Journal articles on the topic 'Insight, problem solving, attention, eye movements'

Considers the influence of the degree of extraversion on the perception of digital information by aviation operators. The analysis of the results of solving the Schulte tables by the test subjects on the NS-Psychotest hardware complex based on the recording of the eye track, performed using a stationary eye tracking device RED250mobile eye tracking device was carried out. While performing the search function, the number of saccadic movements, their amplitude, and the search time for a given digital value were registered. It has been revealed, that introverts during realization eyes search function perform less saccadic movements and spend less time on it than extraverts do. Significant differences have been found during resolving search tasks depending on degree of extraversion. Some interconnections of extension the latent period of the saccade with complication of solving process the cognitive problem were also found. It was found out, that increase in speed of saccadic movements of eyes leads to low efficiency of results of search task execution. Results of conducted research emphasize value of individual approach to medical flight service taking into account psychological features of flight crew in conditions of rapid progress in aviation technologies and means of visualisation of flight information. The obtained data reveal some features of information perception by operators of complex ergatic systems, the study of which in the future will help to maintain the reserves of attention in a continuous stream of incoming data, and thereby reduce the load on the visual analyzer and increase the reliability of professional activities of flight crew.

Abstract Mobile eye-tracking research has provided evidence both on teachers' visual attention in relation to their intentions and on teachers’ student-centred gaze patterns. However, the importance of a teacher’s eye-movements when giving instructions is unexplored. In this study we used mobile eye-tracking to investigate six teachers’ gaze patterns when they are giving task instructions for a geometry problem in four different phases of a mathematical problem-solving lesson. We analysed the teachers’ eye-tracking data, their verbal data, and classroom video recordings. Our paper brings forth a novel interpretative lens for teacher’s pedagogical intentions communicated by gaze during teacher-led moments such as when introducing new tasks, reorganizing the social structures of students for collaboration, and lesson wrap-ups. A change in the students’ task changes teachers’ gaze patterns, which may indicate a change in teacher’s pedagogical intention. We found that teachers gazed at students throughout the lesson, whereas teachers’ focus was at task-related targets during collaborative instruction-giving more than during the introductory and reflective task instructions. Hence, we suggest two previously not detected gaze types: contextualizing gaze for task readiness and collaborative gaze for task focus to contribute to the present discussion on teacher gaze

Processing numbers induces shifts of spatial attention in probe detection tasks, with small numbers orienting attention to the left and large numbers to the right side of space. This has been interpreted as supporting the concept of a mental number line with number magnitudes ranging from left to right, from small to large numbers. Recently, the investigation of this spatial-numerical link has been extended to mental arithmetic with the hypothesis that solving addition or subtraction problems might induce attentional displacements, rightward or leftward, respectively. At the neurofunctional level, the activations elicited by the solving of additions have been shown to resemble those induced by rightward eye movements. However, the possible behavioural counterpart of these activations has not yet been observed. Here, we investigated overt attentional shifts with a target detection task primed by addition and subtraction problems (2-digit ± 1-digit operands) in participants whose gaze orientation was recorded during the presentation of the problems and while calculating. No evidence of early overt attentional shifts was observed while participants were hearing the first operand, the operator or the second operand, but they shifted their gaze towards the right during the solving step of addition problems. These results show that gaze shifts related to arithmetic problem solving are elicited during the solving procedure and suggest that their functional role is to access, from the first operand, the representation of the result.

The interpretation of graphs plays a pivotal role in education because it is relevant for understanding and representing data and comprehending concepts in various domains. Accordingly, many studies examine students’ gaze behavior by comparing different levels of expertise when interpreting graphs. This literature review presents an overview of 32 articles comparing the gaze behavior of experts and non-experts during problem-solving and learning with graphs up to January 2022. Most studies analyzed students’ dwell time, fixation duration, and fixation count on macro- and meso-, as well as on micro-level areas of interest. Experts seemed to pay more attention to relevant parts of the graph and less to irrelevant parts of a graph, in line with the information-reduction hypothesis. Experts also made more integrative eye movements within a graph in terms of dynamic metrics. However, the determination of expertise is inconsistent. Therefore, we recommend four factors that will help to better determine expertise. This review gives an overview of evaluation strategies for different types of graphs and across various domains, which could facilitate instructing students in evaluating graphs.

This article compares the differences in eye movements between orienteers of different skill levels on map information searches and explores the visual search patterns of orienteers during precise map reading so as to explore the cognitive characteristics of orienteers’ visual search. We recruited 44 orienteers at different skill levels (experts, advanced beginners, and novices), and recorded their behavioral responses and eye movement data when reading maps of different complexities. We found that the complexity of map (complex vs. simple) affects the quality of orienteers’ route planning during precise map reading. Specifically, when observing complex maps, orienteers of higher competency tend to have a better quality of route planning (i.e., a shorter route planning time, a longer gaze time, and a more concentrate distribution of gazes). Expert orienteers demonstrated obvious cognitive advantages in the ability to find key information. We also found that in the stage of route planning, expert orienteers and advanced beginners first pay attention to the checkpoint description table. The expert group extracted information faster, and their attention was more concentrated, whereas the novice group paid less attention to the checkpoint description table, and their gaze was scattered. We found that experts regarded the information in the checkpoint description table as the key to the problem and they give priority to this area in route decision making. These results advance our understanding of professional knowledge and problem solving in orienteering.

Prior findings are mixed regarding the extent to which children understand others’ effort in early childhood. Especially, little is known about how character effort impacts children’s selective attention and learning. This study examined preschoolers’ visual attention to and learning from two on-screen characters: One character exerting high effort with low efficiency and another character exerting low effort with high efficiency in solving problems successfully. Children between 3.5 and 6.5 years of age (N = 70) watched a video of the two on-screen characters successfully solving problems. Children’s eye movements were recorded during viewing. Each of the two on-screen characters consistently displayed either high effort/low efficiency or low effort/high efficiency to solve four problems (familiarization). For the final problem (testing), the two characters exerted the same level of effort as each other and used unique solutions to solve the problem. Children then solved the final problem themselves using real objects. Children could selectively use either character’s solution demonstrated in the video. Lastly, children explicitly judged how good the characters were at solving problems. Younger children were more likely to use the solution demonstrated by the character with high effort/low efficiency, whereas older children were more likely to use the solution provided by another character with low effort/high efficiency. Younger children allocated more attention to the high effort/low efficiency character than the low effort/high efficiency character, but this pattern was modified by age such that children’s gaze to the low effort/high efficiency character increased with age. Children’s explicit credibility judgments did not differ by character or child age. The findings are discussed with respect to preschoolers’ understanding of effort and implications for children’s learning from screen media.

Only teachers who possess problem-solving skills can develop them in their students. These skills therefore need to be accentuated during teachers’ pre-service training. In this study, attention was given to pre-service chemistry teachers’ (students) problem-solving skills measured with the use of two sets of problem tasks–chemistry and general science tasks. Based on a pre-test consisting of both types of tasks, one successful, one partially successful and one unsuccessful solver was selected from a group of first-year bachelor chemistry teacher students. To compare, the tasks were also given to three experts (post-docs in the field of chemistry education). All the participants solved two tasks on a computer with their eye movements recorded. After the procedure, retrospective think-aloud and interviews were conducted to provide data about the problem-solving process. The results showed several trends. (1) Students–novices considered the chemistry task more difficult than the science task, which correlated with their task results. (2) Experts considered the science task more complex, therefore more difficult, however scored better than the students. (3) Even the successful student only solved the chemistry task using memorized facts without the support provided. (4) Experts’ direct focus on relevant parts was confirmed, whereas unsuccessful (novice) students distributed their focus toward other task parts too. (5) When students faced a problem during task solving, they used limiting strategies. This behavior was not identified in the expert group. The results thus showed a need to support students’ problem-solving strategies in several areas, especially careful reading, and identifying the main problem and supporting information. Moreover, the results showed a need to present chemistry tasks to students with more variability and explain their reasoning rather than testing field-specific, separated, memorized information.

Augmented reality (AR) overlays digital content onto reality. In an AR system, correct and precise estimations of user visual fixations and head movements can enhance the quality of experience by allocating more computational resources for analyzing, rendering and 3D registration on the areas of interest. However, there is inadequate research to help in understanding the visual explorations of the users when using an AR system or modeling AR visual attention. To bridge the gap between the saliency prediction on real-world scenes and on scenes augmented by virtual information, we construct the ARVR saliency dataset. The virtual reality (VR) technique is employed to simulate the real-world. Annotations of object recognition and tracking as augmented contents are blended into omnidirectional videos. The saliency annotations of head and eye movements for both original and augmented videos are collected and together constitute the ARVR dataset. We also design a model that is capable of solving the saliency prediction problem in AR. Local block images are extracted to simulate the viewport and offset the projection distortion. Conspicuous visual cues in the local block images are extracted to constitute the spatial features. The optical flow information is estimated as an important temporal feature. We also consider the interplay between virtual information and reality. The composition of the augmentation information is distinguished, and the joint effects of adversarial augmentation and complementary augmentation are estimated. The Markov chain is constructed with block images as graph nodes. In the determination of the edge weights, both the characteristics of the viewing behaviors and the visual saliency mechanisms are considered. The order of importance for block images is estimated through the state of equilibrium of the Markov chain. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The purpose of this work is to present the first attempt to provide quantitative analysis and objective justification for designers’ decisions that relate to the arrangement of pilot indicators on an aircraft dashboard with the use of video oculography measurements. To date, such decisions have been made only based on the practical experience accumulated by designers and subjective expert assessments. A new method for optimizing the mutual arrangement of the dashboard indicators is under consideration. This is based on iterative correction of the gaze transition probability matrix between the selected zones of attention, to minimize the difference between the stationary distribution of relative frequencies of gaze that are staying in these zones and the corresponding desirable target eye movements that are given for distribution for qualified pilots. When solving the subsequent multidimensional scaling problem, the gaze transition probability matrix that is obtained is considered to be the similarity matrix, the elements of which quantitatively characterize the proximity between the zones of attention. The main findings of this novel work are as follows: the use of oculography data to justify dashboard design decisions, the optimizing method itself, and its mathematical components, as well as analysis of the optimization in question from the viewpoint of quantum representations, all revealed design mistakes. The results that were obtained can be applied for prototyping variants of aircraft dashboards by rearranging the display areas associated with the corresponding zones of attention.

