AGORAXCHANGE NEEDS YOU!

‘First citizenship ceremony for UK The first ceremony for immigrants granted British citizenship has taken place in London’:’Spending parents leave little inheritance More and more older people are skiing and it has nothing to do with snow and slopes: this type of skiing stands for Spending the Kids Inheritance, or SKI’:’Gay couples to get joint rights Gay and lesbian couples are to be given the chance to get similar legal rights to married couples under a new Civil Partnership Bill.’

These domestic sounding BBC news headlines of the last couple of months, that represent a microcosm of the everyday global struggles over resources, citizenship and personal freedom, would never have occurred under the new social order proposed by agoraXchange and neither would the headlines that tell of the deaths of 9 US soldiers, a Japanese hostage and 60 Iraqis in Falluja.

This net art project, commissioned by Tate Online to “Make the Game, Change the World” sets out four decrees which “form the fundamental political tenets for the new world system on which the game is based”. These are:-

1. CITIZENSHIP BY CHOICE
2. NO INHERITANCE
3. NO MARRIAGE
4. NO PRIVATE LANDRIGHTS

The stated purpose of agoraXchange is to establish “an online community for discussing and designing a massive multi-player global politics game challenging the violence and inequality of our present political system”.

Bravo, outstanding idea!

I was stirred up and provoked by the bold persuasive, agit-prop style of its “backstory: A Saga of Nations”, which subverts the history of man’s grand, evolutionary struggle towards civilisation with an alternative “herstory” of draconian border control and the apathy of the masses in the face of implacable state violence. This art project takes Nietzsche’s critique of the “sober realist’s” smugness (in the face of a world where things turn out to be exactly as bad as they had described), as a springboard for changing the law by changing the language. However I do feel that this art project, which also aims to liberate our creative imaginations, would be more successful with a shift of emphasis towards visual language, as a more generative, multilingual and accessible form of communication than the culturally encoded and politically loaded (in the global sense) use of (English) text.

Having gone to such lengths to implement the website to facilitate public engagement, Jacqueline Stevens and Natalie Bookchin, initiators of this project, may have created the game’s first nemesis in the form of its own online web presence- which inadvertently, through its elaborate structure and use of language, reproduces some of the problems of the insular academy rather than creating the ground-breaking, open collaborative community forum they intended. Its dense, theoretical and text-heavy content unwittingly imposes an invisible barrier to participation through an inflexible set of entry requirements for would-be contributors.

To take part in the early stages of the game design, one has to be proficient in the concepts of game theory. The “game design room” is divided and then sub-divided into categories, each of which pose general questions with incredibly complex ramifications. In the Player Representation forum we are asked to respond to the following question- “If the player is represented as an individual, what are its attributes?”, the answers to which must be contingent on one’s answers to other questions. In fact one must have a concept of a whole new game, inline with the core rules prescribed by the authors in order to contribute, unless one responds with a kind of academic, stream of consciousness inspired by the linguistic structure of the question posed.

In a previous projects The Intruder and Metapet, (an on-line virtual pet game in which a correlation is drawn between pets and employees where Biotech innovation meets corporate creativity), Bookchin has been fantastically successful at communicating and engaging players in great political games through a use of humour, irony, great visuals and a connection with popular culture.
In the agoraXchange Site Feedback forum a post by net artist, Kanarinka highlights the central problem.

“I am afraid that there is not enough at stake in this current game…Why would I ever come back to this site? Why would I care about the outcome of the discussions that take place here? Is there anything at stake for me here?”

agoraXchange sits alongside recent net art gaming activism projects such as Anne Marie Shleiner’s Velvet Strike. In Velvet Strike artists are invited to contribute to a collection of antiwar posters which can then be spray painted as graffiti on the walls, ceiling, and floor of the popular network shooter terrorism game “Counter-Strike”. This project intersects in a very clear and genuine way with a specific online community, with tactics that the audience understands because it is the subject of the game- guerilla tactics. In the hugely entertaining, informative and slightly scary “Flamers” section of the website we can see how players feel that there is something at stake- the defence of their right to play the game without feeling morally compromised.

For a game to work, it must have a real place in one’s idea of personal or collective destiny. If it is entirely speculative, giving no indication of how it might impact on the fortunes of the world, one’s contribution is in danger of becoming merely an exercise in didacticism, an attribution in a pamphlet in the library of a prestigious Institution.

Commissioned and platformmed by Tate Online agoraXchange truly has its foundations in an institution established and flourishing (with huge popular success) on the very principles that the proposed game sets out to subvert and so it’s surprising to see the platform treated in such an art-conventional way, as an online white cube, a neutral space. By overlooking the context in which it sits, associated with the Tate Online website, alongside the documentation of private and public collections which endorse an art cannon depicting many of the inherited patriarchal values which agoraXchange challenges, this project must be missing a trick; failing to take the circumstances and opportunities of its virtual affiliation into account. Surely this project should somehow engage with the Tate’s diverse online audience in a more direct and rebellious way; find out who they are, what they might contribute on their own terms.

Even with all its problems, this ambitiously conceived project is well worth a good exploration. I for one will be lobbying for a more flexible and intuitive format so that we can get to discover how a whole load of different types of people respond to their proposal for a new world order. We can safely say that in the war on war, AGORAXCHANGE NEEDS YOU!

Recent projects by Ruth Catlow include Rethinking Wargames.