When we engage with/in games, there emerges a certain atmosphere around us: a bounded area in which gameplay occurs, a space of ludic ritual wherein the fiction of the game is the dominant framework for meaning-making, a “magic circle” (Salen and Zimmerman 2003, 95). Specifically for digital games, this metaphoric space is constituted by the…

The concept of atmosphere carries a wide range of possibilities within itself despite being difficult to define or analyse in a text. It is a house for the material and the immaterial, visible and the invisible, finite and infinite. Atmosphere circulates, moves, changes surrounds us with despite efforts to capture it. It exposes our obsession…

Experiment/Experience “Have we forgotten experience?” wonders Scott Lash (Experience, 2018). If this is so, we are currently witnessing a comeback with a vengeance. New forms of research and communication explore and experiment with various dimensions of experience. Art and science meet in experimental approaches that foreground sensation, substance and practice. Technological developments “expand the sensible”…

John McKenzie and Aneta Stonic’s performance lecture was an introduction to the notion of thought action figures. This new concept was initially contextualized by presenting two different types of knowledge: episteme and doxa. John McKenzie located the origins of epistemic knowledge in Plato’s metaphysical idealism, where the process of abstraction can offer access to a…

In their lecture performance, Jon McKenzie and Aneta Stonjic introduced thought-action figures to explain how our thinking and acting are structured in certain figures. The form in which the idea of thought-action figures was presented – a lecture performance –  was also an attempt to explore new ways of transferring knowledge, that differ from the…

“It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories.”[1] On May 23, 2018 Jon McKenzie and Aneta Stojnic gave a performance lecture on “Thought-Action Figures” as part of the TiM lecture series. It was…

*The photos: courtesy of Anna van Kooij and Irene Alcubilla Troughton

On the 23d of May 2018, we were invited to the “lecture-performance” by Jon McKenzie and Aneta Stojnic with a peculiar title “Thought-Action Figures”. Prior to lecture, we received preparatory material that consisted of a comic with the same name and some of the philosophical thoughts/quotes from the event. In the beginning of the performance,…

In our last session of Transmission in Motion Seminar, we had the chance to assist a performance-lecture given by John McKenzie and Aneta Stojnic based on what was called “thought-action figures”. This proposition (in lack of a better term) was introduced in an attempt to search for a post-conceptual, post-ideational knowledge that could break down…

This lecture performance focuses on performance, technology, and post-ideational thought, the reinscription of ideas with a broader spacetime suggested by Artaud, Derrida, Haraway, Lehmann, and others. What figures guide our thoughts and actions? What role might post-dramatic, post-conceptual personae and machinic genres play in rethinking the past, negotiating the present, and enacting the future? How…