Validation and recognitions

After pondering several terms: gesture, performance, agency, boundary object; several theoretical positions- actor-network theory, Gell's anthropology of art, boundary object theory, and phenomenology; and several scholars- Bart Simon, Bruno Latour, S.L. Star &J.R. Griesemer, Husserl, Alfred Gell and Carrie Noland; I have come full circle in re-encountering thinking that inspired me two years ago. As I began to think about the relationship of digital games to art history, I was at once encouraged by my friend, mentor and M.A. Supervisor Jean Bélisle to focus on the facts, before embarking on theories.

But the facts I had found were much inspired by a presentation on gestural games (think the Nintendo Wii, and now the Xbox360 Kinect) that Bart Simon, a sociology professor gave regarding how game players emulate and simulate movements far beyond the needs of a game. In that respect, he was very much engaged in his talents as an ethnographer. These talents would be embraced and expanded in the work of Shanly Dixon, a childhood friend and now expert in the field of childhood, cyberculture especially as regards girls and games. These people began to drive my thought towards space, and the sense of movement and embodiment that I saw as being significant towards drawing out the connections between artistic production, gamic experience and the embodied drive through space that occurs between and around these two realms.

As I have explored the problem of agency as dealt with by Alfred Gell, the British Anthropologist and the theorists of Actor-Network Theory, such as Bruno Latour, Michel Callon  and John Law, I came full circle to a scholar whose writing originally inspired me in her approach, but also her subject matter: Carrie Noland. A professor of Italian and French at UC Irvine, her essay about gesture and meaning in the artistic practice of Bill Viola gave me the impetus to start thinking about how to draw together the disparate thoughts I had about artistic practice, digital game aesthetics and the exciting discussion around gestural games that was emerging around the TAG(Technoculture Art and Games) Research Center of Montréal's Concordia University that had just been founded by Lynn Hughes, a design professor and Bart Simon, whose work had shifted from the sociology of science into video Game Studies.

This field excited me for both intellectual and pragmatic reasons. I see it as does Lynn Hughes among others such as Henry Jenkins, as a contemporary mode of performative artistic practice, rather than mass media.It is a wide open field, with much room for new thought. Looking at it from a phenomenological perspective, as arises from my undergraduate interests in Heidegger and later, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Noland's essay(1) seemed to cover everything that I thought was relevant, save digital games.

So it was with great pleasure that I have discovered that her recent book(2) attempts to reconcile theoretical problems with ANT and the controversial theory of agency advanced by the late Alfred Gell. That fact that we have both trod along parallel paths has encouraged me to believe that I might be thinking usefully about the problems that I have chosen to grapple with. The problem of how artistic practice is deployed or deploys through bodies moving in space, and how phenomenological insights can be gleaned from these considerations as we consider how meaning is realised through motion, and agency can be characterised without demanding intentionality be assumed.
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(1) Noland, Carrie "Motor Intentionality: Gestural Meaning in Bill Viola and Merleau-Ponty" in Postmodern Culture vol 17 #3
(2)Noland, Carrie. Agency and embodiment : performing gestures/producing culture. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2009