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Surreal - Word of the Year

Strange Days

I want to take a moment to recognize a recent, fun bit of news.  Surreal was chosen as word of the year by Merriam-Webster.

There is some discussion of the meaning of surreal - with a focus on its dream-like aspect.  Slightly more interesting, there is also a discussion of when use of the term spiked in mass media.  No, not with the MCG announcement or the kickstarter campaign - sadly.  Instead, we get a brief discussion of various events that journalists often described as surreal.

The description of political violence as surreal reminds me of a personal experience with the surreal.  Back in the summer of 1996, I was visiting friends where we watched the movie Strange Days (totally underrated movie - check it out if you have the chance).  We finished the movie and the VCR switched back to the local broadcast.  We had been watching the olympics.  When we switched back the coverage showed smoke rising from rubble, panicked people on the street, and the confusion following the bombing.  Over all of this was the olympics coverage banner.  It is only mild spoilers to point out that Strange Days ends with scenes of violence on crowded, rubble strewn streets.  To switch back to see that in reality created a sense of surreality.  The coverage of the bombing seemed unreal, despite the clear video coverage, because of the contrast between the movie and the news.

The description from Merriam-Webster combined with this memory gave me a new way to express surrealism.  A simple (therefore incomplete) definition could be "a vivid yet unrealistic portrayal - as in a dream."  This is just another way to think about surrealism and how to fit surrealism into your RPGs (Invisible Sun or others).  Describe elements in great detail but with a sense of impossibility/unrealism.

Also, the Skunk Anansie song was awesome :)

Automatism and Surrealism

Monte Cook Games sometimes describes the tone of Invisible Sun RPG as "surreal fantasy."  In keeping with that description, this post further explores the origins of surrealism as a school of visual arts.  In the last post, I discussed Dadaism as one of the precursors of (self-identified) surrealists.  It is important to remember a couple of elements from the Dada movement.

1. The Dadaists questions traditional sources of authority -- from politics to religion to art
2. Reason, itself, was implicated in the horrors of WWI

From this milieu emerged a particular set of artists who took the attack on reason and authority quite seriously - led by Andre Breton.

Andre Breton in 1924

Breton proposed that the conscious creation of art allowed for reason to pollute free expression.  Every deliberate act - including the creation of art - was contaminated.  This led to a natural question.  How does one create art without conscious intention?  His proposal was automatism. 

Automatism involves the use of automatic (rather than consciously controlled) movements to record expression.  In an extreme case, consider randomly hitting keys.  The surrealists applied this technique to drawing and painting.  The artist sketched in a seemly random fashion paying as little attention to the page as possible.  This means more than simply not looking at the page on which one is drawing - one had to try not to think of the page at all or the emerging image.  If an image did emerge (surely, there was not always an emergent image), it was thought to represent subconscious -- and to a surrealist, truer -- form of expression.

Breton applied automatism to other activities as well.  He worked with automatic writing in which a writer records every passing thought with as little self-editing as possible.  The goal was to produce a dream-like sequence of images or thoughts on the page.  The connection between dreams and surrealism here becomes clear.  Automatic drawing and writing was intended to provide access to the raw unconscious - just as dreams were thought to express.  

It is the emphasis on dreams that may serve as the strongest connection between early surrealism and the Invisible Sun RPG.  The images associated with the game and the discussion of the Actuality as being more real than what we know as reality (much like Breton's notion that the sub-conscious is more authentic than anything consciously created) provide some insight into the philosophical and aesthetic inspirations of the RPG.  

Steganography and the Invisible Sun Kickstarter ARG

When the Invisible Sun Kickstarter was started there was an alternate reality game (ARG) that ran along with it. We're going to be talking about the ARG when episode 7 hits the interwebs, but in the lead up to that I had bit of related research that merited a bit more detail. If you're looking for a way to hide information from your players, or the spies in the van outside your window, give this a read.

Steganography

I was looking for a way to hide information in a way that my tech savvy players might be able to figure out for the Invisible Sun lead up campaign that I'm running. During my research, I stumbled upon a technique that I thought might reveal some additional information hidden in the images that were pulled from the caches that were found in the Kickstarter ARG. For reference, the images I've been looking at are From the Changery and Wrong Cat from the memory sticks in the caches. You can follow along by downloading those images, just right click the links or the images and download them.

