Abstract ‘… at the core of a magic performance is interaction: it cannot be performed alone.’ (Nardi 1984, 26)

Situated rites are based on an awareness of the interrelatedness of everything; they operate in specifically defined fields of action and concern effect. Designing artistic research can be understood as a practice of effecting actions by situating rites.

Joots Suite is an artistic workshop that enables players to co-construct epistemic worlds within which they may situate the actions they desire. Groups of players modify a blank Paris Pattern deck, using it as an independent infrastructure for establishing and practising their conceptual world (“worlding”).

Before play begins, each group designs a local suit system wherein Minor Arcana stand for key dimensions of artistic research practice. This foregrounds polylocal knowledge systems: each group devises a minor research language of its own, enacting how concepts may be standardised or marginalised. Players then create Major Arcana cards that enact meta-method moves such as forbidding particular methods or enforcing stakeholder co-design. Major Arcana function as tools for establishing epistemic sovereignty over what counts as legitimate knowledge.

Play proceeds through dealing, bidding, and narrating melds (artistic research designs) that must withstand adversarial peer review. Review criteria are collectively negotiated, dramatising how such evaluative regimes are socially constructed. A forced jootsing phase, where players must swap cards and redesign their methods, explores how conceptual worlds are altered by shifts in infrastructure, access, and control.

The game ends with a house-rule negotiation: each group writes one new rule designed to joots the game itself. If two or more groups play simultaneously, Joots Suite concludes with a brief exposition of the cards and house rules jootsed into existence by each group.