O artigo apresenta os resultados do mapeamento da interação de 30 alunos universitários ao utilizarem três distintas interfaces de fórum virtuais para estudar. A pesquisa utilizou o método do rastreamento ocular e entrevistas semi-estruturadas para documentar e analisar o processo de navegação dos alunos ao participarem e publicarem comentários nos fóruns. A análise dos dados indicou que interfaces de fórum virtual com design mais tradicional, intuitivo e minimalista, e com menor e mais racional disposição de elementos imagéticos, beneficia o aluno em situações de aprendizagem. Esse tipo de interface evita a frustração, perda de tempo e de foco na tarefa, permitindo o uso efetivo da atenção e memória do aluno na compreensão de conteúdos e resolução de problemas. Movimentos oculares indesejáveis dos alunos indicaram desorientação espacial e sobrecarga cognitiva causada por elementos clicáveis da interface dos fóruns, que foram prejudiciais à navegação dos alunos e, por isso, devem ser evitados, podendo levá-los a abandonar o fórum. Elementos imagéticos acessórios presentes na interface não interferiram negativamente com a tarefa dos alunos, pois foram ignorados por eles durante a navegação nos fóruns, como comprovado pela ausência de fixação ocular. O uso de um fórum de um ambiente virtual de aprendizagem (AVA) padrão tradicional não indicou vantagens para a navegação e realização de atividades quando comparado, pelos alunos, a um fórum generalista de design intuitivo, consistente e minimalista.Palavras-chave: Aprendizagem on-line; Navegação; Fórum virtual; Rastreamento ocular.Analysis, through the eye tracking technique, of virtual forum interfaces features that raise on-line learningAbstractThe article presents the results of mapped interaction of 30 university students using three different digital forum interfaces to study. The research utilized the eye tracking method and semi-structured interviews to document and analyze the students' browsing process as they participated in and published on the forums. Data analysis indicated that virtual forum interfaces with a more traditional, intuitive and minimalist design, and with a smaller and more rational array of imaging elements, benefit the student in learning situations. This type of interface avoids frustration, wasted time, and it increases focus on the task, allowing effective use of student attention and memory in understanding content and problem solving. Undesirable eye movements of the students indicated spatial disorientation and cognitive overload caused by clickable elements of the forum interface, which were detrimental to student navigation and therefore should be avoided and may lead them to leave the forum. Imaging elements accessories present in the interface did not interfere negatively with the students' task, as they were ignored by them during navigation in the forums, as evidenced by the absence of ocular fixation. The use of a traditional standard learning management system (LMS) forum did not indicate advantages for browsing and performing activities when compared to an intuitive, consistent and minimalist generalist designed forum.Keywords: Online learning; Navigation; Virtual fórum; Eye tracking.Análisis, a través de la técnica de rastreo ocular, de interfaces de foro virtual que favorece el aprendizaje on-lineResumenEl artículo presenta los resultados de la interacción mapeada de 30 estudiantes universitarios que utilizan tres interfaces de foros digitales diferentes para estudiar. La investigación utilizó el método de seguimiento ocular y entrevistas semiestructuradas para documentar y analizar el proceso de navegación de los estudiantes a medida que participaban y publicaban en los foros. El análisis de los datos indicó que los foros virtuales interactúan con un diseño más tradicional, intuitivo y minimalista, y con una gama más pequeña y más racional de elementos de imagen, beneficiando al estudiante en situaciones de aprendizaje. Este tipo de interfaz evita la frustración, el tiempo perdido y aumenta el enfoque en la tarea, permitiendo el uso efectivo de la atención y la memoria del alumno para comprender el contenido y la resolución de problemas. Los movimientos oculares indeseables de los estudiantes indicaron desorientación espacial y sobrecarga cognitiva causada por elementos seleccionables de la interfaz del foro, que fueron perjudiciales para la navegación del estudiante y, por lo tanto, deben evitarse y pueden llevarlos a abandonar el foro. Los accesorios de elementos de imagen presentes en la interfaz no interfirieron negativamente con la tarea de los estudiantes, ya que fueron ignorados por ellos durante la navegación en los foros, como lo demuestra la ausencia de fijación ocular. El uso de un foro de anbiente virtual de aprendziagen estándar tradicional no indicaba ventajas para navegar y realizar actividades en comparación con un foro diseñado por un general intuitivo, coherente y minimalista. Palabras clave: Aprender en línea; Navegación; Foro virtual; Registro visual.

