Interviewees- an Art Activist, Game Designer and Philosopher

Who I need to interview and how to do it.

WHO

The Art Activist- Margaret Tedesco
In 1995, she collaborated with Isabelle Massu on a year-long collaboration with a group of homeless people from San Francisco's Coalition on Homelessness. Parlor Game: a Popular Version was a series of board games depicting the city rules and regulations San Francisco's homeless had to bypass or confront in order to survive. Six different board games represented the different issues and branches of the association such as Housing - Not Borders and Shelter Outreach. The games were displayed as posters on Market Street in downtown San Francisco, and as an insert in the coalition's newspaper "Street Sheet". (www.sf-homeless-coalition.org)

I'd like to talk to her about the processes employed in the development of the project, about how the collaboration worked and a to get a retrospective view back on the effects of the project on the communities it targeted.

The Game Designer- Anne-Marie Schleiner
The author of Velvet Strike, a finely tuned piece of net art gaming activism with full documentation of gamer's responses.

Velvet-Strike is a collection of spray paints to use as graffiti on the walls, ceiling, and floor of the popular network shooter terrorism game "Counter-Strike". Velvet-Strike was conceptualized during the beginning of Bush’s "War on Terrorism." We invite others to submit their own "spray-paints" relating to this theme. (http://www.opensorcery.net/velvet-strike/)

I'd like to talk to her about the effect of the piece as activism. About how the game is regarded by people working in the commercial game sector (her flame page gives a hilarious snapshot of some of the more negative reactions to the game in the online gaming community). About the game's target audience and about Velvet Strike as constructive cultural terrorism with digital artists opposing gamers.

She writes very well about the alarming convergence of violent video games with real world politics and wargaming. I'm interested in the demographic of Counter-Strike gamers as potential targets for activism especially with the current commercial games industry so fixated on the genre of action games targeting young men and boldly refusing the power of games as social engineering.

The Philosopher - still a bit stuck here
One possible candidate is Johnny de Filo (Sue Golding), a UK based critical theorist/philosopher. I read her 'the eight technologies of otherness', (London: Routledge, 1997). A re-thinking of identity, politics, philosophy, ethics under a rubric of eight technologies (curiosity, noise, cruelty, appetite, skin, nomadism, contamination, and dwelling). l like her writing and hear that she recently gave a paper on games in which chess figured - perhaps this is it....

Games of Truth: a blood poetic in seven part harmony.
(London: The ‘Inaugural lecture Series’, the University of Greenwich, 2003). Emerging from an amalgamation of works over the past several years. It weaves together three interventions: those premising a situation of coding (ie, the codes of honour; the codes of nomadism; the codes of paradox and juxtaposition common to urban inhabitation; and those circumscribing the ‘how’ in ‘how are judgments made?’ It pays homage to the great paradigm shift we are witnessing (and indeed, are a part). Accompanied with video footage from Dakar, and 160 slides of artists’ works including Jean-Michel Basquiat, William Ewing, Annette Messager, Ellen Gallagher.

HOW

After talking to Steve Buckle from the Broadcasting department at Ravensbourne I've decided to go for a Heath Robinson approach. The website is already very text heavy so I'm going to record telephone interviews (by taping a contact mike to the telephone receiver) and stream the audio from the website. fun and functional lo-tech!