Margarete Jahrmann

list of artworks http://www.konsum.net/

list of urban games/performances http://www.ludic-society.net

As artist and researcher Jahrmann investigates electronic objects, social play and urban games. 2010 she submitted her doctoral thesis on “Ludics – The Art and Politics of Play” at Roy Ascott, CAiiA Centre for Advanced Inquiry in Integrative Arts University of Plymouth. Her research focus lies on Ludics, play, political activism and arts. As an internationally renowned artist, she has been exhibited worldwide (selection: 2010 Digital art weeks, Xian, China; Space Invaders, FACT Liverpool, UK and NIMK Amsterdam, NL; 2009 Tales of Play, Alta Technología Andina Lima, Peru; Enter_Act, Kunstmuseum Aaros, Norway; 2008 Arco/Laboral Gijon, Spain; SESC / File Sau Paolo, Brasil; 2007 DIGRA Tokyo, Japan). She has received major media arts awards, such as the distinction in interactive arts, PrixArsElectronica 2003; and software arts award, Transmediale, Berlin 2004. In 2006 she founded the international arts research association Ludic Society, and since then edits the Ludic Society magazine, a periodical on Gay science, Ludics as research discipline and arts and play as method and strategy of agency.

PI Prof. Margarete Jahrmann lectures on Game Conceptions and theories in the department for Game Design at the University of Arts Zurich (since 2000) and lectures at the department Visuelle Mediengestaltung at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (since 1998) on machinima movies and artistic strategies.

current research: The emergence of Ludics as artform is informed by the practice-based research in the Internet of Things (as expressed in Urban Games and Gamefashion by the artist Margarete Jahrmann). Artworks of the genre of game arts give evidence for the playful everyday life in a contemporary ubiquitous mobile gadget world.

The art of Play – includes new forms of gaming with existing technologies. Freestyle gaming as a practice from games culture offers artistic methods to us. It means that we can play with existing games, in a new way. We can drive in the opposite direction in a racing game. We can learn from computer game principles for our life with technological gadgets. We can try to critically use the mobile phone, social networks and GPS, in order to develop art work, that really matters. Gaming informs urban structures through urban gaming, pervasive games inform research through social network games- so to say our reality!

Prosumer, Produsage as basis of knowledge environments

The term Prosumer is a portmanteau formed by contracting either the word ‘professional’ or ‘producer’ with ‘consumer’ (Toffler 1980). This concept was elaborated in the 1990s in terms of collaborative production in design and more recently has been developed in net­worked environments as Produsage (Bruns 2008). The aim of IP03 is to analyse this phenomenon by creating a knowledge-based Prosumer Game in the form of a public exhibition.

Within the Vienna team of the TEF project she works on the game conception of an arts/ research play – in order to explore, through theory and practice, a new form of media, which has been identified in ubiquitous computing realities and been shaped by ‘pervasive gaming’. This new form, known as Alternate Reality Games (ARG), is used as a tactic of persuasion by both artists and industrial producers of political propaganda and marketing strategies. For examples of these uses see: The Howard Dean Game for Iowa commissioned for the U.S. Presidential election 2003; Cambiemos commissioned for the Uruguayan Presidential elec­tion by Battegazzore Frasca, 2004; the BBC game Frozen Indigo Angel, 2006; ARG Game The Lost Ring by the American game studies researcher Jane McGonigal, which was spon­sored by McDonald’s, and worldwide brand experience firm AKQA as a marketing vehicle, 2008. As a consequence Alternate Reality Games (ARG) are increasingly recognised as new medium attracting professional interest as public relations, marketing and political propa­ganda tools in economics and state systems (Ding-politics and the Internet of Things). The IP03 will use this medium to understand its cross sector appeal by situating their use in a broader history of media interaction.

Focusing on pervasive gaming and ARGs, this project will examine how reciprocally emer­ging media and cultural practices have nurtured particular kinds of negotiation between the producer and the consumer in which the familiar power relations have been re-balanced in the joint quest for an understanding of an emerging group of informed users. The users’ sophisticated media awareness and technological competence have proposed a concep­tualisation of the genre (and the whole of pervasive gaming) as a new medium that el­udes familiar forms of techno-centric and established socio-economic methods of analysis. Preliminary studies of ARGs by the IP03 team suggest that a critical analysis can only be carried out in collaboration with what has become known as the Prosumer Public. This hy­brid of producer and consumer provokes a critique of established products for example in ARGs through a range of opportunities offered by technologically enhanced realities. This is of paramount interest in this IP since it invests playful use and the transgression of the borders of reality and virtuality with a cultural productivity beyond mere distraction (Ben­jamin, Krakauer, Manovich, Postman, Warburg).

This research is expected to contribute to a clearer understanding of how a creative avant-garde and a creative commercial community work­ing outside the norms and conventions of mainstream cinema or narration in hybrid media can most effectively collaborate.

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