Anyone contemplating the role of a “hermeneutics of suspicion” in literary and cultural studies must concede that the phrase is rarely used—even by its most devout practitioners, who usually think of themselves engaged in something called “critique.” What, then, are the terminological differences between “critique” and “the hermeneutics of suspicion”? What intellectual worlds do these specific terms conjure up, and how do these worlds converge or diverge? And what is the rationale for preferring one term over the other?The “hermeneutics of suspicion” is a phrase coined by Paul Ricoeur to capture a common spirit that pervades the writings of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. In spite of their obvious differences, he argued, these thinkers jointly constitute a “school of suspicion.” That is to say, they share a commitment to unmasking “the lies and illusions of consciousness;” they are the architects of a distinctively modern style of interpretation that circumvents obvious or self-evident meanings in order to draw out less visible and less flattering truths (Ricoeur 356). Ricoeur’s term has sustained an energetic after-life within religious studies, as well as in philosophy, intellectual history, and related fields, yet it never really took hold in literary studies. Why has a field that has devoted so much of its intellectual energy to interrogating, subverting, and defamiliarising found so little use for Ricoeur’s phrase?In general, we can note that hermeneutics remains a path not taken in Anglo-American literary theory. The tradition of hermeneutical thinking is rarely acknowledged (how often do you see Gadamer or Ricoeur taught in a theory survey?), let alone addressed, assimilated, or argued over. Thanks to a lingering aura of teutonic stodginess, not to mention its long-standing links with a tradition of biblical interpretation, hermeneutics was never able to muster the intellectual edginess and high-wattage excitement generated by various forms of poststructuralism. Even the work of Gianni Vattimo, one of the most innovative and prolific of contemporary hermeneutical thinkers, has barely registered in the mainstream of literary and cultural studies. On occasion, to be sure, hermeneutics crops up as a synonym for a discredited model of “depth” interpretation—the dogged pursuit of a hidden true meaning—that has supposedly been superseded by more sophisticated forms of thinking. Thus the ascent of poststructuralism, it is sometimes claimed, signaled a turn away from hermeneutics to deconstruction and genealogy—leading to a focus on surface rather than depth, on structure rather than meaning, on analysis rather than interpretation. The idea of suspicion has fared little better. While Ricoeur’s account of a hermeneutics of suspicion is respectful, even admiring, critics are understandably leery of having their lines of argument reduced to their putative state of mind. The idea of a suspicious hermeneutics can look like an unwarranted personalisation of scholarly work, one that veers uncomfortably close to Harold Bloom’s tirades against the “School of Resentment” and other conservative complaints about literary studies as a hot-bed of paranoia, kill-joy puritanism, petty-minded pique, and defensive scorn. Moreover, the anti-humanist rhetoric of much literary theory—its resolute focus on transpersonal and usually linguistic structures of determination—proved inhospitable to any serious reflections on attitude, disposition, or affective stance.The concept of critique, by contrast, turns out to be marred by none of these disadvantages. An unusually powerful, flexible and charismatic idea, it has rendered itself ubiquitous and indispensable in literary and cultural studies. Critique is widely seen as synonymous with intellectual rigor, theoretical sophistication, and intransigent opposition to the status quo. Drawing a sense of intellectual weightiness from its connections to the canonical tradition of Kant and Marx, it has managed, nonetheless, to retain a cutting-edge sensibility, retooling itself to fit the needs of new fields ranging from postcolonial theory to disability studies. Critique is contagious and charismatic, drawing everything around it into its field of force, marking the boundaries of what counts as serious thought. For many scholars in the humanities, it is not just one good thing but the only conceivable thing. Who would want to be associated with the bad smell of the uncritical? There are five facets of critique (enumerated and briefly discussed below) that characterise its current role in literary and cultural studies and that have rendered critique an exceptionally successful rhetorical-cultural actor. Critique, that is to say, inspires intense attachments, serves as a mediator in numerous networks, permeates disciplines and institutional structures, spawns conferences, essays, courses, and book proposals, and triggers countless imitations, translations, reflections, revisions, and rebuttals (including the present essay). While nurturing a sense of its own marginality, iconoclasm, and outsiderdom, it is also exceptionally effective at attracting disciples, forging alliances, inspiring mimicry, and ensuring its own survival. In “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” Bruno Latour remarks that critique has been so successful because it assures us that we are always right—unlike those naïve believers whose fetishes we strive to expose (225–48). At the same time, thanks to its self-reflexivity, the rhetoric of critique is more tormented and self-divided than such a description would suggest; it broods constantly over the shame of its own success, striving to detect signs of its own complicity and to root out all possible evidence of collusion with the status quo.Critique is negative. Critique retains the adversarial force of a suspicious hermeneutics, while purifying it of affective associations by treating negativity as an essentially philosophical or political matter. To engage in critique is to grapple with the oversights, omissions, contradictions, insufficiencies, or evasions in the object one is analysing. Robert Koch writes that “critical discourse, as critical discourse, must never formulate positive statements: it is always ‘negative’ in relation to its object” (531). Critique is characterised by its “againstness,” by its desire to take a hammer, as Latour would say, to the beliefs of others. Faith is to be countered with vigilant skepticism, illusion yields to a sobering disenchantment, the fetish must be defetishised, the dream world stripped of its befuddling powers. However, the negativity of critique is not just a matter of fault-finding, scolding, and censuring. The nay-saying critic all too easily calls to mind the Victorian patriarch, the thin-lipped schoolmarm, the glaring policeman. Negating is tangled up with a long history of legislation, prohibition and interdiction—it can come across as punitive, arrogant, authoritarian, or vitriolic. In consequence, defenders of critique often downplay its associations with outright condemnation. It is less a matter of refuting particular truths than of scrutinising the presumptions and procedures through which truths are established. A preferred idiom is that of “problematising,” of demonstrating the ungroundedness of beliefs rather than denouncing errors. The role of critique is not to castigate, but to complicate, not to engage in ideas’ destruction but to expose their cultural construction. Barbara Johnson, for example, contends that a critique of a theoretical system “is not an examination of its flaws and imperfections” (xv). Rather, “the critique reads backwards from what seems natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal in order to show that these things have their history” and to show that the “start point is not a (natural) given, but a (cultural) construct, usually blind to itself” (Johnson xv–xvi). Yet it seems a tad disingenuous to describe such critique as free of negative judgment and the examination of flaws. Isn’t an implicit criticism being transmitted in Johnson’s claim that a cultural construct is “usually blind to itself”? And the adjectival chain “natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal” strings together some of the most negatively weighted words in contemporary criticism. A posture of detachment, in other words, can readily convey a tacit or implicit judgment, especially when it is used to probe the deep-seated convictions, primordial passions, and heart-felt attachments of others. In this respect, the ongoing skirmishes between ideology critique and poststructuralist critique do not over-ride their commitment to a common ethos: a sharply honed suspicion that goes behind the backs of its interlocutors to retrieve counter-intuitive and uncomplimentary meanings. “You do not know that you are ideologically-driven, historically determined, or culturally constructed,” declares the subject of critique to the object of critique, “but I do!” As Marcelo Dascal points out, the supposedly non-evaluative stance of historical or genealogical argument nevertheless retains a negative or demystifying force in tracing ideas back to causes invisible to the actors themselves (39–62).Critique is secondary. A critique is always a critique of something, a commentary on another argument, idea, or object. Critique does not vaunt its self-sufficiency, independence, and autotelic splendor; it makes no pretense of standing alone. It could not function without something to critique, without another entity to which it reacts. Critique is symbiotic; it does its thinking by responding to the thinking of others. But while secondary, critique is far from subservient. It seeks to wrest from a text a different account than it gives of itself. In doing so, it assumes that it will meet with, and overcome, a resistance. If there were no resistance, if the truth were self-evident and available for all to see, the act of critique would be superfluous. Its goal is not the slavish reconstruction of an original or true meaning but a counter-reading that brings previously unfathomed insights to light. The secondariness of critique is not just a logical matter—critique presumes the existence of a prior object—but also a temporal one. Critique comes after another text; it follows or succeeds another piece of writing. Critique, then, looks backward and, in doing so, it presumes to understand the past better than the past understands itself. Hindsight becomes insight; from our later vantage point, we feel ourselves primed to see better, deeper, further. The belatedness of critique is transformed into a source of iconoclastic strength. Scholars of Greek tragedy or Romantic poetry may mourn their inability to inhabit a vanished world, yet this historical distance is also felt as a productive estrangement that allows critical knowledge to unfold. Whatever the limitations of our perspective, how can we not know more than those who have come before? We moderns leave behind us a trail of errors, finally corrected, like a cloud of ink from a squid, remarks Michel Serres (48). There is, in short, a quality of historical chauvinism built into critique, making it difficult to relinquish a sense of in-built advantage over those lost souls stranded in the past. Critique likes to have the last word. Critique is intellectual. Critique often insists on its difference from everyday practices of criticism and judgment. While criticism evaluates a specific object, according to one definition, “critique is concerned to identify the conditions of possibility under which a domain of objects appears” (Butler 109). Critique is interested in big pictures, cultural frameworks, underlying schema. It is a mode of thought well matched to the library and seminar room, to a rhythm of painstaking inquiry rather than short-term problem-solving. It “slows matters down, requires analysis and reflection, and often raises questions rather than providing answers” (Ruitenberg 348). Critique is thus irresistibly drawn toward self-reflexive thinking. Its domain is that of second-level observation, in which we reflect on the frames, paradigms, and perspectives that form and inform our understanding. Even if objectivity is an illusion, how can critical self-consciousness not trump the available alternatives? This questioning of common sense is also a questioning of common language: self-reflexivity is a matter of form as well as content, requiring the deployment of what Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb call “difficult language” that can undermine or “un-write” the discourses that make up our world (1–14). Along similar lines, Paul Bove allies himself with a “tradition that insists upon difficulty, slowness, complex, often dialectical and highly ironic styles,” as an essential antidote to the “prejudices of the current regime of truth: speed, slogans, transparency, and reproducibility” (167). Critique, in short, demands an arduous working over of language, a stoic refusal of the facile phrase and ready-made formula. Yet such programmatic divisions between critique and common sense have the effect of relegating ordinary language to a state of automatic servitude, while condescending to those unschooled in the patois of literary and critical theory. Perhaps it is time to reassess the dog-in-the-manger attitude of a certain style of academic argument—one that assigns to scholars the vantage point of the lucid and vigilant thinker, while refusing to extend this same capacity to those naïve and unreflecting souls of whom they speak.Critique comes from below. Politics and critique are often equated and conflated in literary studies and elsewhere. Critique is iconoclastic in spirit; it rails against authority; it seeks to lay bare the injustices of the law. It is, writes Foucault, the “art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability” (194). This vision of critique can be traced back to Marx and is cemented in the tradition of critical theory associated with the Frankfurt School. Critique conceives of itself as coming from below, or being situated at the margins; it is the natural ally of excluded groups and subjugated knowledges; it is not just a form of knowledge but a call to action. But who gets to claim the mantle of opposition, and on what grounds? In a well-known essay, Nancy Fraser remarks that critical theory possesses a “partisan though not uncritical identification” with oppositional social movements (97). As underscored by Fraser’s judicious insertion of the phrase “not uncritical,” critique guards its independence and reserves the right to query the actions and attitudes of the oppressed as well as the oppressors. Thus the intellectual’s affiliation with a larger community may collide with a commitment to the ethos of critique, as the object of a more heartfelt attachment. A separation occurs, as Francois Cusset puts it, “between academics questioning the very methods of questioning” and the more immediate concerns of the minority groups with which they are allied (157). One possible strategy for negotiating this tension is to flag one’s solidarity with a general principle of otherness or alterity—often identified with the utopian or disruptive energies of the literary text. This strategy gives critique a shot in the arm, infusing it with a dose of positive energy and ethical substance, yet without being pinned down to the ordinariness of a real-world referent. This deliberate vagueness permits critique to nurture its mistrust of the routines and practices through which the everyday business of the world is conducted, while remaining open to the possibility of a radically different future. Critique in its positive aspects thus remains effectively without content, gesturing toward a horizon that must remain unspecified if it is not to lapse into the same fallen state as the modes of thought that surround it (Fish 446).Critique does not tolerate rivals. Declaring itself uniquely equipped to diagnose the perils and pitfalls of representation, critique often chafes at the presence of other forms of thought. Ruling out the possibility of peaceful co-existence or even mutual indifference, it insists that those who do not embrace its tenets must be denying or disavowing them. In this manner, whatever is different from critique is turned into the photographic negative of critique—evidence of an irrefutable lack or culpable absence. To refuse to be critical is to be uncritical; a judgment whose overtones of naiveté, apathy, complacency, submissiveness, and sheer stupidity seem impossible to shrug off. In short, critique thinks of itself as exceptional. It is not one path, but the only conceivable path. Drew Milne pulls no punches in his programmatic riff on Kant: “to be postcritical is to be uncritical: the critical path alone remains open” (18).The exceptionalist aura of critique often thwarts attempts to get outside its orbit. Sociologist Michael Billig, for example, notes that critique thinks of itself as battling orthodoxy, yet is now the reigning orthodoxy—no longer oppositional, but obligatory, not defamiliarising, but oppressively familiar: “For an increasing number of younger academics,” he remarks, “the critical paradigm is the major paradigm in their academic world” (Billig 292). And in a hard-hitting argument, Talal Asad points out that critique is now a quasi-automatic stance for Western intellectuals, promoting a smugness of tone that can be cruelly dismissive of the deeply felt beliefs and attachments of others. Yet both scholars conclude their arguments by calling for a critique of critique, reinstating the very concept they have so meticulously dismantled. Critique, it seems, is not to be abandoned but intensified; critique is to be replaced by critique squared. The problem with critique, it turns out, is that it is not yet critical enough. The objections to critique are still very much part and parcel of the critique-world; the value of the critical is questioned only to be emphatically reinstated.Why do these protestations against critique end up worshipping at the altar of critique? Why does it seem so exceptionally difficult to conceive of other ways of arguing, reading, and thinking? We may be reminded of Eve Sedgwick’s comments on the mimetic aspect of critical interpretation: its remarkable ability to encourage imitation, repetition, and mimicry, thereby ensuring its own reproduction. It is an efficiently running form of intellectual machinery, modeling a style of thought that is immediately recognisable, widely applicable, and easily teachable. Casting the work of the scholar as a never-ending labour of distancing, deflating, and diagnosing, it rules out the possibility of a different relationship to one’s object. It seems to grow, as Sedgwick puts it, “like a crystal in a hypersaturated solution, blotting out any sense of the possibility of alternative ways of understanding or things to understand” (131).In this context, a change in vocabulary—a redescription, if you will—may turn out to be therapeutic. It will come as no great surprise if I urge a second look at the hermeneutics of suspicion. Ricoeur’s phrase, I suggest, can help guide us through the interpretative tangle of contemporary literary studies. It seizes on two crucial parts of critical argument—its sensibility and its interpretative method—that deserve more careful scrutiny. At the same time, it offers a much-needed antidote to the charisma of critique: the aura of ethical and political exemplarity that burnishes its negativity with a normative glow. Thanks to this halo effect, I’ve suggested, we are encouraged to assume that the only alternative to critique is a full-scale surrender to complacency, quietism, and—in literary studies—the intellectual fluff of aesthetic appreciation. Critique, moreover, presents itself as an essentially disembodied intellectual exercise, an austere, even abstemious practice of unsettling, unmaking, and undermining. Yet contemporary styles of critical argument are affective as well as analytical, conjuring up distinctive dispositions and relations to their object. As Amanda Anderson has pointed out in The Way We Argue Now, literary and cultural theory is saturated with what rhetoricians call ethos—that is to say, imputations of motive, character, or attitude. We need only think of the insouciance associated with Rortyan pragmatism, the bad-boy iconoclasm embraced by some queer theorists, or the fastidious aestheticism that characterises a certain kind of deconstructive reading. Critical languages, in other words, are also orientations, encouraging readers to adopt an affectively tinged stance toward their object. Acknowledging the role of such orientations in critical debate does not invalidate its intellectual components, nor does it presume to peer into, or diagnose, an individual scholar’s state of mind.In a related essay, I scrutinise some of the qualities of a suspicious or critical reading practice: distance rather than closeness; guardedness rather than openness; aggression rather than submission; superiority rather than reverence; attentiveness rather than distraction; exposure rather than tact (215–34). Suspicion, in this sense, constitutes a muted affective state—a curiously non-emotional emotion of morally inflected mistrust—that overlaps with, and builds upon, the stance of detachment that characterises the stance of the professional or expert. That this style of reading proves so alluring has much to do with the gratifications and satisfactions that it offers. Beyond the usual political or philosophical justifications of critique, it also promises the engrossing pleasure of a game-like sparring with the text in which critics deploy inventive skills and innovative strategies to test their wits, best their opponents, and become sharper, shrewder, and more sophisticated players. In this context, the claim that contemporary criticism has moved “beyond” hermeneutics should be treated with a grain of salt, given that, as Stanley Fish points out, “interpretation is the only game in town” (446). To be sure, some critics have backed away from the model of what they call “depth interpretation” associated with Marx and Freud, in which reading is conceived as an act of digging and the critic, like a valiant archaeologist, excavates a resistant terrain in order to retrieve the treasure of hidden meaning. In this model, the text is envisaged as possessing qualities of interiority, concealment, penetrability, and depth; it is an object to be plundered, a puzzle to be solved, a secret message to be deciphered. Instead, poststructuralist critics are drawn to the language of defamiliarising rather than discovery. The text is no longer composed of strata and the critic does not burrow down but stands back. Instead of brushing past surface meanings in pursuit of hidden truth, she dwells in ironic wonder on these surface meanings, seeking to “denaturalise” them through the mercilessness of her gaze. Insight, we might say, is achieved by distancing rather than by digging. Recent surveys of criticism often highlight the rift between these camps, underscoring the differences between the diligent seeker after buried truth and the surface-dwelling ironist. From a Ricoeur-inflected point of view, however, it is their shared investment in a particular ethos—a stance of knowingness, guardedness, suspicion and vigilance—that turns out to be more salient and more striking. Moreover, these approaches are variously engaged in the dance of interpretation, seeking to go beyond the backs of texts or fellow-actors in order to articulate non-obvious and often counter-intuitive truths. In the case of poststructuralism, we can speak of a second-order hermeneutics that is less interested in probing the individual object than the larger frameworks and conditions in which it is embedded. What the critic interprets is no longer a self-contained poem or novel, but a broader logic of discursive structures, reading formations, or power relations. Ricoeur’s phrase, moreover, has the singular advantage of allowing us to by-pass the exceptionalist tendencies of critique: its presumption that whatever is not critique can only be assigned to the ignominious state of the uncritical. As a less prejudicial term, it opens up a larger history of suspicious reading, including traditions of religious questioning and self-scrutiny that bear on current forms of interpretation, but that are occluded by the aggressively secular connotations of critique (Hunter). In this context, Ricoeur’s own account needs to be supplemented and modified to acknowledge this larger cultural history; the hermeneutics of suspicion is not just the brain-child of a few exceptional thinkers, as his argument implies, but a widespread practice of interpretation embedded in more mundane, diffuse and variegated forms of life (Felski 220).Finally, the idea of a suspicious hermeneutics does not invalidate or rule out other interpretative possibilities—ranging from Ricoeur’s own notion of a hermeneutics of trust to more recent coinages such as Sedgwick’s “restorative reading,” Sharon Marcus’s “just reading” or Timothy Bewes’s “generous reading.” Literary studies in France, for example, is currently experiencing a new surge of interest in hermeneutics (redefined as a practice of reinvention rather than exhumation) as well as a reinvigorated phenomenology of reading that elucidates, in rich and fascinating detail, its immersive and affective dimensions (see Citton; Macé). This growing interest in the ethos, aesthetics, and ethics of reading is long overdue. Such an orientation by no means rules out attention to the sociopolitical resonances of texts and their interpretations. It is, however, no longer willing to subordinate such attention to the seductive but sterile dichotomy of the critical versus the uncritical.ReferencesAnderson, Amanda. The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005.Asad, Talal. “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism.” Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Ed. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood. Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2009. 20–63. Bewes, Timothy. “Reading with the Grain: A New World in Literary Studies.” Differences 21.3 (2010): 1–33.Billig, Michael. “Towards a Critique of the Critical.” Discourse and Society 11.3 (2000): 291–92. Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994.Bove, Paul. Mastering Discourse: The Politics of Intellectual Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 1992. Butler, Judith. “The Sensibility of Critique: Response to Asad and Mahmood.” Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Ed. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood. Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2009. 101–136.Citton, Yves. Lire, interpréter, actualiser: pourqoi les études littéraires? Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2007. Culler, Jonathan and Kevin Lamb, “Introduction.” Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena. Ed. Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. 1–14. Cusset, Francois. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Trans. Jeff Fort. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008.Dascal, Marcelo. “Critique without Critics?” Science in Context 10.1 (1997): 39–62.Felski, Rita. “Suspicious Minds.” Poetics Today 32.2 (2011): 215–34.Fish, Stanley. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 1989.Foucault, Michel. “What is Critique?” The Political. Ed. David Ingram. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 191–211. Fraser, Nancy. “What’s Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender.” New German Critique 35 (1985): 97–131. Hunter, Ian. Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994.Johnson, Barbara. “Translator’s Introduction.” Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination. London: Continuum, 2004. vii–xxxv. Koch, Robert. “The Critical Gesture in Philosophy.” Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art. Ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. Cambridge: MIT, 2002. 524–36. Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225–48.Macé, Marielle. Facons de lire, manières d’être. Paris: Gallimard, 2011. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007.Milne, Drew. “Introduction: Criticism and/or Critique.” Modern Critical Thought: An Anthology of Theorists Writing on Theorists. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 1–22. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970. Ruitenberg, Claudia. “Don’t Fence Me In: The Liberation of Undomesticated Critique.” Journal of the Philosophy of Education 38.3 (2004): 314–50. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You.” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. 123–52. Serres, Michel and Bruno Latour. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Trans. Roxanne Lapidus. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.Vattimo, Gianni. Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy. Trans. David Webb. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.

