Personal Information
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Given name: Neil









Surname: Mulholland









Email: n.mulholland@ed.ac.uk









I understand that by submitting this form, I consent to the use of my data for the purposes of the 2026 Forum on Artistic Research'.: Yes









I agree to the terms of service.: Yes













Your contribution
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Title: Joots Suite









Format: Workshop (3)









Main language: English









Abstract:
‘… 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 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 modify a blank Paris Pattern deck, using it as an independent infrastructure for establishing and practising their conceptual world (“worlding”).

Before play begins, each group designs a local suit system wherein Minor Arcana stand for key dimensions of artistic research practice. This foregrounds polylocal knowledge systems: each group devises a minor research language of its own, enacting how concepts may be standardised or marginalised. Players then create Major Arcana cards that enact meta-method moves such as forbidding particular methods or enforcing stakeholder co-design. Major Arcana function as tools for establishing 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 collectively negotiated, 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.

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.










Image: https://www.sar2026.ie/system/files/webform/submit_contribution/141/Excuse.jpg









Short biographies of the presenter(s):
- Professor Neil Mulholland is Chair of Contemporary Art Practice & Theory at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the MA Contemporary Art Theory at Edinburgh College of Art. He is the author of Reimagining the Art School: Paragogy and Artistic Learning (London: Palgrave, 2019) and, with Norman Hogg, co-author of pan-pan (New York: Punctum, 2021). He is currently working on Crafting Magic, an ongoing project that combines the composition of an open grimoire of artworks with writing on the correlations between art and magic.
  www.neilmulholland.co.uk confraternityofneoflagellants.org.uk










Previous presentations or iterations of the research:
https://gitlab.com/neil-mulholland/joots-cards














Requirements
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Additional information:
The structure of the game is an open research object first published here https://gitlab.com/neil-mulholland/joots-cards This structure is by-nc-sa 4.0 licensed and can be modded accordingly. The version of Joots Suite proposed for the 17th SAR Conference is a mod of this open research object. Participants in the 17th SAR Conference version of Joots Suite are very welcome to mod or fork the open research object after the event. 

Prof Neil Mulholland 2026 Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/










Spatial and technical requirements :
Each group should be 3-5 players (min/max). Subject to spatial restrictions, any number of groups can play simultaneously. However, to be able to provide jootsing cards for players, and to facilitate play across several groups, it would help to restrict the game to 12 players. Each group of players needs a chair and a table. Tables can be shared between groups. Otherwise there are no requirements.










Potential risks or ethical concerns:
This is a game that asks players to jump-out-of-the-system ("joots"). Players need to be willing and prepared to jump-out-of-the-system and engage with whatever that form of gameplay entails.










Create a user account for SAR 2026: Yes









Create new user: Neil Mulholland