Jamie Harper: The Aesthetics and Politics of Play

As larp develops and draws on the insights of performance studies and fine art, attention is increasingly paid to its aesthetic properties. In contrast to conventional aesthetics that focus on the creation and perception of art objects, new arguments have emerged that argue for new concepts of aesthetic experience.

Nicolas Bourriaud's 'relational aesthetics' that looks at the aesthetic value of social conviviality and Grant Kester's 'dialogical aesthetics' which foregrounds the transformations that inter-subjective exchange can enable have fed into theories of experiential aesthetics of larp. Finnish games studies scholar Jaakko Stenros has offered a compelling analysis of the aesthetic values of larp such as its embodied nature, its co-creative culture and also its structures of critical reflexivity.

This talk will summarise existing ideas of experiential aesthetics but also build on them to consider how the aesthetic experience might connect to political intentions of designers and political responses of players. Though…