Autoplayography

Autoplayography begins with the idea that we are movement. Our lives do not simply take place; they play themselves out. We cannot decide: okay, no day today, perhaps tomorrow. Nor can we say: no, not 57 today. Perhaps 13.

When movement is connected to an ontology of play, play becomes more than something we do. It becomes a way of understanding how we relate to the world. Within the field it creates, play can turn things around and open multiple perspectives. It can bring the past into the present, enlarge a seemingly insignificant detail, slow down time or create unexpected combinations. As such, it opens another field of experience, with possibilities and forms of knowledge of its own.

Above all, play is directly reflexive. We can encounter ourselves within it while moving, acting and playing: while exaggerating, slowing down, reversing things and combining them differently. These possibilities allow us to have other real experiences within the same real world.

Play can also give us distance from the culture of which we remain a part. Without leaving the earth, we become autonauts, to borrow Cortázar and Dunlop’s term: moving through the familiar as if it were unknown, seeing culture from a distance while remaining fully immersed in it.

Autoplayography does not attempt to describe this movement from the outside. It tries to follow it from within

Permeability

My doctoral research began with the permeability of play: the idea that play cannot be contained within a separate ‘magic circle’. It leaks into how we think, move, teach, research and live.

The salt in our tears is the same whether we cry with laughter, at a film or in despair. The boundaries between play and life are never as clean as we imagine them to be.

Understanding

I am much better at remembering than at understanding.

It took me a long time to understand how the different parts of Fink’s thinking fit together: how his ontology of play connects to his understanding of the human being—his philosophical anthropology—and how both are embedded in his understanding of the world: his cosmology.

For me, the pleasure of understanding is far greater than the pleasure of remembering or reproducing. Understanding brings with it a kind of release, as though, at last, I have reached the top of a mountain and can look around: a long, slow “Woooow”—and, at the same time: How did I get here?

It is the same feeling I have during the first ninety seconds on my road bike. I feel young, fit and fast. That sudden, absolute lightness belongs to the same experience as clarity: for a moment, everything opens.

It begins with remembering: remembering, reproducing, pretending to understand, thinking that I know. I could recite the terms—philosophical anthropology, ontology of play, cosmology—long before I understood the movement between them. Then, at some point, something shifts. Not yet. Not quite. And then, somehow, clarity arrives in its own time.

Autoplayography follows this movement: not from knowledge towards certainty, but from lived experience towards a form of understanding that cannot be forced.