The Game of Freedom
2020-25 (ongoing) with Veronica Diesen
Imaginary multiplayer video game exploring the far-right use of ‘freedom’ to mainstream reactionary ideas. Collective construction of a fictitious combat where players compete for a currency called freecoin. Media include(d) Zoom, Teams, and other platforms. Tagline: There’s no I in Teams. There’s no U on X.
Pitch (black):
The Game of Freedom / Oil Spill was our initial working title. ‘Spill’ in Norwegian means competition, play or game. In English it can signify overflow or revelation. It is also a homophone of the yiddish ‘spiel’, which in English can refer to an elaborate but superficial story, a salesman’s pitch.
Different commentators, experts, and analysts are given the brief of devising the architecture of a new kind of video game. Each in different ways are players in the current ‘game of freedom’ that uses Norway as an ideologically important locus or platform: at once a double and the opposite of its north sea rival and wannabe sovereign (wealth fund), the UK.*
Titles (to wealth):
In the game players compete to accumulate a game currency called freecoin. The winners can exploit stories about free expression, human rights, and Norwegian (or UK) exceptionalism to amass titles to wealth in the real world, converting freecoin back into commodities, such as oil.
Out of the materiality of oil and its institutions, Oil Spill will explore the representation of abstraction in different forms and at different scales: from the Norwegian Oil Museum in Stavanger, to Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, and the Equinor Art Collection – the privatised successor to Statoil, with its offshore art programme on oil platforms curiously mirroring the Fund’s offshore investments, and the Nobel Peace Centre – an idyll of the rights of man not immune to the men of the right, and ‘men’s rights’.
In the process we hope to question the dominant spiel about Norwegian and global capitalism, their relation to fascism, and offer propositions for resisting these more effectively.
PREVIEW:
Capturing visual and sonic images from the fascist marches in central London in 2018 to the NGO networking of global ‘human rights’ activists in Oslo, Oil Spill will superimpose figments from the current right wing ‘game of freedom’ – using demands for free speech to legitimize reactionary ideas – onto a continuum of carbon-based images.
The film will use HD colour video and 16mm film to produce a primarily monochrome (like a black square on a white ground), fictitious (as in imaginary) documentary derived or refined from real (and so unrepresentable) facts.
We will use the specific material properties of oil as a ‘use-value’ that is currently functioning to destroy all of us, to (re)imagine a form of representation adequate to the paroxyistic contradictions of the current (global) situation.
‘Left’, right and centre – all the powers of ‘purpose led capitalism’ – have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise the spectre of riot. All converge in supposing that human or material excess is the real issue, the source (and resource) of our woes – elites, globalists, bankers; flows of money or of displaced (and ‘overly populous’) populations.
We do not propose to replace the black mirror of oil with something more sustainable (for capitalism) but rather to hold it up to the world that produced and is produced by it – to turn these ideas upside down.
<===== other spiels =======>
Project notes:
Zoom-based (imaginary) multiplayer video game exploring the far-right use of ‘freedom’ to mainstream reactionary ideas. Collective construction of a fictitious game in which players compete for a currency called freecoin.
Outline (current version):
Freedom game / Oil spill: ‘Spill’ in Norwegian means competition, play or game. In English it can signify overflow or revelation. Homophone of the yiddish ‘spiel’, which can refer to an elaborate but superficial story, a salesman’s pitch.
We will construct a film that plays with the current shtick about Norway as alternative to a ‘corrupt’ neoliberal capitalism to explore some different propositions and play some different games.
We want to look at the uses of free speech and (Scandinavian) social democracy in the context of growing right-wing populism, and consider some of the ambiguities of the relations between art, oil, environment, in a context where funding for culture is scarce and tied to political-economic agenda, left, right and centre right.
We want to interrogate an idea of Norway and its function in a global game of ‘freedom’ played by multiple, competing, actors by constructing a documentary-ish film as virtual (video) game.
With a soundtrack constructed around a series of interviews and focus groups regarding the fictitious 'freedom game', the film’s visual surface was to include literal and metaphorical films of oil, using its duality as a material, and as a core commodity, to evoke other forms of substance and reflection.
Different commentators, experts, and analysts – players in the global ‘freedom games’ that often use Norway as stage, platform or model – are given the brief of devising the architecture of a new kind of video game. In the game players compete to accumulate a game currency called freecoin (a premonition of the coming cryptocalypse?).
