FIGHT OFF THE MOBS OF POST-WAR CAPITALISM
On October 13th, 2023, the Minecraft Bloc research group at the Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) lab brought the avant-garde 1964 “Fun Palace” by Cedric Price, Joan Littlewood, and contributors into the world of MINECRAFT! Players had a hand in realizing this cultural project-to-be to take back a future that never really happened.
Watch the official Fun Palace SMP trailer
Fun Palace Blog Posts
On Minecraft, the Fun Palace and Scale
“The Fun Palace — not so much a building as a giant framework of gantries, walkways, platforms, moveable walls, modular rooms pods, screens and fungible spaces, shot through with computerized communication systems — is itself an allegory for the planned, mediated space of technoculture that produces leisure and play: a promise to the masses of less work and more leisure, imbricated with the neoliberal ideology of the pursuit of individualized pleasures and ever-expanding creative capacity…”
Cementing Modernity
“Modernity – its one of those words that junior scholars and students know, but don’t really know. For established scholars, it is more about who and what retelling of modernity do I not want to know. Either way, its still being negotiated and written on. For students like me then, we are forced to wrestle with mountains of essays — most of which we get by in undergraduate studies by remembering its key features and a few writers. Obviously, it is not enough. Modded Minecraft comes in: the conditions of having to build and build with concrete has placed me into a revelation…”
Greatness from Tall Beginnings
“At its crux, the Allegorical Build is about playing to understand. The Allegory in its name is derived from an old critical form whereby one makes sense of a new content by imposing what was previously learnt onto it. Today, these are known as our ideologies, stereotypes, prejudices, tropes, lived experiences, ‘signs’, and the such. Where Minecraft comes in is its ability to allow players, first to experience what is being presented to them through the form the game’s blocks, to negotiate how these blocks could be re-presented through the form of the grid surrounding the blocks…”
The Fun Palace: Cultural Politics with Derek and Richy
Derek Pasborg and Richy Srirachanikorn, graduate researchers of the TAG Minecraft Bloc, discuss 1964’s The Fun Palace led by Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood. In this short introduction, they touch on the industrial revolution, work and women, London politics, time and crime, convention centres, and even POO!
