Co-Creating Worlds: An Interview with Guggenheim Fellow Patrick Jagoda
By Ellen Wiese
The Guggenheim Fellowship is awarded to practitioners in a diverse range of fields—arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences—and recognizes those with significant prior accomplishment and exceptional potential. Through its gifts of time and money, the Guggenheim Foundation enables 175 awardees (winnowed from over 3,000 applicants) to further their scholastic and creative endeavors over the course of a year. This year, the University of Chicago has five recipients, tied with Stanford for the highest number from a single school. We reached out to Professor Patrick Jagoda, an awardee in the arts field, to hear more about his work and plans for the Fellowship.
Patrick Jagoda
Professor in the Department of English, the Department of Cinema & Media Studies, and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality; Co-editor of Critical Inquiry; and co-founder of Game Changer Chicago Design Lab
You will be using the Guggenheim Fellowship to support Story Lab: Narrative Methods for a Transmedia Era, an experimental and collaborative humanities multimedia publication. What are the details of this project, and how will its development unfold? (And will this development be affected by the pandemic?)
In the year 2020, we find ourselves in a transmedia environment that has transformed storytelling. In addition to more established cultural forms such as the novel or film, narrative is now conveyed through formats such as webisodes, podcasts, video games, webcomics, multilinear interactive fictions, and much more. Even in 1974, Raymond Williams (the Birmingham School cultural critic) wrote that in the United States and Britain more narrative drama was being consumed in a week or even a weekend than might have been watched in a year or even a lifetime in earlier historical periods. Williams’s comment was largely spurred by television viewership in the 1970s. But that’s even more the case today with the possibility of Netflix binges, 100+ hour video games, or serial podcasts that we listen to during our daily commutes — or, as we’re having this interview, shelter-in-place during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Transmedia Story Lab. Images courtesy of the artist’s website.
Both my scholarly and artistic projects during the fellowship will confront this media context. On the scholarly side, Story Lab is a multimedia book that includes chapter, videos, audio files, curricula, images, and more. It’s a collaborative experiment in the public humanities that explores storytelling-based research. Beyond entertainment or art, several fields have approached storytelling as a kind of transdisciplinary method. So, I’m interested in how emergent forms in the arts and humanities — namely, digital storytelling, body mapping, speculative design, narrative videogames, and alternate reality games — can influence the social and medical sciences. This work is based on a decade of serious game design, summer workshops, and public health research that I’ve been conducting with medical doctor and Ci3 founder Melissa Gilliam. Melissa is a Vice Provost now, but years ago we also founded the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab (GCC) and the Transmedia Story Lab (TSL). For nearly a decade, we’ve been working on a series of game and narrative projects, along with a larger team of researchers and designers. In one way or another, each of these projects is concerned with social, emotional, economic, and health issues with young people of color on the South Side of Chicago, often with an emphasis on LGBTQ youth. To date, we’ve largely published in specialized public health contexts. This book is an attempt to make these projects and methods accessible to a broader audience, and to highlight the contributions of the young people who have participated in these programs. To do this, I’m also working with people who were key to the original projects, including Ireashia Bennett, Alida Bouris, and Liz Futrell who work at TSL and Ashlyn Sparrow who was at GCC for many years.
Give me a sense of your artistic trajectory to this point. How did you end up doing the work you’re doing? What are your artistic priorities?
Since about 2011, I’ve worked systematically on a series of artistic projects, especially designing and writing video games, board and card games, and electronic literature. More than any of these areas though, I’ve been fascinated by the art form of the alternate reality game or transmedia game that started in the 2000s. With different groups of collaborators, I’ve co-created narratives that stretch across multiple months and move across multiple media. Each of these games invites collectives of people to explore an alternate reality. Instead of the multimedia frame of a video game on a single screen, these experiences incorporate novelistic text, videos, audio files, phone calls from characters, extensive online scavenger hunts, code-breaking puzzles, live performances, and online experiments across platforms such as Twitch, Zoom, and Discord. These games are so fascinating to me because they provide compelling ways of exploring our post-truth media landscape and the ways that we live and socialize in networked environments. Usually, these “games” do not announce themselves as games, so they ask players to negotiate the very status of fiction and truth within a media environment. Grappling with and changing that environment continues to strike me as one of the greatest challenges of our time.
