Playing with Puzzling Philosophical Problems - Creativity in the Digital Age - page 62

sculpting, dancing, philosophizing, exploring, building, etc. can have a transformative
effect on the recipient of the experience or the performance in question but can also
be a self-fashioning, transformative moment for the philosopher, the artist or the
designer engaged in the very crafting of a certain experience, artefact, work or per-
formance (Gualeni 2014 ). The idea of philosophy as an autopoietic practice (i.e.
functioning as a self-fashioning practice: an activity that has transformative effects
through an on-going critical process) is quite well established in the continental
tradition and was recently recuperated by Davis Baird in his 2004 topic Things
Knowledge: A Philosophy of Scientifi c Instruments . According to Baird, the concept
of 'building' (understood as the academic praxis of 'doing', of 'constructing things'
as a heuristic practice) offers an opportunity
to correct the discursive and linguistic bias of the humanities. According to this view, we
should be open to communicating scholarship through artifacts, whether digital or not. It
implies that print is, indeed, ill equipped [sic] to deal with entire classes of knowledge that
are presumably germane to humanistic inquiry. (Ramsay and Rockwell in Gold 2012 , 78)
Baird's notion of 'building' as an academic practice has also evident affi nities
with the understanding of 'carpentry' explained by Bogost in his 2012 topic Alien
Phenomenology . Bringing together the perspectives of Graham Harman and
Alphonso Lingis, Bogost defi ned 'carpentry' as the 'practice of constructing arti-
facts as a philosophical practice' (Bogost 2012 , 93). In two aspects, I believe,
Baird's academic understanding of 'building' and Bogost's notion of 'carpentry'
are analogous to the approach to the mediation of thought that I am proposing in
this essay:
1. In their openness towards non-textual options for the structuring and dissemina-
tion of philosophical notions and experiments
2. In their vision according to which the very crafting and framing of ideas and
world views in any media form is in itself a deeply transformative activity
Far from being a neutral way of exchanging information, writing has cognitive
effects that are evident and inevitable and has been the focus of philosophical debate
since its fi rst introduction in ancient Greek culture. Analogous to the way video-
games might not be suitable for presenting abstract concepts in their full intricacy
and subtlety, traditional topics can neither give the reader agency nor the possibility
to negotiate with the objectifi ed thoughts that they mediate. Apart from the choice
of whether to continue reading or not, linear topics must in fact be recognized as
only allowing - like any other traditional form of mediation - for hermeneutical
forms of freedom. In addition to that, I believe it is relevant to observe that topics
cannot embed dynamic and objective representations of spatial contexts, while digi-
tal simulations can materialize spaces accurately and interactively and can also offer
the opportunity to explore alternative approaches, courses of action and outcomes.
The embedding of videogames and computer simulations in social practices
(philosophy being one of them) might, thus, best be pursued on the basis of the
understanding that, as any other form of mediation, they disclose reality in specifi c
ways and that such ways are always inherently both revealing and concealing. New