How might we build more equitable (art) worlds? What is at stake when deciding the flow of limited resources? What are the trade-offs of different organisational forms and strategies?
The Modules is a role-playing game about decision-making and resource scarcity. Players speed-run organisational forms and explore the intricacies of ‘real-world’ economics and organisational dynamics.
In a preparatory workshop, participants contribute their knowledge to design different organisations, and their characters and roles within them, based on archetypes pulled at random. Players build an exquisite corpse and contribute their creativity to the contours of the world.
In the second part of The Modules, participants play a game based loosely on Capture the Flag and Nomic, a game about changing the rules of play through different collective mechanisms. Each organisation – called an *org* in the language of the world – manages a balance of a fictional currency called *phi*. They create a sustainable strategy for their treasury, and explore their own cultural economics by navigating the other players.
The ticket includes a free vegan lunch.
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Formed in 2019 in Berlin, Black Swan (Laura Lotti, Calum Bowden, Penny Rafferty, Leïth Benkhedda) is a collective pursuing horizontal and decentralised approaches to art making. Starting from their context in the Berlin cultural scene, Black Swan proposes an ecology of interdependent art worlds based on plurality and situatedness. Black Swan is developing digital toolkits for artists through a methodology that puts play and blockchain-thinking at the centre. Existing communities of creative practitioners are invited to test and experiment with forms of interaction, modes of organisation, and sustainable economic models in role-playing games, working groups, and hackathons. Through this, Black Swan is building an interoperable protocol for artistic communes, to enable collaborative institutional forms and allow for a redefinition of what art can be.
