Socially-oriented art practices and activism often desire to enact change in the world but usually fall short of actualizing their experimental models in the real world. What they lack is some way of mapping onto the world in which we live and, consequently, enacting the type of change they purport to seek. But this need not be the case. In two talks and a discussion, artist and larp designer Susan Ploetz along with researcher Nick Houde will present two different angles on social practices that hope to move beyond representation and into the form of actionable models that demonstratively alter the social and political circumstances of our world.

Susan Ploetz’s talk will look at how play, games, and the purposeful design or construction of social interactions can lead to successful social and political change through the lens of what philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once referred to as “Fused Groups.” By focusing on such movements as the neo-anarchist Provo Movement in the 60’s and the emergent Larpers of the World, she will explore how such activities can form a baseline of participants who can embody and facilitate decentralized collective action of people ready and willing to exercise their agency, flexible federations that can mobilize institutional power, and perhaps even people who form civic groups in the face of state and other superstructural collapse.

Nick Houde’s talk outlines a new research project prototyping models for vertically integrated labor unions. These are labor unions that organize workers down a globalized supply chain, connecting workers across factories, logistics operations, national borders, and firms to foment collective bargaining power that is more amenable to the production model of the 21st century. The outline will attempt to sketch out the basic technological and legal infrastructures that would make them implentable.

Susan Ploetz is an artist-researcher working at the junction of embodiement, theory, technos, and politics. Upcoming projects include Senses of Security as a part of the Uncertainty Seminars at Stroom den Haag, and larping with humans and soft robotics as a part of The Shape of Things to Come: Technology, AI and the Human, at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, Japan.

Nick Houde is a researcher, writer, and musician based in Berlin. For the last three years he has worked as a research fellow and co-curator at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) for the Technosphere Project and the Anthropocene Curriculum. His research and writing focuses epistemology and mechanistic forms of reasoning around social value and governance. Musically, he performs under the moniker of Soft Steps.