| Indhold: |
This course is about play and playing, even gambling, all kind of games: dice, tarot, cards, etc; about chance, fate and the like, which was an enduring phenomenon as old as human being, richly attested by the anthropology of culture.
This course (or seminar) derives from my personal research “Playing dice with the gods” on this specific phenomenon in human culture which apparently reflects back a coherent typology of image, and a specific profile of the artist player.
It is related to chance, fortune and destiny, which played a major role in the fabrication of images, as well as in their performance.
Its tradition goes back to ancient times, from ancient knuckle bones games and the wheel of Fortune, going through the Renaissance hierophant, or reversed kind of ludus from Carmina Burana, reaching up to Modernism which had in Mallarmé one of the most fortunate poets, who, at his turn, inspired other artists, at least one notorious and radical modernist, the icon of Modernism Marcel Duchamp. He still intrigues the world of scholars with his vision of the artist “mediumistic being.” Perhaps seen from this anthropological perspective, his statement may gain some light or certain logic or comprehension.
After inquiring into some of these kinds of games and trying to assess their more or less aleatory nature, we will eventually reach the contemporary phenomenon of virtual games, so fashionable these days, but which needs to be addressed in this broader cultural frame, and from here to evaluate its effects and implications in Visual Culture. |