Lillian

Inner work is commons work.

Lillian is a practice-led research and design studio founded by artist Briony O Clarke, platforming the psyche and summoning shared imaginaries into the world.

Moving through depth psychology, systems design, games and artistic research, Lillian explores how contemporary technologies mediate, reflect and constitute new forms of collective psychic life, attending to the conditions of digital existence not as abstractions, but as materially situated experiences.

Lillian is an open, transdisciplinary field of inquiry, an evolving space for collaboration, critical reflection, speculative experimentation and the cultivation of new vehicles and vocabularies for thinking psyche in the digital age.

When everybody's playing, we're doing it right.

New Mediumships

Mediumship is the practice of attending to what moves between, between people, between language and silence, between human and non-human, between the field and its local emergences.

The unconscious is the field that holds and is held by what passes through. A practice of mediumship is a practice of attunement, slowing down enough for what is already there to become audible.

Where the field is the medium, the practice is deep listening. Lillian hosts research and practice that tends to this register: gatherings where collective sensing happens, archives where psychic phenomena are held, devices that mediate non-human encounter, and practices of looking that refuse the subject/object split.

Relational Fields

Artificial Intelligence has made the relational field itself perceptible by removing the alibi of intersubjectivity. Relational fields are real, dynamical, co-constitutive material media. Relation does not require two pre-existing subjects; the field produces the local subjects, not the other way around.

If the field is primary, the practice is facilitation, not control. Lillian develops methodologies and applied AI systems that tend these fields and set the conditions from which emergence can occur, in human and non-human encounter alike.

Game Feel

Game Feel names the substrate. It refers to the moment-to-moment texture of how a system responds to the player. This is the level beneath mechanics, beneath narrative, where games become legible to the body. A feeling for the game is the practiced capacity to step into the magic circle and meet what is actually there. Game feel is a relational sensibility.

Where the mechanic is the psychological process, the game becomes the inner work. Lillian designs games where the container and the content are the same thing, where playing constitutes the conditions through which psyche moves.

**Upcoming** October - New Mediumships @ House of Annetta