Talk with Catherine L. Hansen: Interactive Fiction and the Arts of Attention

At this evening talk with educator and researcher Catherine L. Hansen, we phone Tokyo to discuss what video games and other game media can show us, as laboratories of radical, minor, non-commodified attention. Interactive fiction (IF) lies at the intersection of experimental and avant-garde lineages in art and literature, from Dada and Surrealism to pataphysics and the Oulipo—a mid-century US hobbyist counterculture of coders, cavers, and D&D role-players—and a contemporary community of noncommercial makers and storytellers.

How are avant-garde dreams of revolutionizing everyday life through renewed attention still alive in today’s gaming cultures, from mainstream to marginal? How have they been sustained or challenged by new technologies? How can text democratize the attentional architecture of gaming? Finally, how can we look at games (including IF) as a place where practices of attention become negotiable, communal, newly legible, and unpredictably creative? How can this help us see familiar games differently, and also imagine what games could still be?

In light of these questions, we will talk about and play X is for Examine, a collection of IF games made by Hansen and her University of Tokyo students Lee Carlisle, Chenren Li, and Edwin Zheng, now on view at SoRA’s current exhibition, Beyond Dark Flow.