Hannah Zafiropoulos: Lecture

Following the recent interest in live action role play in art contexts, this talk presents ongoing research on the potential of larp in curatorial practice. It argues for the development of procedural authorship as a methodology of practice-based research within the emergent field of ‘the curatorial’. ‘The curatorial’ is defined by its ambition to move beyond representation to open up a space of renewed democratic participation that allows for greater levels of participant agency in the process of meaning and the production of new knowledges. Larp is situated as a form of curatorial practice that employs simulation as a post-representational mode, borrowing the term ‘procedural authorship’ from video game theory to understand how a curator may ‘write’, or create the context for such participation. The talk will first ground this thinking in a brief history of curatorial practice before discussing its possible applications, before introducing several experiments currently being undertaken…