The winners would exploit stories about free expression, human rights, the Norwegian alternative, etc, to amass titles to wealth in the real world, converting freecoin back into commodities, such as art or oil. Out of the materiality of oil and its institutions, Oil Spill was to explore the representation of economic, financial, and visual abstraction in different forms and at different scales: from the Norwegian Oil Museum in Stavanger, to Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, and the Equinor Art Collection – the privatised successor to Statoil, with its offshore art programme on oil platforms curiously mirroring the Fund’s offshore investments, and the Nobel Peace Centre , an 'idyll of the rights of man' (as Marx referred to the sphere of circulation) not immune to the men of the right and indeed men's rights.
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In the process we hoped to question the dominant spiel about Norwegian and global capitalism, their relation to a rising global fascism, and perhaps discover some tactics or propositions for resisting these more effectively.Capturing visual and sonic images from the EDL fascist marches in central, London in 2018 to the NGO networking of global ‘human rights’ activists (and oil) in Oslo, Oil Spill would superimpose figments from the current right wing ‘game of freedom’ – using demands for free speech to legitimize reactionary ideas – onto a continuum of carbon-based images.
(This was all 3-4 years before people started applying tomato soup to oil paintings to raise awareness about climate change; it was also before the George Floyd uprising and the 'black out tuesday' day of black squares on instagram, the rise of the blank post-it notes and later white square protests in Hong Kong (and now mainland China),
The film was attuned to a tendency in global proletarian struggles to confront power not with a set of legible demands but rather a constellation of ‘memes with force’, or protests that either make no demands or overflow them, in the process defining the lines between right and left in the global fight against fascism.
We planned to use the specific physical properties of oil in combination with the history of artistic – including cinematic – abstraction (from Malevich's white and black squares to Franz Klein's black reflections to Adorno's notion of art as windowless monad) to (re)imagine a form of representation appropriate to the paroxyistic contradictions of the current (global) situation.
HD colour video, mobile phone and other footage, and a specific sonic architecture for each 'game level' to produce a primarily monochrome and fictitious documentary, nonetheless derived or refined from real facts. If centre and right increasingly converge in supposing that human or material excess is the real issue, the source (and resource) of our woes – elites, globalists, bankers; flows of money or of displaced populations – we proposed to use the black mirror of oil to turn these ideas upside down.
Then the pandemic came along and emptied turned the cinema's white rectangles, exposing the white squares of the lightboxes as forthcoming attractions slowly turned into the last reminders of a suddenly vanished era. As we entered the epoch of social distancing, Zoom and other new intensities of on-screen life would radicalise and realised what we had only projected, as if completing our project, and at the very least pushing us to reimagine it in altered conditions.
Zoom-based (imaginary) multiplayer video game exploring the far-right use of ‘freedom’ to mainstream reactionary ideas. Collective construction of a fictitious game in which players compete for a currency called freecoin.
Outline (current version):
Freedom game / Oil spill: ‘Spill’ in Norwegian means competition, play or game. In English it can signify overflow or revelation. Homophone of the yiddish ‘spiel’, which can refer to an elaborate but superficial story, a salesman’s pitch.
We will construct a film that plays with the current shtick about Norway as alternative to a ‘corrupt’ neoliberal capitalism to explore some different propositions and play some different games.
We want to look at the uses of free speech and (Scandinavian) social democracy in the context of growing right-wing populism, and consider some of the ambiguities of the relations between art, oil, environment, in a context where funding for culture is scarce and tied to political-economic agenda, left, right and centre right.
We want to interrogate an idea of Norway and its function in a global game of ‘freedom’ played by multiple, competing, actors by constructing a documentary-ish film as virtual (video) game.
With a soundtrack constructed around a series of interviews and focus groups regarding the fictitious 'freedom game', the film’s visual surface was to include literal and metaphorical films of oil, using its duality as a material, and as a core commodity, to evoke other forms of substance and reflection.
Different commentators, experts, and analysts – players in the global ‘freedom games’ that often use Norway as stage, platform or model – are given the brief of devising the architecture of a new kind of video game. In the game players compete to accumulate a game currency called freecoin (a premonition of the coming cryptocalypse?).
