Torien Cafferata's MFA Defence: The Playbox
Wednesday, November 22, 2023 | 6:00 PM | FREE
Room 4390 鈥� Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
The Playbox is an autoneuroethnography in the form of a live theatre performance wherein audiences are invited to play and spectate a 鈥減re-release demo鈥� of a fictitious game console designed by and for the mad. Every year The Playbox is almost released, languishing in development hell as a manifestation of executive dysfunction, dissociation, perseveration, and other AuDHD pathologies. The demo is composed of anti-games of various classic and future genres played using cardboard controllers to operate my body-as-avatar, serving as a medium of delegation, a somatic and cognitive prosthetic, a nesting doll of agencies鈥攐f offers and asks to engage in maddened domestic labour. This work draws upon Robert Pfaller鈥檚 theory of 鈥渋nterpassivity鈥� vs. interactivity and McKenzie Wark鈥檚 鈥渁llegorithms鈥� and 鈥済amespace鈥濃�攁 space where work and play enmesh under ableist capitalism. This positions The Playbox as an AuDHD dialectics simulator in which players and avatar are simultaneously empowered and disabled by a hauntological neuroscape of impossible tasks, precarious materials, and unstable inputs and outputs.
Keywords: performance, interactive theatre, mad futures, mad studies, ludology, game studies, interpassivity, mixed reality, anti-game, hauntology, participatory art.