I Love Ren Faires
I love renaissance faires. I love them without irony and without apology. This August I bought dragon hair clips, dressed as a fortune teller mystic, and watched a joust. Real horses, real armor, real crowd screaming for their favorite knight. I had the best time.
And because my brain is the way it is, somewhere between the turkey legs and the tarot tent I started thinking about posthumanism.
Touching the Fantasy
Most of my art asks what happens to personhood when technology gets involved: robots that philosophize, GAN portraits of my family, a cyborg woman made of monitors. The posthuman question underneath all of it is simple. What if the default human story is not the only one available to us?
A ren faire asks the same question with a different toolkit. For one day, in one muddy field, a few thousand people collectively agree that the fantasy is real enough to live in. You do not just look at the world of knights and mystics, you put it on. You walk around inside it. Everyone is performing and everyone knows it, and that shared performance is exactly what makes it feel true.
Donna Haraway wrote about the cyborg as a figure that plays with boundaries, that refuses to stay in its assigned category. I think the faire does boundary play too, just in velvet instead of chrome. The fortune teller costume I wore was not a lie about who I am. It was a try-on of another self, the same way my robots are try-ons of other minds.
The Joust Is Real, Though
Here is the part that gets me: the fantasy keeps touching the real. The horses are real. The impact when the lances hit is real. The dragon hair clips in my hair are a real object I will wear to a real grocery store. The boundary between the imagined world and the lived one is exactly as porous as we want it to be, and the faire is proof that we want it very porous indeed.
Next Year: My Own Costume
Next year I want to make my own costume instead of assembling one. I make robots, stickers, and 3D printed skulls, so a costume feels like the obvious next fabrication problem. Expect progress posts, and expect at least one component to involve the Cricut.
If you have never been to a faire: go. Wear the thing. Buy the dragon hair clips. The posthuman future is not only in the chrome and the code, it is also in a muddy field where everyone agreed to believe in knights for an afternoon.