The winners would exploit stories about free expression, human rights, the Norwegian alternative, etc, to amass titles to wealth in the real world, converting freecoin back into commodities, such as art or oil. Out of the materiality of oil and its institutions, Oil Spill was to explore the representation of economic, financial, and visual abstraction in different forms and at different scales: from the Norwegian Oil Museum in Stavanger, to Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, and the Equinor Art Collection – the privatised successor to Statoil, with its offshore art programme on oil platforms curiously mirroring the Fund’s offshore investments, and the Nobel Peace Centre , an 'idyll of the rights of man' (as Marx referred to the sphere of circulation) not immune to the men of the right and indeed men's rights.
In the process we hoped to question the dominant spiel about Norwegian and global capitalism, their relation to a rising global fascism, and perhaps discover some tactics or propositions for resisting these more effectively.Capturing visual and sonic images from the EDL fascist marches in central, London in 2018 to the NGO networking of global ‘human rights’ activists (and oil) in Oslo, Oil Spill would superimpose figments from the current right wing ‘game of freedom’ – using demands for free speech to legitimize reactionary ideas – onto a continuum of carbon-based images.
(This was all 3-4 years before people started applying tomato soup to oil paintings to raise awareness about climate change; it was also before the George Floyd uprising and the 'black out tuesday' day of black squares on instagram, the rise of the blank post-it notes and later white square protests in Hong Kong (and now mainland China),
The film was attuned to a tendency in global proletarian struggles to confront power not with a set of legible demands but rather a constellation of ‘memes with force’, or protests that either make no demands or overflow them, in the process defining the lines between right and left in the global fight against fascism.
We planned to use the specific physical properties of oil in combination with the history of artistic – including cinematic – abstraction (from Malevich's white and black squares to Franz Klein's black reflections to Adorno's notion of art as windowless monad) to (re)imagine a form of representation appropriate to the paroxyistic contradictions of the current (global) situation.
HD colour video, mobile phone and other footage, and a specific sonic architecture for each 'game level' to produce a primarily monochrome and fictitious documentary, nonetheless derived or refined from real facts. If centre and right increasingly converge in supposing that human or material excess is the real issue, the source (and resource) of our woes – elites, globalists, bankers; flows of money or of displaced populations – we proposed to use the black mirror of oil to turn these ideas upside down.
Then the pandemic came along and emptied turned the cinema's white rectangles, exposing the white squares of the lightboxes as forthcoming attractions slowly turned into the last reminders of a suddenly vanished era. As we entered the epoch of social distancing, Zoom and other new intensities of on-screen life would radicalise and realised what we had only projected, as if completing our project, and at the very least pushing us to reimagine it in altered conditions.
Preview
OLD/NEW NOTES (2023)
Pitch (black): The Game of Freedom / Oil Spill
‘Spill’ in Norwegian = competition, play, game.
English = overflow, reveal. The yiddish ‘spiel’- cool story bro. superficial, elaborate sales pitch. spiel = pitch = black = white]
Players get a brief - devise the architecture of the game. You are players in the current ‘game of freedom’.
Norway is the game surface. Double and opposite of its north sea rival, the wannabe sovereign (wealth fund), UK.
Players compete to accumulate a game currency called freecoin.
Winners tell stories about free expression, human rights, Norwegian (or UK) exceptionalism.
Get skills powers titles to £ – convert freecoin back into shit, ie commodities, eg gas, oil
Oil spill took note of the trend for artists to do art against oil with funds from eg major oil states aka Norway.
Abstraction comes in different forms and scales: from the Norwegian Oil Museum in Stavanger, to Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, and the Equinor Art Collection or the Economics institute. Fascism comes as standard in a completely auto-destructive capitalism.
Privatised successor to Statoil, Equinor’s offshore art program on oil platforms tracks the Fund’s offshore investments.
The Nobel Peace Centre is an idyll of the rights of man. From the freedom of speech for Anders Breivik to ... punch a fascist, we are still caught in the game of freedom, but the new forms or levels of the game involve the crisis of platforms themselves - such as Twitter - the emergence of (yet more)(alternative) alternatives. Whether Parler or mastodon, we will continue to play our game about the game, our gaming of the game, with an eye to the contradictions ‘on both sides’, but with a relentless compulsion to find a way for the comminist camel to pass through the eye of a socially-contracting, fascistically expanding endtimes capitalism.
Pitch (black): The Game of Freedom / Oil Spill
‘Spill’ in Norwegian = competition, play, game.
