Euro permajam @ Fluid Space

🪳🪳🕯️🪳🪳

In September 2024, I joined the Euro Permajam at Fluid Space in Marseille - since then, I moved to the city, and am now involved in the association running the hacklab.

In case you are not aware of what it is, a game jam is an event where people gather, form teams and create video games in a limited amount of time (often a couple of days). I've been participating in game jams for more than 10 years now - the first one was the online Ludum Dare 30 in August 2014, during which I have made my very first game. Since then I took part in the Global Game Jam in Berlin and Tokyo, many smaller online and offline jams, and even organised a few, like the Spektrum Gaemz Jam. During all that time, I never took part in a jam where the majority of participants weren't cisgender men - and even less so, exclusively women, trans and queer people. The game jam at Fluid Space was the very first time I experienced a game jam in non-mixity - and I'm really excited and glad that some people will now get to participate in their first game jams in an environment were they will (hopefully) not have to deal with sexism and misoginy as they get started and experiment with game development. Dealing with all this bullshit does wear you down a lot, especially in the beginning of your trajectory in the field of tech, digital art and games. I hope that as time goes by, we will be able to get rid of this drag alltogether - in the meantime, spaces like Fluid Space are a welcome respite.

Sick of the filthy dust, montonous and boring, of stagnant, unbreathable, competitive and excluding environments, of semi-free information which is actually totally controlled, power and decision of hunched up egocentric and infantile machos. Tired of repressed, impenetrable and homogenous bodies, we are resetting and migrating our bodies, modificable codes, lubricated and fluid, far from this sad landscape. ~ PECHABLENDA, transhackfeminism

Anyways, that was a quick introduction - but I wanted to share how rare transfeminist hackerspaces are in general, and how rare a game jam event like this one is. I believe it is extremely important to take care and support such initiatives in the current political climate in europe, where everything is quickly closing down on us. We need to build supportive communties and networks as queers and women, not only to experiment, learn and create things together, but also to be able to rely on each other in the techno-nationalist hellscape that is aggressively being pushed down our throats.

• Support Fluid Space : Donation link
• Other transfeminist hackerspaces in France : Hacqueen

All of this kind of brings out the theme of the game jam in question : Resistance to technological violence - and, of course, permacomputing.

L'Impasse

The event took place over a week-end - we made a game for the Game Boy (for the permacomputing bit) inspired by the street in which Fluid Space is located, and the security camera present at the entrance of it. The playable character is a mutant cyborg figure with multiple points of view, the dead end, the monstrous, the dissident, the suspicious, the controlled, the monitored and the immune, the cockroach, the seagull, the rat, undesirable but resistant.

🪳 gogogogo play it : https://fluid-space.itch.io/limpasse

PERMACAB TEAM : 🪳 Misha Feuillet 🪳 Sasha Mattner 🪳 Circé Cherry Lac 🪳 Chloé Desmoineaux 🪳 Lorca Dvlg 🪳 alpha_rats 🪳 Bobby Brim 🪳 Jeanne Yuna

Bonus! hahaha

The french/german channel Arte showed up during the jam to film part of their Tracks episode about Permacomputing - Chloé Desmoineaux and myself appear in it :)

Links and things

• Inverted computer culture text : a thought experiment where "computing is something stereotypically practiced by old women"
• 100 rabbits - a duo building permacomputing tools and software