From the Changery

Wrong Cat

There's a discipline called steganography which is the practice of concealing messages/information in nonsecret text or data. Both of the images have information that's been hidden in the form of white text on a transparent background. That is a form of steganography that's pretty simple and straight forward. That's a pretty good way to hide information for a wide audience if you want the information to be discovered. It's not readily apparent, but with a little bit of work, or happenstance, that information will be discovered.

You can go deeper, however.

One thing I discovered is that you can append bytes after the end chunk of a PNG file without corrupting it. If you pop either image open in a tool like HxD you'll see the opening chunk of the PNG, the starting chunk (IHDR) and at the very end the closing chunk (IEND). You can totally type whatever you want in at the end there without disturbing the rest of the file. I took a look at the recovered image files with this in mind which unfortunately revealed no additional information at the end of the file.

Digging through the byte data of the file did reveal some interesting metadata that Adobe Photoshop had dropped in. Creation dates, modified dates, the tool that was used (Adobe on a Mac), layer names (Have you found a solid door?), change logs (looks like it was converted to a PNG on a Windows machine), dimensions. Lots of fun stuff you can infer the history of the file from. Unfortunately, nothing terribly useful once again.

<xmp:CreatorTool>Adobe Photoshop CC 2015 (Macintosh)</xmp:CreatorTool>
<xmp:CreateDate>2016-07-26T02:14:30-05:00</xmp:CreateDate>
<rdf:li xml:lang="x-default">Words in White</rdf:li>
<photoshop:LayerName>Have you found a solid door? </photoshop:LayerName>
<photoshop:LayerText>Have you found a solid door? </photoshop:LayerText>

Neat, right?

What if there was more data?

Since you can dump data at the end of a PNG file, you can basically put anything you want there. Take the following image for example (right click the image or this link and download it).

This Wrong Cat contains more secrets

At first blush, nothing seems terribly odd about the image. If you double click it the image will open up in whatever program you view images with. This is where things start to get a bit odd if you care about image quality and how it relates to file size. The image is only about 200x250 pixels and shouldn't be nearly a megabyte in size. If you open the file up in HxD you'll see the standard PNG header at the beginning, but if you go to the very end you'll see some really odd plain text that reads "you_found_me" along with some PK and IEND characters. What you're seeing here are PKZip file headers, PKZip being the file format that's used to compress files.

The other way to pull all of the data out of the image is to open the image file up with a compression tool, like 7-Zip. Start up 7-Zip, then navigate to the directory you saved the image to and open the image. Normally, this would just open the image up in your image viewing program, but 7-Zip will simply open up the compressed file that's hanging out in there. Now you can just pull the data out of the image and do what you want with it.

There are two ways to extract the data that's in the file. First off, you can find the beginning of the zip file by searching for "PK". You'll find that header at offset 00003B30. Then you can copy everything from that point to the end of the file, including the "PK" characters you located. Once you've copied everything hit File > New and paste all of the data in the new file you've created in HxD and save it as a ".zip". Now you've got a clean zipped file that you can open up with a simple double click.

Yeah, it's not a way to hide information from players at the table. It's also not a great way to hide data if you want anyone to be able to find it. However, if you're running an ARG in which solving puzzles might take days or weeks, and your players like to mess with things in hex editors, then this might be something you want to look into.

Dadaism in the Visual Arts for Invisible Sun

While the podcast is a fun way to talk about Invisible Sun, there are many topics that call for a discussion centered on visual elements.  This is particularly true for a game that is closely tied to Surrealism -- which is chiefly, though not exclusively, known as a tradition in the visual arts.

Before I can introduce Surrealist visual arts, some background is necessary.  It is useful to take a step back to one of the immediate predecessors of Surrealism to chart the emergence of some of the key themes that will eventually shape Surrealism.  In this post, I want to discuss Dadism as a visual art tradition that paved the way for Surrealism.

The Historical Context of Dadaism

Dadaism emerges as an artistic tradition associated with a specific group of artists in the shadow of World War I in Europe.  I shouldn't need to go in to great detail to convince you that World War I was terrible for Europe.  The death toll was staggering and concentrated in a period of time unprecedented in human history.  This was an event that could not be ignored by those living amid the battlefields and graveyards of the war.  

