date: Friday 25 March, 18:00 – 21:00
location: Page Not Found
Boekhorststraat 126, Den Haag
Page Not Found and the Master Experimental Publishing (XPUB) at the Piet Zwart Institute,
Willem de Kooning Academy,
invite you to the launch of the Special Issue #17 “This Box Found You For A Reason”.
Under the guidance of artist Lídia Pereira and the XPUB staff, the master students explored how (video) games features are making us more, not less, productive. Life and work are ‘gamified’ through social media, dating apps, and fitness apps designed to increase motivation and productivity. Gamification blurs the lines between play, leisure and labour, to release our collective dopamine for profit. Games in themselves often perform a reproductive role, presenting capitalism as a system of natural laws, exemplified by in-game predatory monetisation schemes. On the other hand, games provide necessary down time and relaxation, helping people function in a largely dysfunctional economy and society. Yet leisure remains a contested space which is still unequally distributed, between genders, ethnicities and abilities. The form of the publication reworks the figure of the loot box, a typically virtual and predatory monetization scheme.
The launch features presentations by the XPUB students and a discussion with Sepp Eckenhaussen & Koen Bartijn from Platform BK ( https://platformbk.nl ) who take the economics of the publication as entry point into larger questions of how the labour of artists and designers is valued and what structures, guidelines and policies can help (small scale) institutions ensure that these practices remain sustainable.
This is a free event.
The publication is co-published by Page Not Found and XPUB, and made by Ål Nik (Alexandra Nikolova), Carmen Gray, Chaeyoung Kim, Emma Prato, Erica Gargaglione, Francesco Luzzana, Gersande Schellinx, Jian Haake, Kimberley Cosmilla, Miriam Schöb, Mitsa Chaida and Supisara Burapachaisri.
https://page-not-found.nl
https://issue.xpub.nl/17/
FB event link: https://fb.me/e/1zCMrO0NM