designer/facilitator/researcher/co-owner at fractals co-op (https://fractals.coop)
editor and designer at EXIT Press, publishing LOST FUTURES (https://shop.exits.org.uk)
phd student at newcastle university: building futures after austerity through design.
| work | https://fractals.coop/ |
| zine | https://shop.exits.org.uk/products |
| website | https://kierancutting.co.uk |
And also Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
Chaos Magic continues the trend of being a not-game, and is a love letter to The Beginner's Guide, exploring queer desire, coming of age, and the cost of centring yourself in someone else's story.
There's also quite a lot of games theory.
The Beginner's Guide is a 2015 game by Davey Wreden, developer of The Stanley Parable.
The Beginner's Guide is not a game.
The Beginner's Guide is a not-game where you walk through a series of games created by a friend of the narrator called Coda.
Do you like lyric games and meta games? Did you think the problem with The Beginner's Guide / The Stanley Parable was that they didn't have enough layers? Do you like late-night Wikipedia binges that only make sense to you?
My new 'game' is free for one day only:
In September 2023, fractals co-op worked with Dr Mwenza Blell to bring the Museum of Lost Futures to life.
We designed an immersive experience that explored haunting, reproductive justice and abolitionist practice. We designed objects from possible futures and histories and alternate presents, wrote and recorded an audio soundscape that told the story of the Museum, and developed a card game to help people who are close with each other to explore their futures together.
Immersive experiences have a huge potential for helping people to feel new things and connect these to new imaginaries of the future. It's more critical than ever to help people develop their ability to imagine something different than our current world—especially in an embodied sense.
Read more about our work with Mwenza below. Our favourite way to work is in collaboration, so if you'd like to explore what an imagination-building experience like this might look like in your context, we'd love to chat.
"if we see everything as constructed we can see everything as deconstructable" - @kieran
on ways to defamiliarize social phenomena deeply embedded & normalized in your day to day life
I’ve just got back from a two week trip to Morocco which was amazing and so unique but also deeply tiring. Along with having to deal with the usual slog of catching up on emails and trying to get things going again before Christmas inevitably shuts everything down, I’ve been reflecting on what travel is and why we do it.
This week on Substack, I’m talking about what it is to call a place home (in opposition to travel), through the lens of finding my current home, Newcastle. What draws us somewhere? Can we ever claim to ‘know’ a place?
“A friend tells me her dad always told her ‘the country’s not that big; if you get lost, keep driving until you hit water’. We must be lost a lot because we find ourselves hitting water so many times in this first year.”
EXIT Press are back, with a new print by Patrick Wray!
In “We can collect the keys” (written by Clive Judd, illustrated by Patrick Wray), the narrator ponders a sign forbidding the exercising of dogs and asks himself “Could I exorcise a dog here, do you think?”
At our Birmingham launch event, we begged Patrick to illustrate the dog exorcism. He did. It’s here.
Each print ships with a free copy of “We can collect the keys”.
Admit it, you’ve always wanted to read someone else’s diary, or journal, or notes app. You wanted to know what’s lurking in the corners of someone else’s mind. What do they actually think? What’s going on inside of them? Unless someone has trusted you with their entire heart and let you read their diary, though - you’ve never seen anyone’s but your own.
Let’s change that.
‘notes to self’ is a zine composed entirely of people writing to themselves. Diary entries, pages of your journal, screenshots of your notes app, snippets from that text file you keep on your computer - it’s all here. We want to read your diaries and we want you to read ours. We think there’s something deeply intimate about sharing something that was never meant to be seen by anyone else.
Submissions are open until March 21st. Diary pages, notes app screenshots - anything that was originally meant for your eyes only. You can submit anonymously, if you'd prefer.
#CallForSubmissions #Writing #Zine #Hauntology #Diary #publishing
https://exitpress.substack.com/p/call-for-submissions-notes-to-self
Admit it, you’ve always wanted to read someone else’s diary, or journal, or notes app. You wanted to know what’s lurking in the corners of someone else’s mind. What do they actually think? What’s going on inside of them? Unless someone has trusted you with their entire heart and let you read their diary, though - you’ve never seen anyone’s but your own.
Let’s change that.
‘notes to self’ is a zine composed entirely of people writing to themselves. Diary entries, pages of your journal, screenshots of your notes app, snippets from that text file you keep on your computer - it’s all here. We want to read your diaries and we want you to read ours. We think there’s something deeply intimate about sharing something that was never meant to be seen by anyone else.
Submissions are open until March 21st. Diary pages, notes app screenshots - anything that was originally meant for your eyes only. You can submit anonymously, if you'd prefer.
#CallForSubmissions #Writing #Zine #Hauntology #Diary #publishing
https://exitpress.substack.com/p/call-for-submissions-notes-to-self
Raghav Agrawal
