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AARON FINBLOOM
MARCH 11th
4-6 PM – TOPOLOGICAL MEDIA LAB
Aaron Finbloom is a philosopher, performance artist, musician and co-founder of The School of Making Thinking (SMT) – an artist/thinker residency program and experimental college. Much of his work is interested in exploring the inner workings of dialogue/dialectics by creating quasi-structured conversations through games, booklets, audio guides, dance maps, performative lectures, existential therapy and philosophic rituals. Finbloom has taught philosophy at Suffolk County Community College, and has curated dozens interdisciplinary immersive courses for SMT. His work has been featured at the performance collective “Milk Bar” in Bristol (UK), Elsewhere in Greensboro (NC), BETA Spaces in Brooklyn (NY), Figment (NYC), International Association for the Study of Place, Space and Environment, Towson (MD), and Workspace for Choreographers, Sperryville (VA). Finbloom holds an M.A. in Philosophy and Art from SUNY Stony Brook and currently he is housed within Concordia University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities PhD program.
Game Description
The Philosophy Conversation Game is a game that facilitates a philosophical conversation while making explicit and interactive conversational structure and methodology. The game is played as two players converse while a third person, the conversation guide, visually maps the conversation and provides written and structural cues to guide the conversation. This guide acts as a “conversation therapist” who helps the conversation stay balanced, move in interesting directions, clarify word meanings and advance deeper into a subject. Before the game begins the players chose from six different philosophers each of which has special conversational “powers” which can be used throughout the game to alter the game play in your favor. (for example: one of the Foucault cards reads: “Radically alter the power dynamics of this game for 2 minutes”). The goal of the game is to generate an interesting and lively dialogue in a way that affords an analysis of the method of conversation while it is occurring.