My MTL August 2025

I’m in Montréal for six weeks by now, but it feels definitely longer. That might be just my experience of time, filled by all the things I participated in.

This Magic Moment of Translation

My main focus for the past weeks was writing a dissertation-relevant article, with a deadline on the 15th September. I’m happy when I finally handed it in since I’m slowly getting tired of it. I scheduled several writing sessions per week with myself and I’m quite happy with the outcome. There is still some rough edges that I need to figure out next week, but my biggest worry is that it will not fit for the journal anymore. Let’s see what the review brings in. Surely, more on that later.

Indigenous Voices of Today / Kanien’kéha

I am very thankful to be able to learn more about indigenous cultures here, in Montréal. What I’m mostly interested in is how we, the colonialists, deal with reconciliation. I was able to participate in the Présence Autochtone, the International First Peoples Festival. They had concerts, exhibitions, and a film program, among other events. The turnout for the concerts was very low, about which I was confused and disappointed. I had the feeling that the subject would bring in more people. But it was also summer vacation, pride week, and the communication on the website wasn’t the easiest to follow. Still, I learned that it might not be that much of a topic around here.

A few weeks later I went to the fantastic and very touching perma-exhibition in the McCord Steward Museum, Indigenous Voices of Today. I bought a yearly pass for the place, because I knew I want to come back more than once for this expo. A quote from the newspaper Le Devoir says it all: « a journey through culture, wounds, and the strength of the First Nations of Quebec. ». The subject of reconciliation is central to the exposition and the curators also create a guide on how to connect and become an ally of Indigenous nations. The guide motivated me to have a look into Kanien’kéha, the language of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation, whose people lived and live on Tiohtiá:ke (Montréal).

I found this video especially well done if you want to get a quick feeling for the language.

TAG / MDM

The last few weeks were still summer vacation at the university. The lab was mostly inhibited by the same few lost souls (including me). I had great talks nonetheless and the atmosphere is always filled with laughter and inspiration. I enjoy the North American way of chatting. It is so much easier and more direct than what I’m used from Central Europe (Switzerland in particular).

Regular events, screenings, game testings, and talks resumes with the semester, which started this week. But, we did regular meetings in the Games as Research working group which is focusing on the Materializing Design Method (MDM) these days. The gist of it is that the production of design knowledge is mostly tacit and implicit, meaning, it’s hard to communicate and prove (in a scientific manner). So MDM tries to develop a process that documents design processes in a comprehensible way that can be reflected and researched later through grounded theory. The approach draws from version control (git) and it feels quite sensible and natural to me.

The process of developing and discussing MDM is very inspiring for me and I decided to devote my fourth and last dissertation paper to this approach. The basic idea is to flip the analytical and theoretical third paper on ludemes and follow the thoughts and findings I developed there through research creation. This means I’ll develop a video game or parts of a video game and have an eye out for how ludemes are implemented in different programming languages and frameworks. I would choose maybe two-three different programming paradigms and implement the same game in all of them. Very high on my list are XXIIVV — uxn something Lua based, maybe Löve or PICO-8, and something larger, more modern, like C# for Unity. (somebody also mentioned Elm, which is in the Haskell family, but I will not go there)

uxn, uxntal, and varvara

To balance working on the paper (energy category concentration) I tried to have regular uxn sessions (energy category recharging). Learning how to write uxntal (the programming language for the uxn virtual machine) triggers a different kind of mental state, one akin to mushroom foraging. Programming for me is more about curiosity and solving puzzles and I hardly get so much energy to stick to a thing that I’m doing than figuring out code. Don’t know why, don’t care either, it’s just like this.

Most of my time got invested in the literate-uxn repository. That’s a collection of literate programming examples for uxntal, fully inspired by compudanzas uxn tutorial. After I worked myself a second time through the tutorial, this time in literate programming style, I also started to add my own examples. I’m especially proud of an attempt to code the classic slash/backslash pattern creation program in uxntal. It basically just prints either a slash or a backslash, chosen randomly, on a grid. The pseudo random number generator that is needed to decide which character shall be rendered is pretty rough, but it’s mine and I’m happy with it :)

A bunch of slash and backslashes. Neatly arranged on a grid.

I also went to research ○ programming language fundamentals and ○ esoteric languages (esolangs) for a bit, since there was so much that I didn’t really understand. I found Devine’s notes on programming languages especially helpful to get a feel for the topic, although I had to research quite some of the terms.

Tarot Cards / Coin Flips

Two different topics, two different roots, but they came together eventually.

I heard once (forgot where of course), that if you encounter a thing three times, you should investigate. I came in contact with Tarot several times over the course of a few days. First, the movie Fucktoys that I saw premiered at Fantasia was build around the Fool’s Journey and was fundamentally influenced by Tarot practice. On my way to the screening of the film and a second time a few days later I saw a small Tarot stand in front of the EV building of Concordia University. And a third and last time was when two people at TAG talked about readings they’ve gotten, which was unexpected. Finally, when I searched for some stuff for my apartment in a thrift shop, I came across an unused copy of the OK Tarot deck, which is super cute. That was the final straw and I bought it. I had a bit of fun trying to use it for reflection practice. But it also led me down to research other decks and I found some quite beautiful ones. I also got reminded that I have a pirated HEXEN 2.0 deck from Suzanne Treister at home (pirated meaning I printed it myself, since it wasn’t available for buying anymore). I created a collection on are.na with some of the stuff that I found appealing. Guessed I could make use of some of the decks I collected and whipped up a tarot spread micro-site over at https://jache.re/how-to/Tarot.html.

navia aut caput is Latin for “ship or head”. I’m not sure how I ended up with looking into coin flips and collecting stuff over at are.na, but I think it had something to do with search for simple game mechanics. I believe I was thinking about my next dissertation paper and what I could use to have a project that doesn’t exceed my resources but is still rich enough to allow analysis. And somehow I ended up thinking about coin flips. An oh boy is it an interesting topic! After I had a research spree I had a nice variety of perspectives in front of me.

On one hand we have coin flips as representations of binary systems, which brings them epistemologicallly and phenomenologically close to digital technology. That than immediately links up to the i ching, an ancient Chinese divination method. There are 64 hexagrams with their own meaning. One of these is always constructed out of six horizontal lines that can be either broken or unbroken. To draw a hexagram, you can either throw sticks or do coin flips. Either way it is grounded in cleromancy. Which brings us back to the now and the subject of coin boys, a meme about kids that let the coin decide about everything. “Live by the coin, die by the coin.”, their motto, makes their approach to cleromancy rather nihilistic. So I am definitely taking up coin flips as a core mechanic. I believe it holds a lot of narrative power actually.

And how do cards and coins come together now? While searching for fidgets on Etsy I came by the bustling market of tarot divination coins.

Hochelaga Sidewalk Gardens

Hochelaga is my neighbourhood in Montréal. One curiosity I observed here is the love that goes into little patches of soil. These are either part of front porches, trees that have been planted, or generally where parts of the sidewalk was removed. I started to collect these since I love how they often resemble miniature gardens.

Various

Sticker that says “Death to Car Culture”
Groundhog giving an interview after recieving snacks.