Process Notes on Display

Oyun & Madness

Hello friends, 

Thank you for all your responses to the letter on Go, Alphago, and Endgame.

I already watched (and loved) all 75 episodes of the anime adaptation of Hikaru no Go, and read the Go chapters of The Maniac. 

I’m also looking forward to reading The Master of Go by Yasunari Kawabata, another recommendation via email, but I have to take a step back because the absence of women on this board of narratives is too distracting.

I’m still playing Go, and I’m working on a collaborative project on games, writing, and art—details TK & process notes below.

1.

In the Q&A’s of an Angela Davis talk in Colorado Springs earlier this year, someone asked for advice on how to process the fact that her parents grew up in segregated America.

2. 

I searched for international foundations actively supporting children in high-risk areas like Palestine, Ukraine, Turkey & Syria, and Google took me straight to the Save the Children website.

Browsing its pages was disturbing from the start. Not because of the content, but the but the perfectly gamified user experience design.

It felt like a Choose Your Own Disaster game, except each page detailing children’s struggles in a different part of the world ended with the same Donate button, leading the user to the same box. 

(The Ukraine one also includes a Send a Message to Congress button.)

3.

Turkish has one word for both game and play: “oyun.” Oyun works for most game and play-related phrases I can think of in English, like playing tricks or staging a play.

4. 

“Truance” by Selim Birsel

My footage from 2022, at “OyunBu/ThisPlay,” an exhibition in Arter, a contemporary art museum in Istanbul. 

5.

Angela Davis said it wasn’t all pain, being a child in the South. She and her friends had even invented a game out of segregation, something to do with crossing the street without getting caught, but I can’t remember the details.

6.

Until the birth of the asylum freed the madman from his chains in the 1700s, Foucault’s Madness and Civilization explains, people with mental illness were chained and displayed to the public, if not left to die in the dark or sent away on boats. 

But the asylum preferred mirrors to windows. 

“[T]he asylum, in this community of madmen, placed the mirrors in such a way that the madman, when ail was said and done, inevitably surprised himself, despite himself, as a madman.”

(From Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason by Michel Foucault, translated by Richard Howard)

Madness has been measuring itself against society since then, increasingly eager to define itself by its divergence from the norm.

Except when it’s playing the role of an artist, a child, a gamer, or a receptive mind in the audience.

Only then do we feel madness as the all-encompassing force it is.

7.

“In one another we will never be lacking,” Hélène Cixous writes in “The Laugh of the Medusa.”

8.

For the last five years, I’ve been thinking, reading, and writing with dream as my keyword. Lately, I’ve also been seeing game and play everywhere I look. 

At first, I thought it was because of Go. But this week I realized it’s also because I’m writing a novel about an actor, a director, and a screenwriter. All women.

All the best,

Naz