‘… at the core of a magic performance is interaction: it cannot be performed alone.’ (Nardi 1984, 26)
Situated rites are based on an awareness of the interrelatedness of everything; they operate in specifically defined fields of action and concern effect. Designing artistic research can be understood as a ludic practice of effecting actions by situating rites.
Joots Suite is an artistic workshop that enables players to co-construct epistemic worlds within which they may situate the actions they desire.
Groups of players work with a modified Paris Pattern card deck, using it as an independent infrastructure for establishing and practising their conceptual world (“worlding”). Players use a local suit system wherein Minor Arcana (♣️♦️♠️♥️) represent dimensions of artistic research practice (Methods, Tools, Actors, Effects). This foregrounds polylocal knowledge systems: group-play negotiates a minor research language of its own, enacting how concepts may be pragmatically standardised or marginalised.
Players then devise Major Arcana cards (J, K, Q) that enact meta-method moves such as forbidding particular methods or enforcing stakeholder co-design. Major Arcana establish epistemic sovereignty over what counts as legitimate knowledge.
Play proceeds through dealing, bidding, and narrating melds (artistic research designs) that must withstand adversarial peer review. Review criteria are negotiated in-game, dramatising how such evaluative regimes are socially constructed. A forced “jootsing” phase, where players must swap cards and redesign their methods, explores how conceptual worlds are altered by shifts in infrastructure, access, and control.
Joker 🃏 Joots
The game ends with a house-rule negotiation: each group writes one new rule (🃏) designed to joots the game itself. If two or more groups play simultaneously, Joots Suite concludes with a brief exposition of the cards and house rules jootsed into existence by each group.
The version of Joots Suite proposed for the 17th SAR Conference is a mod of this open research object. Users of the SAR version of Joots Suite are very welcome to mod or fork this open research object.
Prof Neil Mulholland 2026 Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