Computer and video games are one of the primary uses of personal computer technologies, and yet despite an increasing interest in cultural practices that are organised around computer and information technologies cultural studies has paid very little attention to this phenomenon. In the War of Desire and Technology Allucquére Roseanne Stone comments "that there seems no question that a significant proportion of young people will spend a significant and increasing proportion of their waking hours playing computer-based games in one form or another, and so far the implications of this trend have yet to be fully addressed in academic forums" (26). This Christmas will undoubtedly follow the trend of the last few years, with video game consoles and software being the biggest toy sellers. In the lead-up to this Christmas Nintendo shipped 5,000,000 units of the much-anticipated Shigeru Miyamoto-designed game, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The Zelda series of adventure games made its first appearance in 1987 on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) with The Legend of Zelda (which sold 6.5 million units worldwide). It is increasingly evident that whether it is in games arcades, on console systems such as the Nintendo 64, or on personal computers, the playing of computer games is a crucial component of the popular cultural terrain. In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the fifth installment in the series, the player controls a young boy, Link, through his adventures in the 3D-rendered fantasy world of Hyrule. By defeating various monsters, solving puzzles, and discovering magical items the player progresses through the game with the aim of saving Hyrule and rescuing Princess Zelda by defeating the evil Ganondorf. Yup, once you get past all of the 3D polygon graphics enabled by the Nintendo 64 platform this game is your basic rescue-the-princess quest with all of the troubling gender implications that this raises. Cultural theorists such as Stone and Dan Fleming raise the concern that this rapidly expanding industry that is an increasingly significant component of many young people's cultural lives is limited to the problems associated with a narrowly defined masculine identity. Stone asks should things like computer games, which are so terrifically absorbing and which take up so much waking time -- so much precious, irreplaceable waking time -- be expected to possess a modicum of invention, to be able to stretch players' imaginations and skills beyond the ability to hit targets and dodge obstacles? (163-64) Fleming observes that "this remarkable technology could support a much richer play space and with it a position less rigidly tied to a simplistically projected male identity" (57). But the narrative content of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time does not come even close to explaining what it is about playing the game that hooks the gamer into this 30-50 hour experience, and keeps us coming back for more -- just one more session until I finish that Dungeon. Fleming makes the important point that an analysis of the symbolic content of games tells us very little about what it is actually like to play them. He takes the step of shifting our attention from the meanings of cultural objects to their status as events (11-16). The criticism that computer and video game content is dominated by a constraining masculine identity is important, but is no more than a starting point. Is this all that can be said about games such as Zelda? I would argue that the activity of playing computer games cannot simply be approached through a textual analysis of the symbolic content of games. If we tentatively accept that gaming is not simply a content, but an activity, then, how can we analyse or describe this activity? Does cultural studies provide us with the tools necessary to describe it as a cultural experience? How is this experience organised, and what ramifications does it have for cultural studies' understanding of contemporary cultural technologies? An initial avenue of inquiry is provided by the term gameplay. Gameplay is a term that constantly emerges in my discussions with both gamers and game designers. It is a quite ephemeral and at moments incoherent concept that is used to describe the experience of a player's visceral immersion in and interactive engagement with a particular game's environment. It is an aspect of computer gaming that resists or at least would seem to be excessive to representation or symbolising. The very ephemeral and rather vague ways in which it is used have made it tempting to reject any serious analysis of it as an incoherence which may well function to simply side-step or avoid criticism of games' very obvious problem with representations of gender. However, as a player of computer games I recognise the experience that gamers are attempting to describe with the term gameplay and find it difficult to reject it out of hand simply because my theoretical vocabulary as a cultural analyst has difficulties in accommodating it. Where is the problem -- with the cultural experience or the theoretical vocabulary? In many of my discussions with gamers the term gameplay functions as something of a shared horizon or assumed knowledge. If I ask what gameplay is or does I will often receive a response such as the following: "Gameplay is what makes a game fun. It is the fun factor". If I then query what elements or features in particular make a game fun the response will invariably be, "well good gameplay is what is important. Graphics and stuff can be good, but often are just eye-candy". The discussion will generally end with a comment such as "you've played [Game X], you know what I mean, it has great gameplay". This term seems to function as something of a marker for how the cultural experience of gameplay exceeds our symbolic vocabulary. It opens out onto the event status of playing. (But I think exchanges such as the above are also about the event of a research relation.) In email discussions Cameron Brown, a lead game designer employed by Auran (a Brisbane, Australia based game software company -- Auran and Activision co-developed the real-time strategy game Dark Reign) described gameplay in the following terms: I was made 'lead tester' for 'Radical Rex', a SNES [Super Nintendo Entertainment System] platformer.... It got to the point where I could finish the game (10 levels plus bonus 8 levels) in 27 minutes -- about 40 minutes if I held the controller upside down. I could literally play the first level with my eyes closed, using only muscle memory! Anyway, Mario Kart: sometimes, playing it, I lost all sense of everything except the game. My hands moved without conscious intervention on my part.... I believe the MK 'trance state' short circuits this delay not requiring the brain to be aware of something before the hands have responded." The term gameplay appears throughout gamers' discussions of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on newsgroups (rec.games.video.nintendo) and fan WWW sites, for example Nintendojo. The Next-Generation review of Zelda describes a gaming experience "beyond the superficialities of graphics, sound, and controls (which are all excellent) ... that sucks the player into a mystical world that has never been seen or felt before". Eric Enrico Mattei, a reviewer on Nintendojo, asserts that the quality of gameplay in Zelda is such "that you are COMPLETELY IMMERSED in Zelda's world". Writing in anticipation of Zelda's release Mikey Veroni comments that "ease of control is important in Zelda 64 (not to mention any game) because only then can the player feel like Link is acting and responding exactly to the player's actions. Perfect gameplay is so simple yet terribly crucial at the same time". Miyamoto, the designer of Zelda, said in a recent interview that in creating game environments such as Zelda he is concerned with "how players feel when they are touching the controller, so that is the way I'm always making the video game. I'm always thinking of the player's feelings". These various ways of talking about and describing the experience of playing computer and video games are not exactly new or mysterious. They draw on well-established conventions and metaphors for understanding the human interface with technology or equipment in general. When I asked Cameron about his use of the phrase "muscle memory", for example, he responded that it came from a guitar player magazine and was used in the context of explaining exercises to teach your fingers how to play a scale. Other sources for this technological sublime relation include science fiction texts such as William Gibson's descriptions of the experience of jacking into the matrix of cyberspace in Neuromancer. Dan Fleming's careful distinction between the symbolic content of games and the experience of playing them would seem to apply to the above descriptions of gameplay. He asserts that playing a game like Nintendo's platform adventure Mario Brothers is an intriguing experience that involves "the replacement of the gameworld's thematics by its geometry, which is where the fully engaged action really is" (191). Fleming sums up by commenting that "at their best computer games simply operate elsewhere for much of the time" (193). Although I have reservations about the tendency to position gameplay and representation in an almost strict opposition the foregrounding of this elsewhere of playability is useful in that it suggests the status of computer gaming as an event rather than a text or content to be interpreted. In his recent essay, "The Being of Culture, Beyond Representation", Alec McHoul argues, against representationalist understandings of cultural objects, for an approach that takes into account the movements and dynamics of "event-ness or eventality" (2). This shift away from a representational framework towards what McHoul calls "eventalistic experiencing" is where I head in my engagement with gameplay. This spectral dynamic of computer gaming calls us to change our modes of engaging with research objects. The issues of control and controllers appear in many of the gamers' discussions of playing Zelda. Fleming refers to this experience: "the player feels the responsiveness of the controller, the forward momentum, the onset of a relaxed energy, a feeling of competence" (192). Entering into the world of the game is also a skill or competence; it involves the ability to effectively use the game control system or interface to navigate through the play environment. This game control would seem to function within the terms of a traditional controlling masculine subjectivity. It appears to be about enjoying a sense of ease, empowerment and control in a technologically mediated environment. Relations between the human and the technological are from the outset caught up in fantasies of control. But the event of playing, the elsewhere of gameplay, exceeds the limits of our stories about an autonomous self in control of and using technology. When we play games like Zelda we are being positioned in those regions of cultural experience that involve a transformation in the mode of our relation to technological equipment. Our assumptions regarding the relation and separation between the human and the technological -- and perhaps also the gender implications of these relations -- are increasingly transformed, subverted, and questioned. Computer gaming is at least in part about the enjoyment gamers derive from the blurring and confusion of the boundaries between the technological and the self: techno-enjoyment. This element of enjoyment exceeds both the symbolic and the corporeal. But it should not be understood as some kind of more real or immediate bodily experience posited outside of and in opposition to the representational. It invokes another materiality of the technological object that is other than a reduction to technics or the human. It is a spectral interspace: the relation between the human and nonhuman. This relation with technology is not simply or only at the level of representation, nor at the materiality of the technological object or the bodily experience and sensations of the gamer. Gaming opens onto this domain of materialised techno-enjoyment. And in this region of cultural experience it is no longer clearly decidable who or what is in control. This experience of gameplay radically undermines notions of equipmentality grounded in a controlling human subject. Cultural Studies academics -- and I include myself in this group -- should be cautious about rushing to reduce the experience of gameplay to a problem or issue of representation. This is not to argue that representational effects are not operative in the practices of computer gaming. It is to argue the careful consideration of other important effects and processes. References Fleming, Dan. Powerplay: Toys as Popular Culture. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. Gamecenter.com. "An Interview with Shigeru Miyamoto." 1998. 10 Dec. 1998 <http://www.gamecenter.com/News/Item/0,3,0-2305,00.html?st.gc.ttn.si.gn>. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Game cartridge. Nintendo. 1998. McHoul, Alec. "The Being of Culture, Beyond Representation." 1998. 15 Oct. 1998 <http://kali.murdoch.edu.au/~mchoul/being.php>. Mattei, Eric Enrico. "Review of Zelda 64." 1998. 12 Dec. 1998 <http://www.nintendojo.com/reviews/staff/zeldaem.htm>. Next Generation. "Review of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time." 24 Nov. 1998. 13 Dec. 1998 <http://www.next-generation.com/jsmid/reviews/437.php>. Stone, Allucquére Roseanne. The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1995. Veroni, Mikey. "Legendary." 1998. 10 Dec. 1998 <http://www.nintendojo.com/specials/zelda2/index.htm>. Zelda-related WWW sites -- Nintendojo -- Zelda Central -- Zelda 64 Central -- Zelda 64 Headquarters -- Zelda Headquarters -- Zelda's Shrine -- Hyrule: The Land of Zelda Citation reference for this article MLA style: John Banks. "Controlling Gameplay." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.5 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/game.php>. Chicago style: John Banks, "Controlling Gameplay," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 5 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/game.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: John Banks. (1998) Controlling gameplay. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/game.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction I am on the phone with a journalist discussing my research into anti-vaccination. As the conversation winds up, they ask a question I have come to expect: "how big do you think this is?" My answer is usually some version of the following: that we have no way of knowing. I and my fellow researchers can only see the information that is public or in the sunlight. How anti-vaccination information spreads through private networks is dark to us. It is private and necessarily so. This means that we cannot track how these conversations spread in the private or parochial spaces of Facebook, nor can we consider how they might extend into other modes of mediated communication. Modern communication is a complex and multiplatform accomplishment. Consider this: I am texting with my friend, I send her a selfie, in the same moment I hear a notification, she has DMed me a relevant Instagram post via that app. I move to Instagram and share another post in response; we continue our text message conversation there. Later in the day, I message her on Facebook Messenger while participating in a mutual WhatsApp group chat. The next day we Skype, and while we talk, we send links back and forth, which in hindsight are as clear as hieroglyphics before the Rosetta stone. I comment on her Twitter post, and we publicly converse back and forth briefly while other people like our posts. None of these instances are discrete conversational events, even though they occur on different platforms. They are iterations on the same themes, and the archival properties of social media and private messaging apps mean that neither of you forgets where you left off. The conversation slides not only between platforms and contexts but in and out of visibility. Digitally mediated conversation hums in the background of daily life (boring meetings, long commutes and bad dates) and expands our understanding of the temporal and sequential limits of conversation. In this article, I will explore digitally-mediated cross-platform conversation as a problem in two parts, and how we can understand it as part of the 'dark social'. Specifically, I want to draw attention to how 'dark' online spaces are part of our everyday communicative practices and are not necessarily synonymous with the illicit, illegal, or deviant. I argue that the private conversations we have online are also part of the dark social web, insofar as they are hidden from the public eye. When I think of dark social spaces, I think of what lies beneath the surface of murky waters, what hides behind in backstage areas, and the moments between platforms. In contrast, 'light' (or public) social spaces are often perceived as siloed. The boundaries between these platforms are artificially clean and do not appear to leak into other spaces. This article explores the dark and shadowed spaces of online conversation and considers how we might approach them as researchers. Conversations occur in the backchannels of social media platforms, in private messaging functions that are necessarily invisible to the researcher's gaze. These spaces are distinct from the social media activity analysed by Marwick and boyd. Their research examining teens' privacy strategies on social media highlights how social media posts that multiple audiences may view often hold encoded meanings. Social media posts are a distinct and separate category of activity from meditated conversations that occur one to one, or in smaller group chat settings. Second is the disjunction between social media platforms. Users spread their activity across any number of social media platforms, according to social and personal logics. However, these movements are difficult to capture; it is difficult to see in the dark. Platforms are not hermeneutically sealed off from each other, or the broader web. I argue that understanding how conversation moves between platforms and in the backstage spaces of platforms are two parts of the same dark social puzzle. Conversation Online Digital media have changed how we maintain our social connections across time and space. Social media environments offer new possibilities for communication and engagement as well as new avenues for control. Calls and texts can be ignored, and