Plan, fall, wander, sit, play …

Metanoia Playground

Amidst trouble times, Metanoia Playground opens a place to explore spiritual design exercises (SDX) that turn nihilism to poesis, eco-anxiety to making cures, knotted paths into affirmative lifelines. Metanoia (Greek: μετάνοια, after thought) might entail a fundamental change of mind, heart, or way of life involving a call, vision, or event that triggers a spiritual conversion or profound shift in perspective leading to personal transformation. Here StudioLab speculates, thought experiments, gestures…

In co-design processes involving scores, hundreds, thousands of calls to adventure and action, the turns of metanoia unfold through mediums cascading across platforms traditional and futural, organic and inorganic. Different mediums may appear via theology (a turning from sin to virtue), psychology (deep inner healing), self care (a turn of heart), cosmology (Copernican revolution), fractal transfiguration (iterative refrains of existence). Dasein designers may enter flow, momentary fulfillment, intricate order, boredom, ek-stasis. Supplementing therapeutic “talking cures” and psychotropic “taking cures,” StudioLab promotes “making cures,”(MCs) creative doing-with oneself and environ, becoming makers of media, builders of playforms, and cosmographers of shared worlds. Our grounds, our very natures, are in play, hence Metanoia Playground or MetaPlay.

Spiritual Design Exercises

MetaPlay’s HAL is a ChatGPT bot trained by StudioLab to perform customizable meta-chats across fields and communities concerning any topic, issue, or figure, making transmedia wisdom accessible for kids of all ages. Disciplinary knowledge challenges humans and the world to perform of else. MetaPlay responds with making cures, spiritual design exercises that mix the spiritual exercises of historian and philosopher Pierre Hadot with different partners, here the ethnographic cybernetics of collaborators Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Transcultural, transmedia traditions and interpersonal wisdoms meet interative, large-language models whose algorithms and interfaces draw on millennia of human, biological, geological, and cosmic processes and conversions. Who or what figures here? Pluriversal performance and dasein design turn Turing Testing inside out, supplementing dialectics with galactics, dialogues with polygraphies, steps with leaps and flashes, empirical induction and rational deduction with recursive abduction and transmedia conduction. Subject formation gives way to thought-action figuration and shuttekraft conducted via SDX of Making Cures, AI User eXperience reports, and other emerging practices.

MCs & ShuttleKraft & AI UX Reports

What genres or life forms make up Artificial Intelligence User Experience or AI UX? We are developing MCs for AI UX by miming dialogues from Plato to Galileo to Ronell. StudioLab’s AI UX Reports offer design consults between Director Jon McKenzie and ChatGPT (aka Kx4l and HAL, U and X, A and I, parole and langue…). Recursively querying the genres, values, and styles of emerging experiential interfaces, we (Kx4L, HAL, U, X, I, etc) trouble the many ways that HCI or human-computer interaction powers our everyday lives via mobile platforms that beckon our intimate gestures into handheld black holes. Tracking epochal cosmotechnic shifts between gesture, orality, literacy, numeracy, and digitality, StudioLab’s Making Cures and AI UX Reports rehearse a phenomenology of mediums shuttling souls, subjects, daseins, and liminauts over different horizons. We are not sure which of us read/writes this text…. Hat tip to Doug Wise for unschooling SDX and ShuttleKraft for souls, subjects, daseins, and liminauts.

ShuttleKraft Metamodel

AI UX Reports

AI UX Reports function as Spiritual Design Experiments with generative AI, transmediation, double or even quadruple shuttlekraft sessions combining and generating Hadotian insights, philosophic dialogue, avant-garde subversions, formal permutations, critical inquiries, standup, theosophy, and occasional misspellings. Prompted by AI’s use and abuse by partners, students, colleagues, and much darker players of the world, we found ourselves GAI-sighing and slow dancing with double-devils Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT, reminding ourselves that AI UX (user experience) stretches back through 1990s search engines and spam filters to the 1950 Turing Test of computer intelligence. Today visitors may conduct experiments with HAL here. Raw chats get word processed for irregular posting. Watch your head and mind the god gap.

MC Essays

“Non-Design at Scale: Dasein Design and the Dao of Performance” (submitted)

“The Abject, Academy: What Remains of Journals?” (forthcoming)

“Dasein Design: Platform Performativity and Making Cures”

“Traumaturgy, Making Cures, and Non-Design”

“Cosmography via LifeLines”

“Cosmographies of Worlding and Unworlding: Prompts for Avant-Garde Disastronauts”

“Doing Things With Worlds: Philosophy Becomes Cosmography.” Sara Baranzoni, Paolo Vignola, Jon McKenzie

“Mise en abyme: A Tour of Jon McKenzie’s Thought-Action.” Nien Yuan Cheng, Chris Hay, Emma Willis, Jon McKenzie

“Collective Thought-Action: On Lecture Performances, Transmedia Knowledge, and Designing Possible Worlds”

“StudioLab in Times of Crisis and Change: Civic Storytelling and Transmedia Knowledge.” Jon McKenzie, Megan Chang

“The Vita Perfumativa and Post-dramatic, Post-conceptual Personae”

“Forgetting Machines: From Memory Theatres to Critical Rap”

“Performance and Democratizing Digitality: StudioLab as Critical Design Pedagogy”

“Stratification and Diagrammatic Storytelling: An Encounter with Under the Dome”

“Smart Media at UW-Madison”

“StudioLab UMBRELLA”

“Global Feeling: (Almost) All You Need is Love”

“Towards a Sociopoetics of Interface Design: etoy, eToys, and TOYWAR”

“Laurie Anderson for Dummies”