English = overflow, reveal. The yiddish ‘spiel’- cool story bro. superficial, elaborate sales pitch. spiel = pitch = black = white]
Players get a brief - devise the architecture of the game. You are players in the current ‘game of freedom’.
Norway is the game surface. Double and opposite of its north sea rival, the wannabe sovereign (wealth fund), UK.
Players compete to accumulate a game currency called freecoin.
Winners tell stories about free expression, human rights, Norwegian (or UK) exceptionalism.
Get skills powers titles to £ – convert freecoin back into shit, ie commodities, eg gas, oil
Oil spill took note of the trend for artists to do art against oil with funds from eg major oil states aka Norway.
Abstraction comes in different forms and scales: from the Norwegian Oil Museum in Stavanger, to Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, and the Equinor Art Collection or the Economics institute. Fascism comes as standard in a completely auto-destructive capitalism.
Privatised successor to Statoil, Equinor’s offshore art program on oil platforms tracks the Fund’s offshore investments.
The Nobel Peace Centre is an idyll of the rights of man. From the freedom of speech for Anders Breivik to ... punch a fascist, we are still caught in the game of freedom, but the new forms or levels of the game involve the crisis of platforms themselves - such as Twitter - the emergence of (yet more)(alternative) alternatives. Whether Parler or mastodon, we will continue to play our game about the game, our gaming of the game, with an eye to the contradictions ‘on both sides’, but with a relentless compulsion to find a way for the comminist camel to pass through the eye of a socially-contracting, fascistically expanding endtimes capitalism.
From fascist marches in London whitehall in 2018 to NGO networking of ‘human rights’ activists in Oslo, this is figments of the right wing ‘game of freedom’. demands for free speech used to float and promote reactionary ideas. a continuum of carbon-based images for national rebirth thru global death
fascism was always a death drive. meet the tories. meet der starmer.
HD colour video ---> monochrome (like Malevich’s black square on a white ground --- perhaps only extreme abstraction ultra high pitch white noise, 12 tone dissonance, a politics informel, can begin to un-represent the hellworld we are in, to be the windowless monad you want to see instead of this world
fictitious(ie imaginary) documentary derived or refined from real (((unrepresentable)))) facts. the judaeo-christian and muslim ban on images of the deity and the marxian prohibition on images of the future are still crucial weapons if you are against the world but need to survive it ‘longer than power’ (as Brecht sd).
just stop oil, but don’t forget to destroy it as a ‘use-value’, too; i.e. oil is only the ‘screen image’ of the real antagonist of humanity - and that is a social relation or network bigger and more horrific than all the social media platforms put together.
how to show this?
throw oil at politician?
is riot is emulsion of the people
are emutes the speech of the silence or a screech more piercing than language, since they set the price of everything to zero?
black on white may be the suprematism that breaks the white supremacism of the freedom game. with the George Floyd Uprising, this dialectic evolves yet further: neither black nor white and def not ‘all lives matter’ but rather:
black white brown, turn it upside down
‘Left’, right and centre – all the powers of ‘purpose led capitalism’ – have
entered into a holy
alliance to
exorcise the
spectre of transracial anti-capitalist revolt. make ‘revolut’ revolution again/ for the first time.
gamify the gamification (passification) of the riot
game the gamers
level down
raze up
CAMERA
OBSCURA
GERMAN IDEOLOGY
All converge
supposing
that human or
material excess
is the real issue,
the source (and resource) of our woes – elites, globalists, bankers; flows of money or of displaced (and ‘overly populous’) populations.
We do not
propose to
replace the
black mirror of oil with something
more sustainable for capitalism but
rather to hold it up
to the world that produced and is produced by it – to turn these ideas upside down
alliance to
exorcise the
spectre of transracial anti-capitalist revolt. make ‘revolut’ revolution again/ for the first time.
gamify the gamification (passification) of the riot
game the gamers
level down
raze up
CAMERA
OBSCURA
GERMAN IDEOLOGY
All converge
supposing
that human or
material excess
is the real issue,
the source (and resource) of our woes – elites, globalists, bankers; flows of money or of displaced (and ‘overly populous’) populations.
We do not
propose to
replace the
black mirror of oil with something
more sustainable for capitalism but
rather to hold it up
to the world that produced and is produced by it – to turn these ideas upside down