The Fake Haven

Abstract

This writing evolved out of a text that was rejected by my institution. I had to disentangle it and start again. Whereas artwork can be ever faltering, ever failing, not knowing how it will turn out, within practice-led research there is an expectation that you can predict an outcome. In my original text, the boundaries between my practice and a goal driven academic model became porous; poetry seeped into the academic writing and dissolved the fortress. The premise of the text is that through instructions and an imaginary video-game walkthrough, the player is going to return to their ‘pre-self’, which is a notion taken from Zen meditation (described as ‘no-self’). The text has become a proposal for a third-person player game produced for an exhibition. The text changes form, pronouns, possessive nouns, moving from concrete poetry to prose, from internal monologues to diatribes. It is a deliberate mode to dodge self-imposed restrictions when in the rest of life, I exist as queer beyond the gender binary and also as a mother.