our phones are often used as shields. Busying ourselves with them can help us avoid unwanted face-to-face conversations. There are a number of critiques regarding the pressure of always-on contact, and a growing body of research that examines how users negotiate these demands. By examining group messaging, Mannell highlights how the boundaries of these chats are porous and flexible and mark a distinct communicative break from previous forms of mobile messaging, which were largely didactic. The advent of group chats has also led to an increasing complication of conversation boundaries. One group chat may have several strands of conversation sporadically re-engaged with over time. Manell's examination of group chats empirically illustrates the complexity of digitally-mediated conversations as they move across private, parochial, and public spaces in a way that is not necessarily temporally linear. Further research highlights the networked nature of digitally mediated interpersonal communication and how conversations sprawl across multiple platforms (Burchell). Couldry (16, 17) describes this complex web as the media manifold. This concept encompasses the networked platforms that comprise it and refers to its embeddedness in daily life. As we no longer “log on” to the internet to send and receive email, the manifold is both everywhere and nowhere; so too are our conversations. Gershon has described the ways we navigate the communicative affordances of these platforms as “media ideologies" which are the "beliefs, attitudes, and strategies about the media they [individuals] use" (391). Media ideologies also contain implicit assumptions about which platforms are best for delivering which kinds of messages. Similarly, Burchell argues that the relational ordering of available media technologies is "highly idiosyncratic" (418). Burchell contends that this idiosyncratic ordering is interdependent and relational, and that norms about what to do when are both assumed by individuals and learnt in their engagement with others (418). The influence of others allows us to adjust our practices, or as Burchell argues, "to attune and regulate one's own conduct … and facilitate engagement despite the diverse media practices of others" (418). In this model, individuals are constantly learning and renegotiating norms of conversation on a case by case, platform by platform basis. However, I argue that it is more illuminating to consider how we have collectively developed an implicit and unconscious set of norms and signals that govern our (collective) conduct, as digitally mediated conversation has become embedded in our daily lives. This is not to say that everyone has the same conversational skill level, but rather that we have developed a common toolbox for understanding the ebb and flow of digitally mediated conversations across platforms. However, these norms are implicit, and we only have a partial understanding of how they are socially achieved in digitally-mediated conversation. What Lies Beneath Most of what we do online is assumed not to be publicly visible. While companies like Facebook trace us across the web and peer into every nook and cranny of our private use patterns, researchers have remained focussed on what lies above in the light, not below, in the dark. This has meant an overwhelming focus on single platform studies that rely on the massification of data as a default measure for analysing sentiment and behaviour online. Sociologically, we know that what occurs in dark social spaces, or backstage, is just as important to social life as what happens in front of an audience (Goffman). Goffman's research uses the metaphor of the theatre to analyse how social life is accomplished as a performance. He highlights that (darkened) backstage spaces are those where we can relax, drop our front, and reveal parts of our (social) self that may be unpalatable to a broader audience. Simply, the public data accessible to researchers on social media are “trace data”, or “trace conversation”, from the places where conversations briefly leave (public) footprints and can be tracked and traced before vanishing again. Alternatively, we can visualise internet researchers as swabbing door handles for trace evidence, attempting to assemble a narrative out of a left-behind thread or a stray fingerprint. These public utterances, often scraped through API access, are only small parts of the richness of online conversation. Conversations weave across multiple platforms, yet single platforms are focussed on, bracketing off their leaky edges in favour of certainty. We know the social rules of platforms, but less about the rules between platforms, and in their darker spaces. Conversations briefly emerge into the light, only to disappear again. Without understanding how conversation is achieved and how it expands and contracts and weaves in and out of the present, we are only ever guessing about the social dynamics of mediated conversation as they shift between light, dark, and shadow spaces. Small things can cast large shadows; something that looms large may be deceptively small. Online they could be sociality distorted by disinformation campaigns or swarms of social bots. Capturing the Unseen: An Ethnomethodological Approach Not all data are measurable, computable, and controllable. There is uncertainty beyond what computational logics can achieve. Nooks and crannies of sociality exist beyond the purview of computable data. This suggests that we can apply pre-digital social research methods to capture these “below the surface” conversations and understand their logics. Sociologists have long understood that conversation is a social accomplishment. In the 1960s, sociologist Harvey Sacks developed conversation analysis as an ethnomethodological technique that seeks to understand how social life is accomplished in day-to-day conversation and micro-interactions. Conversation analysis is a detailed and systematic account of how naturally-occurring talk is socially ordered, and has been applied across a number of social contexts, including news interviews, judicial settings, suicide prevention hotlines, therapy sessions, as well as regular phone conversations (Kitzinger and Frith). Conversation analysis focusses on fine-grained detail, all of the little patterns of speech that make up a conversation; for example, the pauses, interruptions, self-corrections, false starts, and over-speaking. Often these too are hidden features of conversation, understood implicitly, but hovering on the edges of our social knowledge. One of the most interesting uses of conversational analysis is to understand refusal, that is, how we say 'no' as a social action. This body of research turns common-sense social knowledge – that saying no is socially difficult – into a systemic schema of social action. For instance, acceptance is easy to achieve; saying yes typically happens quickly and without hesitation. Acceptances are not qualified; a straightforward 'yes' is sufficient (Kitzinger and Frith). However, refusals are much more socially complex. Refusal is usually accomplished by apologies, compliments, and other palliative strategies that seek to cushion the blow of refusals. They are delayed and indirect conversational routes, indicating their status as a dispreferred social action, necessitating their accompaniment by excuses or explanations (Kitzinger and Frith). Research by Kitzinger and Frith, examining how women refuse sexual advances, illustrates that we all have a stock of common-sense knowledge about how refusals are typically achieved, which persists across various social contexts, including in our intimate relationships. Conversation analysis shows us how conversation is achieved and how we understand each other. To date, conversation analysis techniques have been applied to spoken conversation but not yet extended into text-based mediated conversation. I argue that we could apply insights from conversation analysis to understand the rules that govern digitally mediated conversation, how conversation moves in the spaces between platforms, and the rules that govern its emergence into public visibility. What rules shape the success of mediated communication? How can we understand it as a social achievement? When conversation analysis walks into the dark room it can be like turning on the light. How can we apply conversation analysis, usually concerned with the hidden aspects of plainly visible talk, to conversation in dark social spaces, across platforms and in private back channels? There is evidence that the norms of refusal, as highlighted by conversation analysis, are persistent across platforms, including in people's private digitally-mediated conversations. One of the ways in which we can identify these norms in action is by examining technology resistance. Relational communication via mobile device is pervasive (Hall and Baym). The concentration of digitally-mediated communication into smartphones means that conversational norms are constantly renegotiated, alongside expectations of relationship maintenance in voluntary social relationships like friendship (Hall and Baym). Mannell also explains that technology resistance can include lying by text message when explaining non-availability. These small, habitual, and often automatic lies are categorised as “butler lies” and are a polite way of achieving refusal in digitally mediated conversations that are analogous to how refusal is accomplished in face-to-face conversation. Refusals, rejections, and, by extension, unavailability appear to be accompanied by the palliative actions that help us achieve refusal in face-to-face conversation. Mannell identifies strategies such as “feeling ill” to explain non-availability without hurting others' feelings. Insights from conversation analysis suggest that on balance, it is likely that all parties involved in both the furnishing and acceptance of a butler lie understand that these are polite fabrications, much like the refusals in verbal conversation. Because of their invisibility, it is easy to assume that conversations in the dark social are chaotic and disorganised. However, there are tantalising hints that the reverse is true. Instead of arguing that individuals construct conversational norms on a case by case, platform by platform basis, I suggest that we now have a stock of common-sense social knowledge that we also apply to cross-platform mediated communication. In the spaces where gaps in this knowledge exist, Szabla and Blommaert argue that actors use existing norms of interactions and can navigate a range of interaction events even in online environments where we would expect to see a degree of context collapse and interactional disorganisation. Techniques of Detection How do we see in the dark? Some nascent research suggests a way forward that will help us understand the rhythms of cross-platform mediated conversation. Apps have been used to track participants' messaging and calling activities (Birnholtz, Davison, and Li). This research found a number of patterns that signal a user's attention or inattention, including response times and linguistic clues. Similarly, not-for-profit newsroom The Markup built a Facebook inspector called the citizen browser, a "standalone desktop application that was distributed to a panel of more than 1000 paid participants" (Mattu et al.). The application works by being connected to a participant's Facebook account and periodically capturing data from their Facebook feeds. The data is automatically deidentified but is still linked to the demographic information that participants provide about themselves, such as gender, race, location, and age. Applications like these point to how researchers might reliably collect interaction data from Facebook to glimpse into the hidden networks and interactions that drive conversation. User-focussed data collection methods also help us, as researchers, to sever our reliance on API access. API-reliant research is dependent on the largesse of social media companies for continued access and encourages research on the macro at the micro's expense. After all, social media and other digital platforms are partly constituted by the social acts of their users. Without speech acts that constitute mediated conversation, liking, sharing GIFs, and links, as well as the gaps and silences, digital platforms cease to exist. Digital platforms are not just archives of “big data”, but rather they are collections of speech and records of how our common-sense knowledge about how to communicate has stretched and expanded beyond face-to-face contexts. A Problem of Bots Ethnomethodological approaches have been critiqued as focussing too much on the small details of conversation, on nit-picking small details, and thus, as unable to comment on macro social issues of oppression and inequality (Kitzinger and Frith 311). However, understanding digitally-mediated conversation through the lens of talk-as-human-interaction may help us untangle our most pressing social problems across digital platforms. Extensive research examines platforms such as Twitter for “inauthentic” behaviour, primarily identifying which accounts are bots. Bots accounts are programmed Twitter accounts (for example) that automatically tweet information on political or contentious issues, while mimicking genuine engagement. Bots can reply to direct messages too; they converse with us as they are programmed to act as “humanly” as possible. Despite this, there are patterns of behaviour and engagement that distinguish programmed bot accounts, and a number of platforms are dedicated to their detection. However, bots are becoming increasingly sophisticated and better able to mimic “real” human engagement online. But there is as yet no systematic framework regarding what “real” digitally mediated conversation looks like. An ethnomethodological approach to understanding this would better equip platforms to understand inauthentic activity. As Yang and colleagues succinctly state, "a supervised machine learning tool is only as good as the data used for its training … even the most advanced [bot detection] algorithms will fail with outdated training datasets" (8). On the flipside, organisations are using chat bots to deliver cognitive behavioural therapy and assist people in moments of psychological distress. But the bots do not feel human; they reply instantly to any message sent. Some require responses in the form of emojis. The basis of therapy is talk. Understanding more accurately how naturally-occurring talk functions in online spaces could create more sensitive and genuinely therapeutic tools. Conclusion It is easy to forget that social media have largely mainstreamed over the last decade; in this decade, crucial social norms about how we converse online have developed. These norms allow us to navigate our conversations, with intimate friends and strangers alike across platforms, both in and out of public view, in ways that are often temporally non-sequential. Dark social spaces are a matter of intense marketing interest. Advertising firm Disruptive Advertising identified the very spaces that are the focus of this article as “dark social”: messaging apps, direct messaging, and native mobile apps facilitate user activity that is "not as easily controlled nor tracked". Dark social traffic continues to grow, yet our understanding of why, how, and for whom trails behind. To make sense of our social world, which is increasingly indistinguishable from online activity, we need to examine the spaces between and behind platforms, and how they co-mingle. Where are the spaces where the affordances of multiple platforms and technologies scrape against each other in uncomfortable ways? How do users achieve intelligible conversation not just because of affordances, but despite them? Focussing on micro-sociological encounters and conversations may also help us understand what could build a healthy online ecosystem. How are consensus and agreement achieved online? What are the persistent speech acts (or text acts) that signal when consensus is achieved? To begin where I started, to understand the scope and power of anti-vaccination sentiment, we need to understand how it is shared and discussed in dark social spaces, in messaging applications, and other backchannel spaces. Taking an ethnomethodological approach to these conversational interactions could also help us determine how misinformation is refused, accepted, and negotiated in mediated conversation. Focussing on “dark conversation” will help us more richly understand our social world and add much needed insight into some of our pressing social problems. References Burchell, Kenzie. "Everyday Communication Management and Perceptions of Use: How Media Users Limit and Shape Their Social World." Convergence 23.4 (2017): 409–24. Couldry, Nick. Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice. Polity, 2012. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Penguin, 1990. Gershon, Ilana. The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media. Cornell University Press, 2010. Hall, Jeffrey A., and Nancy K. Baym. "Calling and Texting (Too Much): Mobile Maintenance Expectations, (Over)dependence, Entrapment, and Friendship Satisfaction." New Media & Society 14.2 (2012): 316–31. Hall, Margaret, et al. "Editorial of the Special Issue on Following User Pathways: Key Contributions and Future Directions in Cross-Platform Social Media Research." International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction 34.10 (2018): 895–912. Kitzinger, Celia, and Hannah Frith. "Just Say No? The Use of Conversation Analysis in Developing a Feminist Perspective on Sexual Refusal." Discourse & Society 10.3 (1999): 293–316. Ling, Rich. "Soft Coercion: Reciprocal Expectations of Availability in the Use of Mobile Communication." First Monday, 2016. Mannell, Kate. "A Typology of Mobile Messaging's Disconnective Affordances." Mobile Media & Communication 7.1 (2019): 76–93. ———. "Plural and Porous: Reconceptualising the Boundaries of Mobile Messaging Group Chats." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 25.4 (2020): 274–90. Marwick, Alice E., and danah boyd. "Networked Privacy: How Teenagers Negotiate Context in Social Media." New Media & Society 16.7 (2014): 1051–67. Mattu, Surya, Leon Yin, Angie Waller, and Jon Keegan. "How We Built a Facebook Inspector." The Markup 5 Jan. 2021. 9 Mar. 2021 <https://themarkup.org/citizen-browser/2021/01/05/how-we-built-a-facebook-inspector>. Sacks, Harvey. Lectures on Conversation: Volumes I and II. Ed. Gail Jefferson. Blackwell, 1995. Szabla, Malgorzata, and Jan Blommaert. "Does Context Really Collapse in Social Media Interaction?" Applied Linguistics Review 11.2 (2020): 251–79.

