The Complex Christ

Game Over//US Release//Adjust Your Links

I'm pleased to be able to announce that The Complex Christ is now going to be released properly in the US. Thank God. No more trips to the post office to mail them over! And no more customs delays! I'll post a purchase link when I have one.

It's going to be re-named Signs of Emergence, and come out under an imprint of the good people at Baker books.

For lots of reasons I'm going to be quitting this blog. I need a rest, the design is tired too, plus I need some time to work on some other writing projects and some time while some things emerge post-Vaux. I also wanted a new Typepad root to hang a load of other blogs off.

So for those of you who like to continue journeying with me, I'll eventually be blogging here at http://kester.typepad.com/signs
The site is almost finished, but, as I said, I'm going to have a break for a bit and start posting proper around Christmas. I'll let people know somehow.
Until then, I'll be keeping an eye on this blog and replying to comments etc.

Thanks to everyone who's kept it interesting. It's Game Over for now. Hope we'll catch up soon ;-)

Peace,

Technorati Tags: Baker, Signs of Emergence, The Complex Christ

China Power Station | The Old World Is Gone

Organised by the Serpentine Gallery, a group of video artists from China have been given space in and around Battersea Power Station to show their work. It's one of the best shows I've been too for a long time, for a number of reasons.

Primarily, the location is iconic. The power station at Battersea stands overlooking the Thames, the vast wasteland around it criss-crossed by railways. One of those buildings that is so large it is difficult to get perspective on it. The chimneys stand higher than the Statue of Liberty. The turbine halls dwarfing those at London's other converted power station, Tate Modern.

Also, it was just before we started Vaux that the four of us who were about to kick it off stumbled on an 'open day' at there about 8 years ago. No one seemed to know about it, so we were given a guided tour of the wrecked site. It is beautiful in its woundedness. The old world has gone: coal, smoke and ash and brick. Industrial massiveness. It lies abandoned, permanently hung with brick-tint melancholy.

This makes it the perfect place for the work on display. China, the raging economy building coal-fired power stations bigger than this every week... It's artists already critiquing the utopia their leaders think they are building, their visions projected among our industrial wreckage.

The exhibition is only on until 5th November, and tickets are limited, so pre-booking is essential. It's really not to be missed - this is the last time the public will be allowed onto the site before contractors move in and turn the whole place into an arts/commercial complex. There's something about that that makes me sad. Which is why I had to go and take some photos. Thankfully there is a beautiful tea-house that's been constructed (see pictures), serving wonderful tea and Chinese treats.

Technorati Tags: Art, Battersea Power Station, China Power Station, London

Insert Coin [3] | Final Fantasy

[Level 1]  [Level 2]

Emerging Church: Game or Ritual?

As The Believer points out, one aspect of games such as Dungeons and Dragons is that of fantasy. When you enter a game, you are entering 'role play' - becoming someone else. Becoming a fantasy self.

This is something I have critiqued in more detail here. But to summarize, if the Emerging Church risks being seen as a game for some - with rules and power accumulating - then the parallel risk is that it becomes a fantasy, and will inevitably suffer collapse at the end of a fantasy cycle. It will become an ecclesiastic Gizmondo (beautiful article, well worth reading).

So what might be a way forward? How do we avoid the game, with its disjunctive effects, de-marking winners and losers? How do we avoid the unhealthy tendency to masculine competitiveness?

We might meditate on the gospel as a D&D scenario. A wise wizard gathers characters around him. They journey from place to place, meeting monsters, overcoming problems, asking questions. They have a quest, they are immersing themselves in a new kingdom. For some, the quest is a game - there are going to be winners and losers. And certainly, Jesus plays within a defined set of rules. He plays a part.

But, firstly, he also subverts the games different groups want him to play: he plays dirty. By bending the rules he subverts the the boundaries of the game, and thus begins to play in a whole new dimension. Others cry 'foul' and get him sent off... But it's at that point that Jesus refuses to engage in this mission as a game at all. By dying, by 'losing', he presents the ultimate criticism of the competitive, religious fantasies that both his followers and opponents projected onto him.

Secondly, he presents a criticism of the power-accumulation that defines 'good play' in so many games. He empties himself. He works in the economy of gift, passing things on rather than pooling wealth.

Thirdly, he rises again to present an entirely new concept of play. The universe is now fluid and self-organizing. Where there were once rules, there are now governing dynamics. Where there were once blocked walls, places our characters could not go, limiting screens, there is now freedom to roam. Spirit. No temple.

Interestingly, it seems that games are heading that way too. Check out Spore (review here) - a game from the creator of the Sims series that begins in the primordial soup, and can zoom in and out between organism and galactic levels. Players evolve species - and their characteristics are totally within their own control. The game doesn't have a stock list, its governing dynamics simply work out how a fish with 3 legs and a huge head might move. Species then create cities, interact on-line with other cities other players have created, and take on whole different galaxies. Due to be released in Spring next year, it promises to be an extraordinary experience.

