One of the major themes in Sarah Bay-Cheng’s recent lecture on “History, Performance, and Playing the Digital in Museums” was the use of mixed reality in modern museums; that is, the blending of physical artefacts and set pieces with digital interfaces, screens and games. She argued that, as museums engage increasingly often with digital technologies,…

Nowadays museums are exploring new ways of communication. Digital technologies are opening new paths of experiences within museum spaces. Interactivity and multidirectional participation are being enhanced by the incorporation of digital technologies. As technologies change, so should the practices around them. Sarah Bay-Cheng invited us to see a new perspective on the relationship amongst museums,…

What does it mean to go beyond representation when we think about atmosphere? Is not atmosphere a “celestial body” composed of nitrogen, oxygen and argon as described by science? Derek McCormack invited us to think of atmosphere beyond this scientific approach to nature. He invited us to think of atmosphere as an elemental medium to be experienced,…

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