We started our second term with an outside partner for a weeklong project.
Our guest lecturer, Susan Ploetz comes to talk to us about Nordic LARPs and how this relates to UX Design
She is an artist-researcher working with Somatics, writing, performance, simulation and live action role plays (Larping) in different configurations.
We started our week reading about Somatics, a concept we learned would be very relevant for this week's program.
What was my understanding of the term Somatics?
👇🏻
It is the way how we feel in our body, its internal awareness, thus when we become somatically or internally aware, we become sensitive in how our body is dealing along with certain scenarios, so with this skill-set of internal awareness we explore our life differently. For instance, the way we use our body, like our muscle memories, engagement with our muscle models.
It is immediate proprioception -- a sensory mode that provides unique data. First-person observation of the soma is immediately factual. (hanna)
Your own experience is your own truthfulness.
Our first session started with an introduction of Nordic Larp by Susan. I personally had never experienced a LARP before, and reading about made me feel playful and curious that how will we engage our senses in it.
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Susan showed a very useful video to gain understanding which I would like to share here.
Highlighting what Bjarke wants to say is ‘the brain is bad at distinguishing between reality and fiction — you’re bringing in sensory information either way. He talks about Nordic larp as specific subset of collaborative storytelling. Making other characters part of you and stepping in their shoes makes you sense information which you cannot gain without indulging or engaging in their cosmos to create way more beautiful stories.
Moving to the second half of the day, Susan introduced us to it.
Skinship L-A-R-P 🖖🏻 (or, Touching Intelligence in its online iteration)
She described Larp as creative storytelling that encourages players to step into Characters. For that, she got us through a mediation in which she first asked us to close our eyes and breathe deeply to make ourselves more focused within. She asked us to picture ourselves as a new alien being and adopt a new name with a new alien outlook.
I called myself Layla, and as soon as I did, I had an image of myself being in that alien character.