If we can face down the fantasy-self of the emerging expressions we are a part of - as Christ did in the desert - we can evolve something truly new. But unless we do so, we are destined to create something competitive and regulated, with its own winners and losers, its own D&D neeks and sports jocks. Let's hope we do so. Let's pray we don't go Gizmondo: promising so much, disappointing so many, costing someone a fortune.

Technorati Tags: Arcade Game, Dirt, Dungeons and Dragons, Gaming, Gizmondo, Religion, Spore

Insert Coin [2] | Weapons::Rules::Power

[First Level]

Game or Ritual? This was the key question addressed in Level One.

Lévi-Strauss made the distinction between Games ("they end in the establishment of a difference between players or teams where originally there was no indication of inequality") and Rituals ("it brings about a union, or in any case, an organic relation between two initially separate groups") and I proposed that it might be fruitful to meditate on whether our expression of Church was one or the other. Certainly, from the initial responses, it seems people have identified an unhelpful spirit of competition in Emerging Churches, which may be a hangover from their very masculine roots.

Dungeons and Dragons, about which an article in The Believer inspired this series, inhabits a grey (actually, misty, foggy or windswept might be better adjectives) area between game and ritual. It was perhaps a (knee)jerk reaction to jock sports - which are heavy on winners - but still definitely has aspects of a true game.

One of those key aspects is the emphasis on accumulation. Though there may not be 'winners' and 'losers' as such, 'good' play is exhibited by the accumulation of power and wealth: special weapons, keys to open secret doors, coins which give leverage in various ways. The more explicit connection came later in arcade games such as Super Mario: more stuff meant longer life and greater power. (My personal favourite: Xybots. An absolute classic. After each level you basically descended to a shop, where you could cash your coins in for bigger weapons, better shields etc.) The parallels for us are obvious enough.

One thing that both rituals and games have in common is the need for rules - boundaries around which the action takes place. Elsewhere in the issue The Believer looks at Oulipian literature. Oulipo stands for "Ouvoir de littérature potentielle", a loose gather of French writers who write within close constraints precisely because they believe that the constraints can be very creative. Similarly, Thomas Vinterberg and Lars Van Trier explored the Dogme 95 system of film making as a creative, not restrictive act.

The really good rituals or games are those where the rules are fixed enough for there to be tensions created, and not so fixed that the action either becomes totally predictable, or so free that things degenerate into chaos.

In our meditation on rituals and games as they might impact the Emerging Church, we might thus far conclude that a) power is more obviously accumulated in games, but power-games exist very clearly under the surface in rituals too (which will bring us back to connect with Gift), and b) games and rituals both need rules - the issue is the extent to which those rules create disjunction, rather than union. Rules ought to be creative. Too intimately linked with power accumulation, they become divisive, promote unhealthy competition, which leads to denominations of 'winners' and 'losers'.

As the Emerging Church continues to... emerge/solidify/denominate, I wonder: is it becoming more game-like? The rules, though never written, are becoming clearer, and some might argue that power-resource-accumulation is already happening around certain people/movements. Perception or reality, the disjunctive effects of that could be dangerous.

Level 3 soon...

Technorati Tags: Dungeons and Dragons, Gaming, Power, Arcade Game, Religion, Theology

Insert Coin | Is Church a Game?

The ever-brilliant Believer Magazine took 'Games' as its theme for the September issue. It's left me with some thoughts I want to share, probably over the course of a few posts.

One of the main articles, by Paul La Farge, was an exploration of Dungeons and Dragons, which, in typical Believer style, meant a gorgeous meditation on the history and culture of the game, building to the author playing an actual game with D&D's founder (sort of), Gary Gygax.

La Farge writes:

"The appeal of D&D is superficially not very different from the appeal of reading. You start outside something (Middle Earth, Dickens' London) and you go in, bit by bit. Along the way, you may have occasion to think, to doubt, or even to learn. Then you come back: your work has piled up, it's past your bedtime; people may wonder what you have been doing. D&D is a game for people who like rules: in order to play the game you had to make sense of roughly twenty pages of instructions."

 

However, in the course of the article La Farge explores the extent to which D&D actually is a game. He quotes Lévi-Strauss:

"Games appear to have a disjunctive effect: they end in the establishment of a difference between players or teams where originally there was no indication of inequality. And at the end of the game they are distinguished into winners and losers."

La Farge notes that there are no real winners or losers in D&D, and there is no real difference established. So, rather than being a game, it is instead, perhaps, closer to ritual. Again quoting Lévi-Strauss:

"Ritual, on the other hand, is the exact inverse: it cojoins, for it brings about a union, or in any case, and organic relation between two initially separate groups."

Having read the article I began to wonder if the Emerging Church was rather too similar to D&D than we might like to admit. Men spending too much time in dark, dungeon-like rooms exploring deep worlds? I don't even want to go there!

More seriously, I do wonder if this distinction between game and ritual gives us something to reflect on. It is interesting to note that the clichéd D&D player was 'nerd' as opposed to 'jock'. Jocks were definitely into games, because they knew they could win. Nerds went for something more conjunctive, perhaps because they knew they couldn't.