As to trajectory, I made my first alternate reality game with University of Chicago students in 2011 (Oscillation). In 2012, I worked with artist Patrick LeMieux and new media scholar Katherine Hayles on a game about finance cultures, the post-2008 economic crisis, and Occupy Wall Street (Speculation). Following that, I’ve worked on games about health disparities in the U.S. (Stork), conspiracy (The Project), academic conferences (Play as Inquiry), and STEM learning among underrepresented young people (The Source and SEED). Since 2017, I’ve been working with a core group of collaborators that includes Heidi Coleman (TAPS), Ashlyn Sparrow (Weston Game Lab), Marc Downie (Cinema and Media Studies), and Kristen Schilt (Sociology) on game design projects for social good and learning. We’ve made two games that have run during the University of Chicago orientation: one about diversity, inclusion, and dissensus (the parasite) and one about climate change (Terrarium). This spring, we came together quickly in April and May to create a game for the broader University of Chicago community that seeks to build community and encourage creativity during the COVID-19 pandemic (A Labyrinth). To my own surprise, this is the tenth such game that I’ve co-directed. Even so, this form has yet to get any less interesting or productively difficult to me over the years.
Stills from Terrarium. Images courtesy of the artist’s website.
Your work utilizes multimedia and experimental elements. Why does unconventional/emerging art appeal to you? What do experimental/emerging forms have to tell us?
“Experiment” and “experimental” are tricky terms for me. The world is filled with experimental thinking and material experiments, but they take so many different forms. Randomized Controlled Trials in closed scientific laboratories offer one model. Neoliberal economic experiments practiced by the International Monetary Fund or corporate product optimization offer very different kinds of experiments. Aesthetic modulations of affect that unfold within distributed digital media environments like social media networks or video game open worlds represent yet another kind of experiment.
In another sense, experiments can be both dangerous and insightful, depending on how they are designed and executed. Plenty of scientific experiments instrumentalize human lives. The obvious examples, which are in different ways extreme and exemplary, would be something like Josef Mengele’s horrific experiments on disabled people and pregnant women at Auschwitz, or the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment that withheld penicillin from African American men in rural Alabama. I think we could also add Harry Harlow’s primate experiments that probed the psychology of attachment and various other experiments on nonhuman creatures. At the same time, there are also countless generative and ethical experiments, created by artists or scientists, which creatively construct a world, trying out myriad possibilities en route to provisional knowledge and working theories.
I realize that this may seem like a weird context for me to jump to when you asked a question about experimental art and emerging forms! But for me, art has never been so different or certainly not completely distinct from science in terms of its capacity for experimenting with the world and generating knowledge about it. Experimental art forms have taught me so much about human behavior, habits, creativity, modes of play, ways of organizing the world, patterns of inequality, and much more. The alternate reality games I was just talking about can be called “games” or “an art form” but they are also alternative experimental tools and techniques. I have a book coming out this fall, Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (University of Chicago Press, 2020), which explores these ideas in much greater detail in the realm of video games.
The Guggenheim Fellowship is diverse in its awardees, drawing from individuals in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences. As someone who frequently works across media (or in combined media), what is the particular appeal of the Fellowship? How will this opportunity shape your work?
Jagoda during an ARG collaboration with Heidi Coleman. Photo by Ben Kolak and Scrappers Film Group.
My work has rarely had a snug fit with any single discipline or method. I’m based in an English and Cinema & Media Studies department. In this context, I write books and essays that seek to contribute to fields such as literary studies, media studies, and critical theory. But I also do other kinds of work. For instance, I publish research studies in public health, sexual and reproductive health, education, and social science journals. I design both digital and analog games — and study their effectiveness at reaching various goals. I work with filmmakers on video essays and short documentary pieces. I’ve worked in a curatorial mode on an art exhibition. To be clear: All of this has always been possible for me because of the amazing collaborators I’ve had the good fortune of working with over the years — people coming from the arts, design, social science, biological science, and of course different humanistic fields. I think I feel especially excited about the Guggenheim fellowship because it feels like I received it not in spite of my transdisciplinary promiscuity but because of it. I’m still surprised and grateful. If anything, I think this opportunity will encourage me to be even more, or differently, experimental.
