AI Anarchies: Troll Swamp
Workshop
Troll Swamp
Instructors:
The Mycological Twist (Eloïse Bonneviot & Anne de Boer)
Profile:
The Mycological Twist
The Mycological Twist is a project by Berlin’s Eloïse Bonneviot and Anne de Boer. They take mycology as a source of inspiration in engaging with ecological and social practices—from the mushroom fruiting body to rotting matter deep below ground. Recent projects include: ECLIPSE (the 7th Athens Biennale), Quadrat Sampling E-Ecologies (with HAU, Berlin), and L’Académie des Mutants, (Musee d’Art Contemporain Bordeaux).
Brief:
Troll Swamp is a large-scale board game for multiple players, based on the popular Dungeons & Dragons tabletop game. The game uses role-play and teamwork to act out scenarios about online trolling. Guided by the Troll Master (a storyteller navigating the players through the game), Autumn School participants will play the game, reconsidering their online habits and relationships with others in the process.
Process:
There is a definite sense of immersion entering the workshop. There is a layered configuration of amorphous tables clustered inside a semi-circle of banners that hang from ceiling to floor, designating an intimate space for this Troll Swamp to unfold within. New age, quasi-mystical music plays in the background and imbues the room with a sense of fairytale and adventure. The spatial design of the workshop space uses platforms in a literal and physical way, setting up an environment for imagining new ways of constructing physical representations of something that we are used to inhabiting very immaterially.
Photography: Silke Briel
Photography: Silke Briel
Process:
Choose your fighter: Troll Swamp character assignments include an 11-year-old dreamer, a half-organism half-fairy, a legal advisor, a cottagecore virtual avatar, a 1-day-old broccoli, a power user of pet advice forums, and a cactipus. The game characters, represented as 3D-printed rainbow clusters of castles, crystals, and creatures, all live on the foodie internet, each inhabiting their own websites and blogs.
Character strengths:Making fiction reality
Creating glitches that open portals to new works
Comments everywhere on everything
Quick while being slow and not moving
Knows a little about many things
Goes in two directions at once, without moving much
Character weaknesses:Can’t distinguish between fiction and reality
Unaware of own weaknesses
Hates cooking with olive oil
Overly occupied with aesthetics
Uncertain about their support
Paranoid due to fear of being eaten
Character strengths:
Character weaknesses:
Fave:
Funny moment: An hour into role-playing, storytelling, and trolling, one workshop participant asked the Troll Master “are we going to take a break at some point?” to which another responded: “you have to roll the dice first.”
Alexander Scholz
Alex is a Berlin-based writer, artistic director, and cultural worker. As the founder and creative director of HOLO, he helps produce and disseminate knowledge on disciplinary interstices, artistic research, and cultural transformations in the digital age. Over the years, he curated exhibitions, conferences, and educational programmes for organizations and festivals including A.C.C. (KR), Mapping (CH), MUTEK (CA), and NODE Forum for Digital Arts (DE).
Greg J. Smith
A writer and cultural worker based in Hamilton, Canada, Greg is an editor for HOLO and his writing has appeared in publications including Creative Applications Network, Musicworks, and Back Office. He is also a PhD candidate within the Department of Communication Studies and Multimedia at McMaster University, where he is researching the emergence of the programmable drum machine in the early 1980s.
