Savva Dudin is a PhD candidate at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts.

More information about Savva Dudin

Research

My doctoral research project frames games as embodied technologies that enact power relations and have the potential to prefigure emancipatory infrastructures. It addresses the paradoxical scaffolding of the current political impasse: how to anticipate and design the collapse of a complex society while developing frameworks to prevent it. 

The history of LARPing, a game methodology that became widespread in times of Cold War stagnating peacemaking, teaches that the absence of a political horizon can be fertile ground for speculative communities to prefigure alternative political economies that emerge after systemic rupture. These anticipatory practices, termed pre-enactments, are simulations that allow participants to rehearse unprecedented scenarios and train decision-making, navigating the irreconcilable tensions. 

Today, it is almost impossible to refuse playing with what psychologists call catastrophizing, one of the most normalised morbid symptoms of the interregnum. Deregulation, civil wars, and cold conflicts turning hot escalate the question of sovereignty: Who is actually playing? Answering it from the perspective of social engineering, that attempts to break rules from the top is a re-enactment of Schmittian realpolitik's death-preaching games. However, this research focuses on prototyping new legal fictions from the bottom up, creating new public forms, and scaling mutual aid's support structures. 

The project stems from a speculative hypothesis that game design could reclaim our collective rule-making capacity from outside of dominant identities and the existing oppressive regulative ideas. It searches for alternatives to wargaming and aims to test their capacity to prototype agonistic tensions where excluded actors are recognised as equal under the law. Conceptually indebted to Jonas Huizinga, Seyla Benhabib, and Sylvia Wynter, my research revolves around games that combine the contingency of the play instinct with relational repair. It explores ways in which participatory game design attempts to foster civic repair, post-growth, and post-work legal fictions that recognize excluded political entities and model nonexistent ones.