Writing
Capitalism
We live in a time where work and labour can be practised remotely, contracted across borders, and makes up what we call today ‘the gig economy’. As a critique of capitalism this game questions how the gig economy reflects social life today. Digital culture theorist McKenzie Wark writes in Capital is Dead:
“As Cardi B raps, “I’m a boss you a worker bitch.” What it means to be a boss is now modeled on the vectoralist rather than the capitalist class. It’s about accumulating asymmetric relations of information. It’s about commanding and monopolizing information. It’s about monetizing appearances. The thing to aspire to is a brand starting with the branded self and branching out from there.”
Assembly lines, construction sites, desks, cubicles, co-ops, coffee breaks and beyond, a workspace is a prime example of how work and leisure impact our identity.
Game: Post_Human Monday
Surveillance
The Black Lives Matter movement gave way to a dialog around modern policing widely across North America but also globally. A film like Queen and Slim continues to center an unsettling tensions that still exist while Screening Surveillance, a short film of near future fictions, puts into focus persistent vulnerabilities within surveillance. All bring new meaning to diversity; privileging what Black Writers Matter describes as the act of gathering which mirrors Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering.
Resource: The Carded
Queerness
Queer studies then acts as a way to think critically about the way identity come together socially and culturally. From The Boys Who Became The Hummingbirds, Daniel Heath writes in Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time: An Indigenous LGBT Sci-fi Anthology:
"So they darted to those whose hearts beat strongest, streaks of blinding bright grace, calling to them in soft voices, sharing stories of possibility beyond the grim dust of what was to a hopeful possibility of what could be."
To push this further, how is climate change also inextricably a part of a community’s experience?
Project: OCASI