Introduction
 «I have never worked in the technocratic exaltation, solving a constructive problem and that’s it. I’ve always tried to interpret the space of human life» (Vittorio Garatti).
 Vittorio Garatti (Milan, April 6, 1927) is certainly one of the last witnesses of one “heroic” season of Italian architecture. In 1957 he graduated in architecture from the Polytechnic of Milan with a thesis proposing the redesign of a portion of the historic centre of Milan: the area between “piazza della Scala”, “via Broletto”, “via Filodrammatici” and the gardens of the former Olivetti building in via Clerici. These are the years in which Ernesto Nathan Rogers established himself as one of the main personalities of Milanese culture. Garatti endorses the criticism expressed by Rogers to the approval of the Rationalist “language” in favour of an architecture that recovers the implications of the place and of material culture. The social responsibility of architecture and connections between architecture and other forms of artistic expression are the invariants of all the activity of the architect, artist and graphic designer of Garatti. It will be Ernesto Nathan Rogers who will offer him the possibility of experiencing these “contaminations” early: in 1954, together with Giuliano Cesari, Raffaella Crespi, Giampiero Pallavicini and Ferruccio Rezzonico, he designs the preparation of the exhibition on musical instruments at the 10th Milan Triennale. The temporary installations will be a privileged area in which Garatti will continue to experiment and integrate the qualities of artist, graphic designer and architect with each other. Significant examples of this approach are the Art Schools in Cuba 1961-63, the residential complex of Cusano Milanino in 1973, the Attico Cosimo del Fante in 1980, the fittings for the Bubasty shops in 1984, the Camogli residence in 1986, his house atelier in Brera in 1988 and the interiors of the Hotel Gallia in 1989. 
 True architecture generates itself1: an approach that was consolidated over the years of collaboration with Raúl Villanueva in Venezuela and is fulfilled in Cuba in the project of the Art Schools, where Garatti makes use of a plurality of tools that cannot be rigidly confined to the world of architecture. 
 In 1957, in Caracas, he came into contact with Ricardo Porro and Roberto Gottardi. Ricardo Porro, who returned to Cuba in 1960, will be the one to involve Vittorio Garatti and Roberto Gottardi in the Escuelas Nacional de Arte project.
 The three young architects will be the protagonists of a happy season of the architecture of the Revolution, they will be crossed by that “revolutionary” energy that Ricardo Porro has defined as “magical realism”. 
 As Garatti recalls: it was a special moment. We designed the Schools using a method developed in Venezuela. We started from an analysis of the context, understood not only as physical reality. We studied Cuban poets and painters. Wifredo Lam was a great reference. For example, Lezama Lima’s work is clearly recalled in the plan of the School of Ballet. We were pervaded by the spirit of the revolution. 
 The contamination between knowledge and disciplines, the belief that architecture is a “parasitic” discipline are some of the themes at the centre of the conversation that follows, from which a working method that recognizes architecture as a “social transformation” task emerges, more precisely an art with a social purpose. Garatti often cites Porro’s definition of architecture: architecture is the poetic frame within which human life takes place. To Garatti architecture is a self-generating process, and as such it cannot find fulfilment within its disciplinary specificity: the disciplinary autonomy is a contradiction in terms. Architecture cannot be self-referencing, it generates itself precisely because it finds the sense of its social responsibility outside of itself. No concession to trends, to self-referencing, to the “objectification of architecture”, to its spectacularization. Garatti as Eupalino Valery shuns “mute architectures” and instead prefers singing architectures.
 