One might argue that the Evangelical model of faith, with hell for the losers, is very much like a game, with very high stakes. And the Christian 'jocks' love to play. But is that what God wanted? Has the Emerging Church become the 'nerd' version, the non-competitve, no losers model? We might want to claim that the expressions of church we are involved in are fully based on ritual... but are we ignoring the sense of competitiveness about our success when we do so?

So, I think it is worth reflecting: is the Church playing at game or ritual?
For now I've run out of credit.

for more soon...

Technorati Tags: Church, Gaming, Gygax, Dungeons and Dragons, Religion

One Day in History | "A Day of No Particular Significance"

History Matters, along with the National Trust and a bunch of other UK organizations have put together 'One Day in History'.

The idea is simple: on October 17th you log on to the History Matters Website and upload your 'blog' diary of that day. These mass entries will then be collated and kept as a permanent record in the British Library of a snap-shot of an ordinary day in the UK in 2006. Why Tuesday October 17th? For no reason. It is 'a day of no particular significance'. Why do it? Because history matters. And this is one way in which the distributed nature of the web can be harnessed, and it's temporal nature bypassed. These 'Mass Observations' have been collected in the UK since 1937 (and are currently archived at the University of Surrey) , but this is a unique way of taking them to a totally new dimension.

Pepys will be rejoicing...

Sign up now.

Technorati Tags: History Matters, London, Pepys

Cross' Bridge | Health and Safety | Middle Class Obedience

Some photos of Michael Cross' installation at Dilston Grove - a disused shell of a church on the edge of Southwark Park.

The main body of the church has been filled with a tank of water. As you step out over it, steps appear from the water. They are meant to disappear behind you, leaving you standing in the middle, alone, surrounded by water and light. 'It'll work better in the next one I'm building', said the artist. Apparently in an outdoor lake, which will be stunning.

The piece for me ended up being a meditation not on water and light, but on health and safety, and middle class obedience. We all had to sign disclaimers. Walkers were forced to wear life-jackets, and were guided out by the artist. In case they fell into 60cm of water. No one was allowed near the tank when the artist wasn't in the room. And everyone obeyed sensibly.

It wasn't Cross' fault. 'Insurance purposes.' But somehow it took the trickster element away, and thus a good bit of the artistic merit, leaving something more akin to a challenge on a outdoor pursuits camp.

Technorati Tags: Art, Michael Cross, Obedience

Life-jacket | Strait-jacket

Ben has some good thoughts here about the search for a 'just society' being debased by 'human rights'.

He makes the point that "the ideology of a tolerant society has become a straight jacket that prevents human freedom". I was reminded by the metaphor a colleague once used about our National Curriculum, and to recycle it, perhaps human rights have become 'life jacket for the vulnerable, but a strait-jacket for the just.'

They are essential in many ways to protect those most at risk. But for those who are actually just, they are so 'tight' that they become counter-productive.

Technorati Tags: Baumen, Baumen, Human Rights, puppy

Creation>Preservation>Destruction | Genesis in Reverse?

Part of my timetable this year is teaching some RE. It's been a fascinating change. One of the things I've been covering is the Genesis story with a group of 11 year olds.

Reading through the story and analysing the day-by-day creation, one student commented on the environmental obligation that the text suggested. In the following discussion, the deep symbolism of the story really began to strike me: the pattern of the days rolls from separation of water into sea and rain, the appearance of land, the plants, the animals and finally mankind.

And the way this pattern of the days is creeping into reverse.

Possibly hundreds of species becoming extinct each day, rain-forests decimated... and the sea rising again to take the poisoned land back.

I was talking to someone at dinner at a wedding on Saturday - a research biochemist - and he was explaining his support for Richard Dawkins. His view is the planet will survive, and some new form of life will evolve. We are simply hurrying an inevitable new ice-age.

I'd obviously argue that a key point of the birth of consciousness has been missed - a unique intervention that breaks into this cycle and leaves us with a responsibility to take care of this amazing gift we've been bestowed with.

It's a gift we've been completely trashing. The meeting of the World's Top Polluting Countries is a crisis meeting. Real action has to be taken at inter-governmental level. And what is depressing from the initial conversations is that many are saying 'sorry, our economies have to come first.' We can't afford to save the planet. Money has finally won. Seems Dawkins' 'Selfish Gene' was about right after all.

Technorati Tags: Civilization, Environment, Sustainable Growth, Technology

Three-view Tele | Now That's Community

No doubt about it, Sharp are clever people. They've developed an LCD screen that shows 3 different images, depending on your viewpoint.

As Far East Gizmos put it, "these displays have allowed Sharp to once again create new demand and contribute to the creation of new lifestyles."

Call me a grouch, but is part of that great new lifestyle everyone in the family being able to watch the same screen, but something different? Ahh... those great family evenings! McDonalds for one, KFC for another and curry for the kids. And let's all sit down together and watch something different! Now that's community ;-)

[But wouldn't we just LOVE one for alt.worship. Trinity meditation here we come...]

Technorati Tags: Technology