt såna principer. Lydnaden skapar ytterligare frågor och problem kring njutningen och motviljan att underordna sig en annan person, en röst eller ett system. Oavsett skapar avataren ett spännande glapp mellan kropp och agens som kan undersökas utifrån (gammel)moderna cartesianska idéer om kropp-själ såväl som postmoderna idéer om subjektsupplösning, människa-maskinrelationer, osv.

eXistenZ tar stundom sina spelare i besittning, för att föra handlingen vidare, en sorts cut scenes (i speltermer). Till exempel hånglar Ted och Alleghra ofrivilligt upp varandra för att det passar spelets dramaturgi. Spelet tar även över deras tal:

TED: God… What happened? I didn’t mean to say that?
ALLEGRA: It’s your character who said it. It’s a kind of schizophrenic feeling isn’t it? You’ll get used to it. There are things that have to be said to advance the plot … and those things get said wether you want to say it or not. Don’t fight it, go with it.

Hela filmen finns på Youtube i taskig kvalitet och på Piratebay för den som föredrar det.