 A Dialogue of Luigi Alini with Vittorio Garatti
 Luigi Alini. Let’s start with some personal data. 
 Vittorio Garatti. I was born in Milan on April 6, 1927.
 My friend Emilio Vedova told me that life could be considered as a sequence of encounters with people, places and facts. My sculptor grandfather played an important role in my life. I inherited the ability to perceive the dimensional quality of space, its plasticity, spatial vision from him.
 
 L.A. Your youth training took place in a dramatic phase of history of our country. Living in Milan during the war years must not have been easy. 
 V.G. In October 1942 in Milan there was one of the most tragic bombings that the city has suffered. A bomb exploded in front of the Brera Academy, where the Dalmine offices were located. With a group of boys we went to the rooftops. We saw the city from above, with the roofs partially destroyed. I still carry this image inside me, it is part of that museum of memory that Luciano Semerani often talks about. This image probably resurfaced when I designed the ballet school. The idea of a promenade on the roofs to observe the landscape came from this. 
 
 L.A. You joined the Faculty of Architecture at the Milan Polytechnic in May 1946-47.
 V.G. Milan and Italy were like in those years. The impact with the University was not positive, I was disappointed with the quality of the studies.
 
 L.A. You have had an intense relationship with the artists who gravitate around Brera, which you have always considered very important for your training.
 V.G. In 1948 I met Ilio Negri, a graphic designer. Also at Brera there was a group of artists (Morlotti, Chighine, Dova, Crippa) who frequented the Caffè Brera, known as “Bar della Titta”. Thanks to these visits I had the opportunity to broaden my knowledge.
 As you know, I maintain that there are life’s appointments and lightning strikes. The release of Dada magazine provided real enlightenment for me: I discovered the work of Kurt Schwitters, Theo Van Doesburg, the value of the image and three-dimensionality. 
 L.A. You collaborated on several projects with Ilio Negri.
 V.G. In 1955 we created the graphics of the Lagostina brand, which was then also used for the preparation of the exhibition at the “Fiera Campionaria” in Milan.
 We also worked together for the Lerici steel industry. There was an extraordinary interaction with Ilio.
 L.A. The cultural influence of Ernesto Nathan Rogers was strong in the years you studied at the Milan Polytechnic. He influenced the cultural debate by establishing himself as one of the main personalities of the Milanese architectural scene through the activity of the BBPR studio but even more so through the direction of Domus (from ‘46 to ‘47) and Casabella Continuità (from ‘53 to ‘65).
 V.G. When I enrolled at the university he was not yet a full professor and he was very opposed. As you know, he coined the phrase: God created the architect, the devil created the colleague. In some ways it is a phrase that makes me rethink the words of Ernesto Che Guevara: beware of bureaucrats, because they can delay a revolution for 50 years.
 Rogers was the man of culture and the old “bureaucratic” apparatus feared that his entry into the University would sanction the end of their “domain”.
 
 L.A. In 1954, together with Giuliano Cesari, Raffella Crespi, Giampiero Pallavicini and Ferruccio Rezzonico, all graduating students of the Milan Polytechnic, you designed the staging of the exhibition on musical instruments at the 10th Milan Triennale. 
 V.G. The project for the Exhibition of Musical Instruments at the Milan Triennale was commissioned by Rogers, with whom I subsequently collaborated for the preparation of the graphic part of the Castello Sforzesco Museum, together with Ilio Negri. We were given a very small budget for this project. We decided to prepare a sequence of horizontal planes hanging in a void. These tops also acted as spacers, preventing people from touching the tools. Among those exhibited there were some very valuable ones. We designed slender structures to be covered with rice paper. The solution pleased Rogers very much, who underlined the dialogue that was generated between the exhibited object and the display system.
 
 L.A. You graduated on March 14, 1957.
 V.G. The project theme that I developed for the thesis was the reconstruction of Piazza della Scala. While all the other classmates were doing “lecorbusierani” projects without paying much attention to the context, for my part I worked trying to have a vision of the city. I tried to bring out the specificities of that place with a vision that Ernesto Nathan Rogers had brought me to. 
 I then found this vision of the city in the work of Giuseppe De Finetti. I tried to re-propose a vision of space and its “atmospheres”, a theme that Alberto Savinio also refers to in Listen to your heart city, from 1944.
 
 L.A. How was your work received by the thesis commission? 
 V.G. It was judged too “formal” by Emiliano Gandolfi, but Piero Portaluppi did not express himself positively either. The project did not please. Also consider the cultural climate of the University of those years, everyone followed the international style of the CIAM. 
 I was not very satisfied with the evaluation expressed by the commissioners, they said that the project was “Piranesian”, too baroque. The critique of culture rationalist was not appreciated. Only at IUAV was there any great cultural ferment thanks to Bruno Zevi. 
 L.A. After graduation, you left for Venezuela.
 V.G. With my wife Wanda, in 1957 I joined my parents in Caracas. In Venezuela I got in touch with Paolo Gasparini, an extraordinary Italian photographer, Ricardo Porro and Roberto Gottardi, who came from Venice and had worked in Ernesto Nathan Rogers’ studio in Milan. Ricardo Porro worked in the office of Carlos Raúl Villanueva. The Cuban writer and literary critic Alejo Carpentier also lived in Caracas at that time.
 
 L.A. Carlos Raul Villanueva was one of the protagonists of Venezuelan architecture. His critical position in relation to the Modern Movement and the belief that it was necessary to find an “adaptation” to the specificities of local traditions, the characteristics of the places and the Venezuelan environment, I believe, marked your subsequent Cuban experience with the creative recovery of some elements of traditional architecture such as the portico, the patio, but also the use of traditional materials and technologies that you have masterfully reinterpreted. I think we can also add to these “themes” the connections between architecture and plastic arts. You also become a professor of Architectural Design at the Escuela de Arquitectura of the Central University of Caracas.
 V.G. On this academic experience I will tell you a statement by Porro that struck me very much: The important thing was not what I knew, I did not have sufficient knowledge and experience. What I could pass on to the students was above all a passion. In two years of teaching I was able to deepen, understand things better and understand how to pass them on to students. The Faculty of Architecture had recently been established and this I believe contributed to fuel the great enthusiasm that emerges from the words by Porro. Porro favoured mine and Gottardi’s entry as teachers. Keep in mind that in those years Villanueva was one of the most influential Venezuelan intellectuals and had played a leading role in the transformation of the University. Villanueva was very attentive to the involvement of art in architecture, just think of the magnificent project for the Universidad Central in Caracas, where he worked together with artists such as the sculptor Calder. 
 I had recently graduated and found myself catapulted into academic activity. It was a strange feeling for a young architect who graduated with a minimum grade. At the University I was entrusted with the Architectural Design course. The relationships with the context, the recovery of some elements of tradition were at the centre of the interests developed with the students. Among these students I got to know the one who in the future became my chosen “brother”: Sergio Baroni. Together we designed all the services for the 23rd district that Carlos Raúl Villanueva had planned to solve the favelas problem. In these years of Venezuelan frequentation, Porro also opened the doors of Cuba to me. Through Porro I got to know the work of Josè Martì, who claimed: cult para eser libre. I also approached the work of Josè Lezama Lima, in my opinion one of the most interesting Cuban intellectuals, and the painting of Wilfredo Lam.
 
 L.A. In December 1959 the Revolution triumphed in Cuba. Ricardo Porro returned to Cuba in August 1960. You and Gottardi would join him in December and begin teaching at the Facultad de Arcuitectura.
 Your contribution to the training of young students took place in a moment of radical cultural change within which the task of designing the Schools was also inserted: the “new” architecture had to give concrete answers but also give “shape” to a new model of society.
 V.G. After the triumph of the Revolution, acts of terrorism began. At that time in the morning, I checked that they hadn’t placed a bomb under my car.
 Eisenhower was preparing the invasion. Life published an article on preparing for the invasion of the counterrevolutionary brigades. 
 With Eisenhower dead, Kennedy activated the programme by imposing one condition: in conjunction with the invasion, the Cuban people would have to rise up. Shortly before the attempted invasion, the emigration, deemed temporary, of doctors, architects, university teachers etc. began. They were all convinced they would return to “liberated Cuba” a few weeks later. Their motto was: it is impossible for Americans to accept the triumph of the rebel army. As is well known, the Cuban people did not rise up. The revolutionary process continued and had no more obstacles.
 The fact that the bourgeois class and almost all the professionals had left Cuba put the country in a state of extreme weakness.
 The sensation was of great transformation taking place, it was evident. In that “revolutionary” push there was nothing celebratory. All available energies were invested in the culture. There were extraordinary initiatives, from the literacy campaign to the founding of international schools of medicine and of cinema. In Cuba it was decided to close schools for a year and to entrust elementary school children with the task of travelling around the country and teaching illiterate adults. In the morning they worked in the fields and in the evening they taught the peasants to read and write. In order to try to block this project, the counter-revolutionaries killed two children in an attempt to scare the population and the families of the literate children. There was a wave of popular indignation and the programme continued.
 
