Interactive Technique 2.0 – What is IT2?

Traditional techniques give you patterns, assuming you’ll be in a context where you can use those patterns.

“It draws the gamer’s attention not to the storyline but to the combinations of elements from which any given storyline might be selected.” [Wark, 070]

IT2 assumes no patterns.

IT2 is constructivist: students co-direct the course, building methodologies suited to their interests.

IT2 allows free flow attention, tangential movement. IT2 assumes tangential impulses reveal patterns of exertion and recuperation (lma). Impulse analysis is the class activity:

to refine our way of orientation within these, and to locate the effects of this orientation for creative or performative use.

for these types of situations

– Play often happens in rules, but the rules can be changed by the players. Play can be serious. Play expresses power. The rules of the game dictate the rewards, and penalties. IT2 = play, democratic rules, self-reflexive expression.

Student – Gamer, Performer, Designer
Teacher – Facilitator, Resource, Mediator

In work and play, it is not the novel, not cinema not television that offers the line within which to grasp the form of everyday life, it is the game. (Wark, 058)

An art that denies the role of play and its own game nature denies its very genetic makeup – is casting itself as a replication, an object on a conveyor belt, denied any role of play, the art becomes a slot waiting to be occupied, a pre-written script waiting to be played… where is the person? where is the art?

I try to bring this to the surface, that its contours may be wielded at the players will, desire, pleasure, fun.

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“If it is free, it is valueless. Those odd lines within topology where anything goes are the ones of no consequence,” [Wark, 066].

The challenge is inherently present – to create and sustain the conflict that is necessary to engage dancers in play. It is the study of the mind-body topology and the forces that interest it, or don’t. It is the uniting of the life gamespace and the performance gamespace. What you’re seeing is not a preexisting aesthetic (or game) that students must gain the skills to play in, but an aesthetic that evolves out of the innate interactive creativity of the students – the “technique” is whatever is necessary to accomplish that.