To some artists, World War I represented not just an exercise in poor judgment or bad luck.  The violence expressed in the war had to stem from deep within the traditions that fueled, or at least tolerated, this level of violence.  It was no longer the case that human history would inevitably march forward towards peace and prosperity for all.  The artists who would eventually become the Dadaists sought to use art to expose the contradictions, biases, and essential inhumanity built into the dominant cultures of the time (the cultures that just fought the great war). 

Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimer Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919)  by Hannah Hoch

In this potent political environment, several artists organized events to gather like-minded artists.  One of the most famous of the events specifically linked to the Dadaist art movement was the creation of Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.

The Mechanical Head: The Spirit of Our Age (1920) by Raoul Hausmann

The Ideology of Dadaism

The Dadaist gatherings were often characterized as anarchic as they saw the violence of the recent war as deeply embedded in the culture and society.  The only solution was to expose the violent tendencies embedded in these cultures and reveal the often unseen or invisible tendencies that led to violence.  This was expressed, in part, as an attack on sources of authority ranging from legal/political authorities to artistic authorities who declared what qualified as art and what sorts of art should be praised.  

The Dadaists involved artists from a range of traditions including painting, sculpture, and theater but I will focus on those pieces most easily displayed here -- mostly painting and sculpture.

Fountain (1917) by Marcel Duchamp

Examples of Dadaist Visual Arts

I have sprinkled this post with several examples of Dadaist art.  I won't dive into any of them in great detail but they represent the variety of styles associated with the tradition.  The first piece (by Hannah Hoch) illustrates the use of collage to juxtapose images and words in startling combinations.  Here the juxtaposition is intended to expose patterns that can be concealed in the original source material.  

The second piece (by Raoul Hausmann) illustrates the use of sculpture to express the disjointed nature of modern identity (rather than a beautiful classical sculpture, by comparison) and an awkward reliance of science (notice the measurement tools).  Science was one of the many institutions and sources of authority that the Dadaist brought into question.  After all, it was advanced in science and technology that allowed the armies of WWI to so efficiently kill so many people -- including the use of chemical weapons.

The third image (by Duchamp - one of the movement's most famous figures) efficiently expresses the anti-authoritarian approach of the Dadaist artists.  Duchamp illustrates the subjectivity of art by sculpting the most mundane - and, to some, borderline offensive -- subject he could imagine, a urinal.  He saw this as raising questions about what counts as art and who decides.  He wanted to get as far away from classical sculpture as possible to raise the question.  It raises an interesting question.  Is this the opposite of art?  Can art even have an opposite?

The final example illustrates the use of re-appropriation and a direct engagement of the artist and audience.  This piece by Man Ray is another sculpture that uses an image (an eye) cut out from a photo.  The piece included the instructions to use different speeds for the metronome to see how the movement of the eye affected how the image affected the viewer (engaging directly the role of the audience in "using" the art).  The instructions further demanded that the viewer destroy the piece when they were done.  This, again, brought into question the relationship between the viewer and the art piece. It also illustrates the preoccupation with contradictions (the "indestructible" or "to be destroyed").

Indestructible Object (or Object to be Destroyed) (1923) Man Ray

The Transition to Surrealist Visual Arts

The artists who called themselves Dadaists would lay the foundation on which the Surrealist movement would build their own work and their own perspectives.  The Surrealists would maintain the anti-authoritarian approach of the Dadaists and the disregard of established standards of artistry.  To this, they would add specific techniques to avoid the corruption they saw as residing within reason and conscious thought itself.

Typical Disclaimer 

I am not an art historian and this is a short blog post.  My discussion is simplistic, partial, and otherwise limited.  I have tried to avoid being outright "wrong".  I hope this is a useful starting point for any more in-depth investigations you want to conduct to follow-up.  If someone more expert than myself would like correct any errors or expand on these topics, I encourage them to do so.  I would love to learn more on the topic as well.

An Introduction to the Tarot for Invisible Sun

The Tarot and Invisible Sun

By: Scott E. Robinson (@drscottrobinson)

The Invisible Sun RPG seeks to set itself apart from existing RPGs in a variety of ways. One physical element of the game is the sooth deck. Given the novelty of including a deck of visual references and integrating it into the mechanics of the game (in ways that are not entirely clear at this point), the sooth deck has been the subject of a great deal of speculation.
I aim to add to this speculation.
Specifically, I want to discuss how some of the ways that tarot decks are used may provide inspiration for Invisible Sun games.

