Gary Alan Fine (1983) wrote that understanding fantasy experiences has the potential of providing us with completely new types of meanings. Understanding fantasy becomes especially important in the field of consumer research, as the concept has been linked to the creation of individual and shared meaning (Penaloza 2001; Martin 2004), desires (Campbell 1987; Zizek 1997), as well as building communities (Kozinets 2002; Goulding et al. 2013) and individual identities (Schouten 1991; Belk and Costa 1998). In my research, I am exploring how consumers experience fantasy and how it is tied into their overall lives. I am conducting the research as ethnography in the context of live action roleplaying games with a focus on understanding embodied experiences from the consumer’s point of view.

While conducting research, I was finding it increasingly difficult to conceptualize my own experience and the experience of my informants using only verbal and textual tools. Emotion and intuition are central parts of fantasy experiences, and these are not always purely cognitive. I decided to try to paint what I was experiencing and how I wanted to theorize it. The process aided me immensely in understanding my data as well as in developing its interpretation and theorization.

As Csikszentmihalyi (1990) has described, painting can put one into a state of flow. Similarly, Collingwood (1938) has proposed the aesthetic process to allow us to step to the very edge of our knowledge and capabilities, pushing us to do more. As a result, creating art builds and develops our knowledge in ways we may be unable to do otherwise. The process of painting research has pushed me to think and deal with my work in different ways, opening possibilities for new meaning and perspective.
My submission to the CCT Gallery addresses a typology of fantasy experiences that has emerged in my data. Understanding and theorizing the different processes has been very difficult, and I have used drawing and painting to develop my own understanding of my data and its interpretation. More specifically, the work I am submitting has helped me understand my own and my informants’ experiences of fantasy, as well as how they differ on a more theoretical level.

My submission consists of two (2) paintings, which nonetheless create one work of art. Part one (see Painting 1) explores and aims to represent the more playful, leisurely experience of fantasy, which I have come to conclude to be set in the context. The finished work will thus stress the difference of surroundings and the similarity of self in them. Part two (see Painting 2) explores and aims to represent the more serious and reflexive experience of fantasy, which I have connected, in my analysis of data, to creating a difference in one’s self. Using hands as the central subject allows me tap into the first person point of view of the audience, pushing them to view the setting of the painting as if surrounding them. In this, I following Walton’s (1990) ideas of artworks creating make-believe parallel worlds, into which we can step into and take something away with us.

All in all, the role of the artwork in my research is twofold. Firstly, the artwork allows me better understand my own data and the theoretical constructs I am trying build within it. Secondly, it provides an opportunity to communicate my work to others in a new way and giving them an opportunity to engage with it on a more embodied and emotional level.

References

Belk, Russell W. and Janeen Arnold Costa (1998), “The Mountain Man Myth: A Contemporary Consuming Fantasy”, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 218-240.

Campbell, Colin (1987), The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1990), Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, New York, NY: HaperCollins.

Collingwood, R.G. (1938), The Principles of Art, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Fine, Gary Alan (1983), Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Goulding, Christina, Avi Shankar, and Robin Canniford (2013), “Learning to be Tribal: Facilitating the Formation of Consumer Tribes”, European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 47, No. 5/6, pp. 813-832.

Kozinets, Robert V. (2002), “Can Consumers Escape the Market? Emancipatory Illuminations from Burning Man”, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 20-38.

Martin, Brett A. S. (2004), “Using the Imagination: Consumer Evoking and Thematizing of the Fantastic Imaginary”, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 136-149.

Penaloza, Lisa (2001), “Consuming the American West: Animating Cultural Meaning and Memory at a Stock Show and Rodeo”, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 369-398.

Schouten, John W. (1991), “Selves in Transition: Symbolic Consumption in Personal Rites of Passage and Identity reconstruction”, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 412- 425.

Walton, Kendall L. (1990); Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Zizek, Slavoj (1997), The Plague of Fantasies, London, UK: Verso.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/24967