Where is the field of art headed? What questions are we asking ourselves as people? What’s next?
That would be a question that an art historian, curator, or fine artist might answer more effectively than I can! To say something speculative about that, I have to start with my own practice. You know, there are plenty of people who still don’t consider game design to be art. Of course, that depends on their definition of art. Regardless, that has always struck me as an absurdly conservative position. However you classify it, I think of most of my art work as belonging to the field of experience design. My art isn’t primarily about the usual media aesthetics triumvirate of image, sound, and text. All three of those realms matter to me. But I’m more interested in constructing worlds that also invite performance and real-time exchanges between creators and audiences. The term “interactive” doesn’t quite get at what I mean. For instance, multilinear narrative is interesting as a formal affordance but never feels sufficient to me. I’m much more interested in art that invites an audience to co-create a world. Art history gives us useful concepts for thinking about this kind of thing —for instance, Nicolas Bourriaud’s “relational aesthetics” and perhaps even more Claire Bishop's “relational antagonism.” But game and experience design allow us to explore social relations and dissensus far outside the confines of the conventional art world.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons has sold more than 13.41 million copies since its release on March 20th. Each copy costs $59.99, much more than the usual movie ticket or Amazon rental.
The only provisional comment I’ll make about the future of art and culture has to do with the changes we’ve seen during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This is likely not to be the last such pandemic or global crisis, plus the world will be facing massive social changes due to the acceleration of climate change in the coming years. Even since early March, we’ve seen a transformation of culture. Live theater has struggled to persist amidst shelter-in-place orders, even as some theaters have used this as an opportunity for formal experiments. The film industry has taken a huge hit, recording zero profits for the first time in history and shutting down countless production processes, even as we also see an unprecedented (even overwhelming) quantity of amateur and experimental films emerging online. I do think we’ll see a decline in some established art forms (I can’t help but think about the rapid decline in Academy Awards viewership or live attendance for many live art events even prior to the present crisis). But at the same time, with a reduction in social activities that require physical presence, video game play in places like the U.S. has skyrocketed — a notable development, given that the video game industry had already outpaced the music, film, and television culture industries prior to the pandemic, making approximately 120 billion dollars in profits in 2019 (compared to the film industry’s continued slide to 42.5 billion that same year). During the pandemic, people have played just incredible amounts of existing games such as Fortnite and newly released games such as Animal Crossing: New Horizons. And the space of experimental game making is far from saturated. In 2020, experiments in areas like live streaming, augmented reality, game design, networked sociality, and netprov strike me as the most exciting, unexplored, relevant, and important spaces for understanding — and more importantly transforming — contemporary art and culture. I obviously don’t think established arts, such as sculpture, music, theater, or film are going away, nor would I want that. But they are likely to look very different, and in some cases less central, even in a decade.
The world was already heading in these directions. The pandemic just accelerated those tendencies and has started to actualize what were previously latent potentials.
Is there anything else you would like to share about your work and/or the fellowship?
Individual awards can obscure the networks that enable art and thought. I want to emphasize that, even as I’m receiving the Guggenheim fellowship as an individual for which I’m grateful, I’ve been working with so many teams of visionary people who are crucial to how I think and work today. So many of these people are the colleagues in my home departments and also people outside of the University of Chicago — I immediately think of close collaborators such as Sha Xin Wei, Patrick LeMieux, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Michael Maizels, Dave Carlson, and Priscilla Wald. But I’ve also been enriched by intense multi-year and multi-project collaborations with people at the University of Chicago, such as Ashlyn Sparrow, Heidi Coleman, Melissa Gilliam, Kristen Schilt, Ireashia Bennett, Marc Downie, Alida Bouris, Peter McDonald, and so many students and members of the Southside Chicago community. No list of names could justice to the quality and importance of these collaborations. These are extraordinary makers and thinkers. And this kind of sustained continuity with a shared and inclusive local community — importantly one that exceeds the more common collaborative couple form — generates a different type of thought than the types of scholarship I was trained within. I am grateful for this “we.” I hope this fellowship can in some small way encompass and expand how these collectives undergird the work I’ve contributed to over the years.
Learn more about UChicago’s Guggenheim Fellows here.