E.T.A.'s anti-spectation pedagogy: "it's never about being seen," the statue, the machine

texture · 11 Nov YDAU

• When: 11 Nov YDAU (2009), the Hal–Stice exhibition match watched by "Helen Steeply"
• What: The thematic inverse of the Entertainment, voiced at the school JOI founded. DeLint's creed to the journalist: E.T.A. trains kids "to see" and to forget "being seen," to "get lost in something bigger than them" so the Show — the entertainment-machine of audiences that "chew" performers into "statues" — "won't fuck them up." "It's never about being seen. It's never." That the founder of a temple to anti-spectation made, as his last act, the most captivating spectation-object imaginable is the thread's deep irony; Steeply, hunting the Entertainment, notes only that "it was unlikely that any one game figured much in the Entertainment." See the JOI timeline (E.T.A. founding); the samizdat/usous threads (Steeply's hunt).