The main goal of the seminar is to transform gaming practice, which is casually believed to be a nonimportant recreational activity, into a training ground for the production of knowledge and social and cultural studies.
This event is part of the public program of the World Gone By computer class.
The aim of the stream is to reveal the conflicts within the game (magical battles between people, old gods, fallen dragons, and ancient snakes) and to define the personal conflicts of participants, including those connected with their professional interests (philosophy, design, contemporary art, and architecture).
As in an ordinary network stream, the process of the game plays an important role. It can engage, make you worry about a player-character, impose internal symbols of the game universe, and divert from the main routes. The stream will be a type of performance during which participants talk about the most serious things, clarifying their own positions within the magical wars.
The Coincidental Institute is a transdisciplinary research collective that coordinates the theoretical and practical efforts of a group working with coincidences. It was founded in 2020 by the philosopher Joel Regev, the artist Alek Petuk, and the architect Yura Plokhov. In 2022, designer Katya Smolyanskaya joined the team.
Dark Souls is an action/RPG computer game developed by the company From Software. Today the game, which was launched in 2011, has become an important cultural phenomenon and the basis for the development of so-called soulslike games, which are known for their difficult game process, subjects from the field of dark fantasy, and particular type of storytelling through objects in the game environment and excerpts of NPC language. In other words, the game does not present the player with a narrative in the form of text but requires that they combine separate elements of the world into a single story, which can be something individual to each player made up of a subjective idea of the world, personal meetings, and the combination of various pieces.
Coincidental Institute staff:
Joel Regev (b. 1972, Moscow) is a philosopher and an assistant professor in the Stasis Center for Practical Philosophy of the European University in St. Petersburg. He is the author of the books Coincidencology: A Short Treatise on the Method, The Impossible and the Coincidence: On the Revolutionary Situation in Philosophy, and Radical TJing. He lives and works in St. Petersburg.
Yura Plokhov (b. 1987, Nizhny Tagil) is an architect. He graduated from Moscow Architectural Institute (2011). His professional and research interests focus on urban planning and the theory of architecture. He is the founder and editor of the architectural journal Tafuri’s Notes. He lives and works in Moscow.
Katya Smolyanskaya (b. 2000, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk) is a UX/UI designer and has a bachelor’s degree from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow (2022).
Alek Petuk (b. 1984, Ukhta) is an artist, founder of the art group BKB, organizer of the independent festival Kuzlefest, and member of the community Soundartist.ru. He lives and works in Moscow.
Garage Digital stopped working on this project.
Performance Hydrogen City is the new site-specific performance by Digital Object Alliance invites visitors to experience the materiality of a speculative world of the future through the possible embodiment of videogame logics. The performance took place at Hyundai Motorstudio Moscow as part of the joint program by Garage Digital and the online platform Rhizome for the international exhibition World on a Wire.
