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Ludic Society Magazine #2
Editors: Jahrmann/ Moswitzer
(Arco/CentroCondeDuque)
Madrid Vienna Zurich 2006. ISBN 3-902389-01-X
issue #2 objects de jeu, vie et l'art
"I will not make any deals with you. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered!" The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan, 1967
Text? Number 6, the first para-digmatic prisoner trapped on an informatic island, is himself a bachelor and identified by the vélocipède batch. The nouvelle société ludique investigates new bachelor machines again, but now these are over-clocked into living machines. The mise en scène of these play objects in life defines the line of ludics as a process of inquiry, as a game, a discipline based on arts real play and scholarship.

Similar to a ´pataphysical bike, ludics is a levitation model for a thinking machine, providing the salvation, that is embedded in the danger and joy of in-game technologies. Behind the books of physics and science (ept meta ta physika), the methods and practices of ´pataphysika and pata-science fiction vanquish the physics of the rules of play. In a sloping spiral curve the historic ´pataphysical bike breaks into pieces. Instead of dumping it in the trash can of art history, it can be recycled and poetically circuit bent. As an absurd forerunner of the bi-cycle, the monowheel appears to represent in itself an icon for imaginary solutions. Riding the new monowheel with a firm grip but not thwarted in artistic passion helps to overcome the frame of the bike, the stiff ´cadre´ of the bicycle, which became the epiphenomenon of a simple model of a technical machine in time. Alfred Jarry (1898) was framing his mindset by the bike of the time. Now the jeune ´pataphysicienne rides a monowheel, organises her affiliates hells' angel like in chapters and acts as penseuse maudite, as wicked severe thinker, a bon mot which Deleuze originally had attributed to Nietzsche (1965). This discourse-theoretical framing drives closer towards Nietzsche's vibrant dictum of a ´gay science´ in playful formats as aphorisms and poetry, transfered to life in Real Gaming and Real Playing.

Text? In their conception as live tools for performances in club contexts the above mentioned objets célibataires can be compared to a playful Lebensmaschine= living machine in the sense of Christoph Schlingensief. When he presents the re-make of the historic theater-machine animatograph, he follows in its format works of avantgarde artists such as Lázló Moholy Nagy, who constructed with his light-space-modulator what were at first glance useless multi-layered spaces as stages for play in reality. From the ludics point of view this new animatograph intends to be

a “graphical” glitch machine
, which engraves texts into the scene play and its surrounding realities. This black boxed deus ex machina is an effort to liberate from the pure art forms, as the art form of (stage-)play. For this purpose a real play machine needs to be created, which the ludic socialite can compare to other play objects. The historic Animatograph from 1896 by Robert W. Paul was conceptionalized as a machine, projecting out of the illusionary play-worlds into the real-world stage. At the moment of their creation experimental machines of this kind were useless art projects, a sort of visual theremins playing with the promises of technologies. The synthesizer, the vocoder or the very convincing supersecretary voder of the 1940s Bell Laboratories were all such projectory objects of bachelors, which we would consider today as circuit bending machines. Especially the voder as a speech synthesizing object incorporates the direct use of the typewriter as listening aid (Röller 2005) and live audio tool, which replaces the often sexually connotated secretary. In an act of
variantology, understood as relationship between norm and deviation, the ludic synthesizer will be driven by a spiralcurved poetic objet célibataire
. The vocoder made its way onto the stage of fiction technologies, especially with artists as George Clinton and Parliament, with Bootsy and Sun Ra, in short the afrofuturist fiction strain in music.

References: Alfred Jarry. 1898. The passion of Jesus considered as an uphill bicycle race. Paris Roger Caillois. 1961. Man, Play, and Games. Illiniois Ibid.: 1973. Der Krake. Logik des Imaginativen. München GTA, Grand Theft Auto. 2005. Monowheel Cheats. http://www.gtagarage.com/mods/show.php?id=526 Gilles Deleuze. 1965. Nietzsche. Aujourd´hui. Paris Christoph Schlingensief. 2006. Area7. Burg. Wien Werner Nekes. 2004. Media Magica. Mühlheim A.Crimi, The supersecretary of the future: the vocoder (from Life). In: From Memex to Hypertext, 1991. Nils Röller, The Typewriter as LISTENING AID. In: S. Zielinski, S. Wagnermaier. Variantology 1. Köln 2005 Michel Carrouges. 1976. Machines Célibataires. Paris Marshall McLuhan. 1951. The Mechanical Bride. N. Y. Pere Ubu. http://www.ubuprojex.net (10.1.2006) Breadboard, early form of point-to-point construction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Breadboard (12.1. 2006) Reck/Szeemann.1999.Junggesellenmaschinen. Wien Ralph Sonny Barger. 2004. Hell´s Angels. Hamburg Thomas Pynchon. 1984. Is it OK to be a Luddite? N.Y.