 L.A. Ricardo Porro was commissioned to design the Art Schools. Roberto Gottardi recalls that: «the wife of the Minister of Public Works, Selma Diaz, asked Porro to build the national art schools. The architecture had to be completely new and the schools, in Fidel’s words, the most beautiful in the world. All accomplished in six months. Take it or leave it! [...] it was days of rage and enthusiasm in which all areas of public life was run by an agile and imaginative spirit of warfare»2. You too remembered several times that: that architecture was born from a life experience, it incorporated enthusiasm for life and optimism for the future.
 V.G. The idea that generated them was to foster the cultural encounter between Africa, Asia and Latin America. A “place” for meeting and exchanging. A place where artists from all over the third world could interact freely. The realisation of the Schools was like receiving a “war assignment”. Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara selected the Country Club as the place to build a large training centre for all of Latin America. They understood that it was important to foster the Latin American union, a theme that Simón Bolivar had previously wanted to pursue. Il Ché and Fidel, returning from the Country Club, along the road leading to the centre of Havana, met Selma Diaz, architect and wife of Osmany Cienfuegos, the Cuban Construction Minister.
 Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara entrusted Selma Diaz with the task of designing this centre. She replied: I had just graduated, how could I deal with it? Then she adds: Riccardo Porro returned to Cuba with two Italian architects. Just think, three young architects without much experience catapulted into an assignment of this size. The choice of the place where to build the schools was a happy intuition of Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara.
 
 L.A. How did the confrontation develop?
 V.G. We had total freedom, but we had to respond to a functional programme defined with the heads of the schools. Five directors were appointed, one for each school. We initially thought of a citadel. A proposal that did not find acceptance among the Directors, who suggest thinking of five autonomous schools. We therefore decide to place the schools on the edge of the large park and to reuse all the pre-existing buildings. We imagined schools as “stations” to cross. The aim was to promote integration with the environment in which they were “immersed”. Schools are not closed spaces. We established, for example, that there would be no doors: when “everything was ours” there could not be a public and a private space, only the living space existed.
 
 L.A. Ricardo Porro recalled: I organised our study in the chapel of the former residence of the Serrà family in Vadado. It was a wonderful place [...]. A series of young people from the school of architecture came to help us […]. Working in that atmosphere, all night and all day was a poetic experience (Loomis , 1999).
 V.G. We felt like Renaissance architects. We walked around the park and discussed where to locate the schools. Imagine three young people discussing with total, unthinkable freedom.
 We decided that each of us would deal with one or more schools, within a global vision that was born from the comparison. I chose the Ballet School. Ivan Espin had to design the music school but in the end I did it because Ivan had health problems. Porro decided to take care of the School of Plastic Arts to support his nature as a sculptor. Gottardi had problems with the actors and directors, who could not produce a shared functional programme, which with the dancers was quite simple to produce. The reasons that led us to choose the different project themes were very simple and uncomplicated, as were those for identifying the areas. I liked hidden lands, I was interested in developing a building “embedded” in the ground. Ricardo, on the other hand, chose a hill on which arrange the school of Modern Art. Each of us chose the site almost instinctively. For the Classical Dance School, the functional programme that was provided to me was very meagre: a library, a deanery, an infirmary, three ballet classrooms, theoretical classrooms and one of choreography.
 We went to see the dancers while they were training and dancing with Porro. The perception was immediate that we had to think of concave and convex spaces that would welcome their movements in space. For a more organic integration with the landscape and to accommodate the orography of the area, we also decided to place the buildings in a “peripheral” position with respect to the park, a choice that allowed us not to alter the nature of the park too much but also to limit the distances to be covered from schools to homes. Selma Diaz added others to the first indications: remember that we have no iron, we have little of everything, but we have many bricks. These were the indications that came to us from the Ministry of Construction. We were also asked to design some large spaces, such as gyms. Consequently, we found ourselves faced with the need to cover large spans without being able to resort to an extensive use of reinforced concrete or wood.
 
 L.A. How was the comparison between you designers?
 V.G. The exchange of ideas was constant, the experiences flowed naturally from one work group to another, but each operated in total autonomy. Each design group had 5-6 students in it. In my case I was lucky enough to have Josè Mosquera among my collaborators, a brilliant modest student, a true revolutionary. 
 The offices where we worked on the project were organised in the Club, which became our “headquarters”. We worked all night and in the morning we went to the construction site. 
 For the solution of logistical problems and the management of the building site of the Ballet School, I was entrusted with an extraordinary bricklayer, a Maestro de Obra named Bacallao. During one of the meetings that took place daily at the construction site, Bacallao told me that in Batista’s time the architects arrived in the morning at the workplace all dressed in white and, keeping away from the construction site to avoid getting dusty, they transferred orders on what to do. In this description by we marvelled at the fact that we were in the construction site together with him to face and discuss how to solve the different problems.
 In this construction site the carpenters did an extraordinary job, they had considerable experience. Bacallao was fantastic, he could read the drawings and he managed the construction site in an impeccable way. We faced and solved problems and needs that the yard inevitably posed on a daily basis. One morning, for example, arriving at the construction site, I realised the impact that the building would have as a result of its total mono-materiality. I was “scared” by this effect. My eye fell on an old bathtub, inside which there were pieces of 10x10 tiles, then I said to Bacallao: we will cover the wedges between the ribs of the bovedas covering the Ballet and Choreography Theatre classrooms with the tiles. The yard also lived on decisions made directly on site. 
 Also keep in mind that the mason teams assigned to each construction site were independent. However the experience between the groups of masons engaged in the different activities circulated, flowed. There was a constant confrontation. For the workers the involvement was total, they were building for their children. A worker who told me: I’m building the school where my son will come to study. Ricardo Porro was responsible for the whole project, he was a very cultured man. 
 In the start-up phase of the project he took us to Trinidad, the old Spanish capital. He wanted to show us the roots of Cuban architectural culture. On this journey I was struck by the solution of fan windows, by the use of verandas, all passive devices which were entrusted with the control and optimisation of the comfort of the rooms. 
 Porro accompanied us to those places precisely because he wanted to put the value of tradition at the centre of the discussion, he immersed us in colonial culture.
 
 L.A. It is to that “mechanism” of self-generation of the project that you have referred to on several occasions?
 V.G. Yes, just that. When I design, I certainly draw from that stratified “grammar of memory”, to quote Luciano Semerani, which lives within me. The project generates itself, is born and then begins to live a life of its own. A writer traces the profile and character of his characters, who gradually come to life with a life of their own. In the same way the creative process in architecture is self-generated. 
 
 L.A. Some problems were solved directly on site, dialoguing with the workers.
 V.G. He went just like that. Many decisions were made on site as construction progressed. Design and construction proceeded contextually. The dialogue with the workers was fundamental.
 The creative act was self-generated and lived a life of its own, we did nothing but “accompany” a process. The construction site had a speed of execution that required the same planning speed. In the evening we worked to solve problems that the construction site posed. The drawings “aged” rapidly with respect to the speed of decisions and the progress of the work. The incredible thing about this experience is that three architects with different backgrounds come to a “unitary” project. All this was possible because we used the same materials, the same construction technique, but even more so because there was a similar interpretation of the place and its possibilities.
 
 L.A. The project of the Music School also included the construction of 96 cubicles, individual study rooms, a theatre for symphonic music and one for chamber music and Italian opera. You “articulated” the 96 cubicles along a 360-metre-long path that unfolds in the landscape providing a “dynamic” view to those who cross it. A choice consistent with the vision of the School as an open place integrated with the environment.
 V.G. The “Gusano” is a volume that follows the orography of the terrain. It was a common sense choice. By following the level lines I avoided digging and of course I quickly realized what was needed by distributing the volumes horizontally.
 Disarticulation allows the changing vision of the landscape, which changes continuously according to the movement of the user. The movements do not take place along an axis, they follow a sinuous route, a connecting path between trees and nature. The cubicles lined up along the Gusano are individual study rooms above which there are the collective test rooms. On the back of the Gusano, in the highest part of the land, I placed the theatre for symphonic music, the one for chamber music, the library, the conference rooms, the choir and administration.
 
 L.A. In 1962 the construction site stopped.
 V.G. In 1962 Cuba fell into a serious political and economic crisis, which is what caused the slowdown and then the abandonment of the school site. Cuba was at “war” and the country’s resources were directed towards other needs. In this affair, the architect Quintana, one of the most powerful officials in Cuba, who had always expressed his opposition to the project, contributed to the decision to suspend the construction of the schools. 
 Here is an extract from a writing by Sergio Baroni, which I consider clarifying: «The denial of the Art Schools represented the consolidation of the new Cuban technocratic regime. The designers were accused of aristocracy and individualism and the rest of the technicians who collaborated on the project were transferred to other positions by the Ministry of Construction [...]. It was a serious mistake which one realises now, when it became evident that, with the Schools, a process of renewal of Cuban architecture was interrupted, which, with difficulty, had advanced from the years preceding the revolution and which they had extraordinarily accelerated and anchored to the new social project. On the other hand, and understandably, the adoption of easy pseudo-rationalist procedures prevailed to deal with the enormous demand for projects and constructions with the minimum of resources» (Baroni 1992).
 
 L.A. You also experienced dramatic moments in Cuba. I’m referring in particular to the insane accusation of being a CIA spy and your arrest.
 V.G. I wasn’t the only one arrested. The first was Jean Pierre Garnier, who remained in prison for seven days on charges of espionage. This was not a crazy accusation but one of the CIA’s plans to scare foreign technicians into leaving Cuba. Six months after Garnier, it was Heberto Padilla’s turn, an intellectual, who remained in prison for 15 days. After 6 months, it was my turn. I was arrested while leaving the Ministry of Construction, inside the bag I had the plans of the port. I told Corrieri, Baroni and Wanda not to notify the Italian Embassy, everything would be cleared up.
 
 L.A. Dear Vittorio, I thank you for the willingness and generosity with which you shared your human and professional experience.
 I am sure that many young students will find your “story” of great interest.
 V.G. At the end of our dialogue, I would like to remember my teacher: Ernesto Nathan Rogers. I’ll tell you an anecdote: in 1956 I was working on the graphics for the Castello Sforzesco Museum set up by the BBPR. Leaving the museum with Rogers, in the Rocchetta courtyard the master stopped and gives me a questioning look. Looking at the Filarete tower, he told me: we have the task of designing a skyscraper in the centre. Usually skyscrapers going up they shrink. Instead this tower has a protruding crown, maybe we too could finish our skyscraper so what do you think? I replied: beautiful! Later I thought that what Rogers evoked was a distinctive feature of our city. The characters of the cities and the masters who have consolidated them are to be respected. If there is no awareness of dialectical continuity, the city loses and gets lost. It is necessary to reconstruct the figure of the architect artist who has full awareness of his role in society.
 The work of architecture cannot be the result of a pure stylistic and functional choice, it must be the result of a method that takes various and multiple factors into analysis. In Cuba, for example, the musical tradition, the painting of Wilfredo Lam, whose pictorial lines are recognisable in the floor plan of the Ballet School, the literature of Lezama Lima and Alejo Carpentier and above all the Cuban Revolution were fundamental. We theorised this “total” method together with Ricardo Porro, remembering the lecture by Ernesto Nathan Rogers.