It happened tomorrow is an artistic research contribution, in the form of video loops on CRT monitors, to the final exhibition of the programme Climate Imaginaries at Sea. The exhibition is titled 'Unimaginable, clarion calls from rising seas' and was hosted at Bradwolff from 19 to 25 April 2024.De Gaetano curated a special collection of more than 400 videos from the open archives of Sound & Vision, including short films, documentaries, and news reports about different forms of (other than) human relationships with water in the Netherlands. In an ongoing series of workshops called “It Happened Tomorrow/ Reflections on Water,” still images from the collection have prompted students, artists, researchers, and policymakers currently based in the Netherlands to collectively speculate on future ways of living in a country with higher waters. Through individual and collective drawing and climate fiction exercises, people were invited to look at and expand on still frames from the collection as a way to imagine possible future landscapes, adaptation scenarios, and how to co-inhabit them with other species. These video montages explore and respond to the imaginaries generated during the participatory workshops and the narratives encountered in the audiovisual collection. Conversations from the workshops informed the textual captions on the videos, which take the form of fictional letters from an unknown researcher travelling through the Netherlands in 2124. Following Ursula Le Guin Carrier's bag theory of fiction, the audio-visual assemblages propose non-linear accounts of possible futures, open-ended and without heroes. Generative AI takes the role of co-fabulator in queering the boundary between past and future, human and more than human, giving shape to tiny climate fictions that question how we look at nature and how we can reimagine ourselves as part of it.
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The Kenyan supreme court recently struck down a government decision to ban the registration of an LGBTIQ+ community rights organisation, sparking new homophobic rhetoric in the country. Kenya is one of 32 African countries that criminalises homosexuality. Those who identify as part of the LGBTIQ+ community are often discriminated against, harassed and assaulted. Lise Woensdregt and Naomi van Stapele, who have researched queer experiences in Kenya for nine years, explain the impact of this ruling.
"My PD-trajectory aims to contribute to knowledge development in the domains of artacademic institutions, the queer/drag/HIV community, and advocacy as context for queer safety. Emphasis will be placed on how to write, document, design, and archive elements in order to shape language to actively comprehend each other’s affinities, aspirations, and propel visibility for emancipatory realities by creating empathy among differences. Incorporating the theorization of new terms such as “gift dragonomy” and “dragging as grafting” based on drag mothering knowledge will play an active role in preserving subcultural language while avoiding ‘representational fixity.”
In 2007 at Ropecon, a large Finnish roleplaying convention, Emily Care Boss coined the term bleed to refer to emotional transference that sometimes happened to players of roleplaying games. Bleed describes an effect where emotions and attitudes experienced while roleplaying a character continue on after the roleplaying session was over, or the other way around, where a player brings their own feelings into the character they are embodying. For example, a player would roleplay a romance with another player's character, and then develop feelings for said player after the game was over. Bleed can create powerful effects in a roleplaying session, both positive and negative, which has resulted in the development of various best practices and safety tools that analogue game designers can draw upon, and roleplaying games frequently have mechanics designed around inducing and maximizing particular types of bleed in their players. Bleed mechanics lend themselves particularly well to exploring queer and otherwise marginalized identities, generating empathy, and exploring acts of political resistance. They are a powerful tool in the analogue game designers’ toolbox. Digital games make comparatively far less use of bleed in their designs than analogue games—the concept of bleed is not well-known among digital game designers. Consequently, there is little guidance for designing digital bleed mechanics, and insufficient safety tools with which to do so. With how powerful these effects can be, the knowledge and tools gaps for digital games needs addressing. This research project will create primarily digital narrative games that are explicitly designed to invoke bleed, and seeks to provide designers with new frameworks and safety tools to create bleed effects for digital games. Games will be created with varying themes and approaches regarding identity and storytelling to explore how, in particular, narrative design influences bleed in digital games.