Uses of the Tarot

Tarot decks are used for a variety of purposes and in a variety of ways. Of course, I can not discuss all of these ways in a short post like this. I will lean on the discussion in Rachel Pollack's excellent Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom. Pollack argues that there are two main uses for tarot decks. Some use the decks as methods of divination. Some use the decks for self-exploration and analysis. For Invisible Sun, the sooth deck is part of a game - so neither of these purposes directly apply. In all of these cases, and most importantly for our game, the key is the interpretation of complex visual images.

We do not know exactly how the visual images will play into the mechanics of the game. However, there is some reason to believe that the active interpretation of the images on the sooth deck will be involve move than translating a specific bonus to a roll. For this reason, it is useful to consider how tarot decks incorporate complex visual images and the variety in ways in which these images can be interpreted.

For example purposes, I will focus on examples from the Rider-Waite tarot deck.

Major Elements of the Tarot

It is worth briefly discussing the format of the traditional tarot deck. The deck is divided into major and minor arcana. The minor arcana resemble the format of a playing card deck with four suits (the actual suits can vary - but something like swords, wands, pentacles and cups in the Rider-Waite deck). Each of the suits has cards numbered one (the ace) to ten and four court cards (Page, Knight, Queen, and King). The major arcana are a sequence of specific cards with names like The Fool or Justice. Pollack argues that there is a sequence within the major arcana but, for our purposes, we can look at the major arcana as a sequence of images without worrying too much about the meaning of the order.

In early editions of the tarot deck, the minor arcana were simply numbered cards and did not include complex images. This changed with the Rider-Waite tarot deck -- which is one of the reasons it is convenient to use it as a basis for discussion.

To consider how the tarot may inspire the use of the sooth deck as a means to influence game play in Invisible Sun, I want to illustrate the varied imagery included in traditional representations of key tarot cards.

I am no expert in tarot interpretation. It is not my goal to provide a definitive interpretation of any of these cards and images - if such a thing is even possible. Instead, I want to illustrate how one can derive many (potentially incompatible) interpretations of images and how this could influence an RPG game.

We come to why I am presenting this as a blog post rather than discussing it on the Incantations podcast. The discussion is inherently visual. I did not want to simply say "OK - everyone google 'The Fool Rider-Waite' and look at the image." The blog format provides a nice means through which I can discuss a specific image.

For this post, I will start with The Fool.

Visual Elements of The Fool

The Fool is the first card (numbered 0) in the major arcana. In this, it is said to represent origins and the beginning of a journey - either physical or spiritual. The character (presumably the fool) looks ahead and up while standing at the end of a ridge or cliff.

Note the various visual elements present in the card.

The Fool (Rider-Waite Tarot) -- Wikipedia

1. Sun
2. Dog
3. Flower
4. Staff
5. Mountains in the background

Of course, one could point to other more specific elements including the pattern of the clothing, etc. This list of five provides a nice starting point though. The act of interpreting the tarot involves considering traditional interpretations (with The Fool, this is origins and beginnings) alongside with specific references in other elements of the image that may apply to a circumstance or person.

For an RPG encounter, one could find inspiration in the sun as a distant force that lights the entire image. The dog could represent the presence of a helpful or friendly animal - if you want to take a fairly literal reading. The flower could represent a specific prize that the characters are pursuing. The staff here appears with a sack of goods -- maybe indicating the importance of equipment and preparation. Finally, the mountains appear in the background as a hint of potential difficulties (though the figure is looking past them).

You could come up with many, many other interpretations. This is just a starting point. Riffing only on five of the visual elements in the image provided many potential contributions to specific scenes or encounters in an RPG.

I am hoping this is how the sooth deck will work. It may provide complex visual images (with accompanying names) to serve to inspire changes in RPG scenes - but not in a single, correct way. The complex image can inspire different developments in different situations.

Conclusion and Coming Attraction

This is just one example of how to take minor inspiration form a Tarot card. If there is interest, I can continue this series to look at other cards if there is interest.

I aspire to provide blog posts in the weeks between podcast episodes. If you are interested in any particular topic, don't hesitate to comment in the Invisible Sun G+ community or Tweet me (my address is in the by-line). If topics seem inherently visual, I will address them here. Next week (10/28) we will release episode 4 of the blog with a discussion of Vances and the film Suspiria.