Max Haiven (and company)

With game designer and professor Paolo Pedercini we explore the possibility of anti-capitalist games and what's behind today's conspiracy movements.

Paolo Pedercini is a game developer, curator and educator. He teaches digital media production and experimental game design at the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. Since 2003 he works under the project name “Molleindustria” producing provocative games addressing issues of social and environmental justice, religion, and labor and sexuality.

Paolo is the director of LIKELIKE, a neo-arcade devoted to independent games and playful art in Pittsburgh, PA.

Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan of the Laboratory for the Insurectionary Imagination present their 2021 book **We Are 'Nature' Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones** published by the RiVAL-affiliated VAGABONDS series of Pluto Press in cooperation with the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest

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For a video version of this talk, please visit: https://youtu.be/4rcJjws1tlk

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Information about the book: https://vagabonds.xyz/wandi/

Purchase the book worldwide: https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745345871/we-are-nature-defending-itself/

Information about the authors: https://www.labo.zone/

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In 2008, as the storms of the financial crash started to blow, Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan deserted the metropolis and their academic jobs, embarking on a journey across Europe in search for postcapitalist utopias. They wanted their art activism to no longer be uprooted.

They arrived at a place French politicians had declared “lost to the republic”, known by those who inhabited it as la ZAD (the ‘zone to defend’): a messy but extraordinary canvas of commoning, illegally occupying 4,000 acres of wetlands where an international airport was planned.

In 2018, the 40-year-long struggle snatched an incredible victory, defeating the infrastructure project through a powerful cocktail that merged creation and resistance.

The following piece by Max Haiven, A. T. Kingsmith and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou was pubished in the Los Angeles Review of Books on Saturday, 13 November 2021 and is available here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/whither-harmony-square-conspiracy-games-in-late-capitalism

We're joined by Keir Milburn joins us to talk about the rise of the cosmic right and their conspiritual weirdness, as well as the fate of the acid left and the role of games in revolutionary movements.

Keir Milburn is a longtime political activist from the UK. He spent over a decade teaching political economy and organization but now works on municipalism, economic democracy and political economy for the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. His most recent book is Generation Left. He is a member of the Red Plenty Games Collective and co-hosts the #ACFM podcast on Novara Media.

Ruth and Marc of Furtherfield Gallery join us to talk about the connections between art, games and revolutions in everyday life and technology.

Furtherfield disrupts and democratises art and technology through exhibitions, labs & debate, for deep exploration, open tools & free thinking and is London’s longest-running (de)centre for art and technology whose mission is to disrupt and democratise through deep exploration, open tools and free-thinking.

Ruth Catlow is its co-founding artistic director and has spent 20 years exploring games, and more recently Live Action Role Play as a way of engaging people's imaginations and expertise across silos, around emerging technologies and the wicked social and political problems they give rise to or intensify. Catlow is the founder of DECAL Decentralised Arts Lab crowdsourcing R&D by leading artists, using blockchain and web 3.0 technologies for fairer, more dynamic and connected cultural ecologies and economies. She is also PI at the Blockchain Lab at the Serpentine Galleries R&D Platform.

Marc Garrett is a co-founder of Furtherfield ho has curated over 60 contemporary Media Art exhibitions and projects in the UK and internationally. Heb is recently the co-editor of the books Artists Re: thinking the Blockchain, State Machines: Reflections & Actions at the Edge of Digital Citizenship, Finance, & Art and Frankenstein Reanimated: Art and Life in the 21st Century.

A wide-ranging conversation with Aleena Chia about the labour of fans, the joys of rabbit-holing, con/spirituality communities and the importance of democratic engagement.

Aleena Chia is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University and incoming Lecturer of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She researches cultures of creativity such as automation in digital game production, lucid dreaming in Consciousness Hacking communities of practice, and wellness ideologies in social media disconnection. She is co-author of TechnoPharmacology (University of Minnesota Press/ Meson Press, forthcoming) and has published in journals such as the Journal of Fandom Studies and Television and New Media. - http://aleenachia.org/

For more information about the podcast visit http://conspiracy.games

A feminist care conspiracy? An artwork transmogrified into a world-wide secret society? A free anti-capitalist social technology? A revolutionary pyramid scheme? Cassie Thornton shares The Hologram project: a ferminist, peer-to-peer social technology for collective health and rebellion (thehologram.xyz).

Cassie Thornton (feministeconomicsdepartment.com) is an artist and activist who makes a “safe space” for the unknown, for disobedience, and for unanticipated collectivity. She uses social practices including institutional critique, insurgent architecture, and “healing modalities” like hypnosis and yoga to find soft spots in the hard surfaces of capitalist life. Cassie has invented a grassroots alternative credit reporting service for the survivors of gentrification, has hypnotized hedge fund managers, has finger-painted with the grime found inside banks, has donated cursed paintings to profiteering bankers, and has taught feminist economics to yogis (and vice versa). Her new book, The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future, is available from Pluto Press (https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745343327/the-hologram). She is currently the co-director of the Re-Imagining Value Action Lab (reimaginingvalue.ca) in Thunder Bay, an art and social centre at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada.

A wide-ranging conversation with acclaimed and bestselling author, essayist and podcaster Hari Kunzru centring on his 2020 novel *Red Pill*.

Born in London, Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions, Gods Without Men, and White Tears, as well as a short story collection, Noise and a novella, Memory Palace. His new novel Red Pill was published in September 2020. He is an honorary fellow of Wadham College Oxford, and has received fellowships from the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy in Berlin. He is the host of the podcast Into The Zone, from Pushkin Industries. He lives in New York City.

We are caught between two wars of restoration: the far-right, seeking to return us to a fabled past and a liberal capitalist "centre" demanding more business as usual. Between these two, dark new "conspiracy theories" breed, especially among men, which reinforce the worst of patriarchy, with deadly effect...

Jack Bratich is professor of Journalism and Media Studies at the Rutgers School of Communications and Information. His research focuses on themes including the interface of political culture and popular culture, conspiracy panics, surveillance, journalism, activism, and the production of truth. He is author of Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (2008).

How have governments and other powerful forces conspired against Black people in "North America" since the colonial invasion? How are fears about conspiracy theorizies displaced onto Black and racialized people? How do we separate the real conspiratorial functions of power from dangerous conspiracy fantasies?

El Jones is a poet, journalist, professor and abolitionist activist living in K'jipuktuk (Halifax, Canada). She is a two-time Canadian national spoken word champion and served as Halifax's poet laureate from 2013-15.