TIME WHAT DAY is a series of mixed-reality experiences in which players inhabit, investigate, and inscribe digital and physical spaces to explore and enact Theories of Memory, Space, Time, and Identity. Each Volume comprises a Game Box and an accompanying Digital Text.

In Part One: Traces of Sense, players engage in acts of sensory perception and self-reflection to explore theories from John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Based on the logic and philosophy of Lockean Memory Theory, the Player engages in sensory play, the materials of which are extracted from the memories of The Maker. The Player must use their own memories to progress through the experience.

The Digital Text of Part One was built using Twine with additional design elements programmed in HTML5 and Javascript. Orignal sound design was also created using Audacity.

TIME WHAT DAY is a result of a larger conceptual development called autodramaturgy, which is a process in which a Subject interacts with an Object in order to better understand both the Subject and the Object.

An Autodramaturgy consists of a Self (auto) and a Structure (dramaturgy). The Subject of an Autodramaturgy is the audience, interactor, or player (i.e. the Self). The Object of an Autodramaturgy can be anything external to the self with an exclusive and complete system of logic (i.e. the Structure). The Subject performs an Autodramaturgy with (not on) an Object through creating and/or performing Autodramaturgical materials and events.

Autodramaturgical materials and events are built by distilling the logical, narrative, and phenomenological elements of an Object through dramaturgical analysis, then translating and/or reorganizing these elements into performance(s) for the Subject to explore and execute based on their own subjective systems of logic.

These materials and events, within and through which this process occurs, become Products of an Autodramaturgy. The Products of an Autodramaturgy are Hybrid Structures resembling both the Subject and the Object.

Autodramaturgies achieve RECEPTION (experiencing sensory phenomena and information) and PERCEPTION (organizing and interpreting sensory information into systems and/or meaning) via CONCEPTION (forming or devising a new idea based on the abstract). Autodramaturgical processes are sites of simultaneous reception and perception of the Subject and the Object through the conception of hybridized autodramaturgical products.

TIME WHAT DAY Part One: Traces of Sense is a hybridized product of the Subject (myself) and Object (Lockean Memory Theory). This autodramaturgical product is used as the Object in a subsequent Autodramaturgy, performed with a new Subject.

Autodramaturgies are Subject-driven/centered processes; it was necessary to distill myself as Subject into Object (hybridized with Locke) to allow new Subjects to conceive, receive, and perceive based on their own systems of thinking, sense of play, and aesthetic preferences. This self-reduction from Subject into Object aligns with a core question of the series: What happens to our identity when we don’t retain our subjective, narrative memories?