Ardeth (Nov 2021)
The Fold
Abstract
“The Fold”, is a game-essay informed by a series of in-depth interviews with a number of disparate actors, times, and spaces in the history and present of Het Nieuwe Instituut, a cultural centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.1 Through a world of 8-bits and 8x8 pixels, the game-essay explores the transformative potential of ‘institutional space’. This is defined in the accompanying text, “The Fold: Reading artefacts of Institutional Topology”, as the organisation of social relations in (re)producing various kinds of territory and spaces through which those relations might be consolidated and preserved. The game-essay and text are the first offering of a methodology for spatially intervening in institutions, which we have described as “topological”; concerned with the folding and unfolding of institutional parts in order to identify meaningful opportunities to affect and disrupt. In the game-essay, different parts, or subsets of social relations within institutions, are made both proximate and disparate through a series of characters, spaces, and conversations, all centred around the institute’s contested merger in 2012: the original fold. As reader-characters make their way through a disorientating array of spatial and temporal folds they are encouraged to act, see, and think topologically. In an attempt to retrieve material, visual, and verbal artifacts and recover meaning in their deliberate obscurity, “The Fold” re-examines a past ‘fold’ in institutional space whilst aiming to prompt the imagination of future ones.
