Look for the next infographic in coming weeks.
Animal Diplomacy Bureau (ADB) is about creating playful and non-confrontational means to get people thinking and talking about conservation within urban landscapes. The ultimate goal is to cultivate better human—animal relations through changing the way we think. This is a difficult task, because, before we can begin to think about changing our thoughts, we need people to consider how they think about animals in the first place. In our increasingly urban environments, animals are increasingly irrelevant. By moving into cities designed for humans, we have segregated ourselves both physically and mentally from wildlife. ADB bridges this divide through play.
Play is a way of reimagining our current realities and entertaining new values and concepts. In play we can begin to leave behind any assumptions about animals and where they should live and begin to imagine how cities may look if they were designed for both humans and animals equally. But, can play really influence us this much?
There was a game that went viral on social media not too long ago, called The Floor is Lava. This game directly affected human behavior in the real world. Whenever someone yelled “THE FLOOR IS LAVA!”, you had to jump onto the nearest raised surface to avoid getting burned by lava. It’s a totally ridiculous, and counterproductive premise. But, that didn’t matter because it’s just play! In play our minds can entertain and make real alternate worlds with different rules. What’s even more amazing is, that we create worlds together with other people. The Floor is Lava only worked if you had friends who also agreed, that at certain points in time THE FLOOR IS LAVA. Play is a cooperative way to imagine new worlds and affect reality. So, why don’t we play to imagine a world where the city is reclaimed for wildlife? Let’s become birds!
ADB created a series of mixed-reality games (Birds on the Grass) where players became birds and wandered the streets and parks of London to find food and survive. Players could choose to be one of three types of London birds: invasive Ring-Necked Parakeet, Great Tit or Peregrine Falcon. Players were given two tools, the Bird Song Compass and Bird Alert Network, both based on real bird behaviors. The Bird Song Compass allowed players to find food by triggering geocached bird songs at locations where food was hidden. The Bird Alert Network activated a bird warning song whenever the Peregrine Falcon was close by. With these tools, players had the information real birds have when they navigate our cities. Players not only became birds, but also began to think like birds.
Ultimately, the game translated Bird Reality into a way that humans can understand and feel empathy towards. It also allowed players to view their everyday surroundings differently. Streets, buildings, and parks took on different meanings when people became birds. When we begin think and see as birds, we start to understand how human action affects them. The games are a way of allowing people to think and draw their own conclusions about a serious but often sidelined topic, human—animal relations. As ridiculous as it may look, turning people into birds is a great way of getting them to spend half an hour of thinking about the world through animal eyes.
For ADB, play is the greatest form of diplomacy. As Thomas S. Henricks, a play theorist, wrote, “in play, people envision and enact the possibilities of living in their societies; and for that reason, play is an important agency for social and cultural change.”1 This is not to say, that people will change the way they think immediately after playing the games. What is important, however, is that people are given the chance to experience an alternative vision of the world and the freedom to think about its implications. There is no reason to force ideas or ideology onto a person, but it is important to be able to share ideas and talk about them. Play gives people the chance to do this in a non-confrontational way.
Each full session of Birds on the Grass ended with a chance for people to talk about their experiences as birds. The conversations were kickstarted by the question “What would the city look like if it were designed equally for humans and animals?” As players were ungainly bird people just minutes before, they continued to be playful, coming up with some fantastical ideas that put animals at the forefront. Among the topics talked about were the expansion of the Thames river into wetlands, the best city planning methods for animal city, and more. What was important was not the ideas, but the new ways of thinking people had begun to adopt. They were truly thinking through a multispecies lens. Each of these ideas were drawn into a series of Cities in collaboration with illustrator Ying-Chen Juan. They serve as a way to document the games and the how people are approaching the idea of a more animal inclusive city.
In all its silliness, play is a wonderful tool for diplomacy. Play is cooperative world building and future imagining. It’s a way of leveling the playing field and negotiating concepts and relationships between different people and animals alike. As the world continues on its current path, we need to be actively imagining and making real alternative futures towards a more stable and multi-species future. We need to understand our impact on species other than ourselves and to do this we need to change the way we think. Animal Diplomacy Bureau hopes that through games we can begin to think together and create more animal inclusive cities. ♦
1 Henricks, Thomas S., “Play as Self Realization: Toward a General Theory of Play,” Journal of Play, 6 (2014), 192–96.
(Image credits: All photos courtesy of Kaylene Kau. “Zoning City,” illustration by and courtesy Ying-Chen Juan.)
Games are designed by all kinds of people and can take many different forms. The festival of independent games known as IndieCade has been finding a way to celebrate the innovations of independent game developers since 2005.
Read the transcript.
PLAY is creativity at work.
PLAY is growth.
PLAY is for everyone.
PLAY is contagious laughter.
PLAY is rebellious.
PLAY for learning.
PLAY is open.
PLAY today.
PLAY soothes.
PLAYfull.
PLAY is no parents.
PLAY is _______________.
Visitors respond to the PLAYTIME manifesto in the gallery. What’s your take on the MANIFESTO?
#PEMplaytime
Round 2: Meaning
Christine Wong Yap, Answerer
Christine draws the Question Card, “What makes you feel meaning?”
I really like having a sense of purpose. I guess that it’s kind of a good and a bad thing to be achievement-oriented. I also really enjoy activities that give me flow experiences, the way I can lose myself in an activity that’s challenging enough that my skills are fully involved. For me, that’s often art practice, but at the same time it is really meaningful for me to see people engaging my work. To see them participate and see the interaction have an emotional resonance—that is really important to me because my work often begins with a feeling. To see people integrate that in their own experience is really cool.
Torreya Cummings, Concretizer
You were talking about your work being meaningful to other people… I feel that in a lot of the work that I do, I would like that to happen. I never really know if it’s doing that or not, but I have, a few times… I think I was at an opening at Yerba Buena Center and somebody came up to me and said, “Hey, I have your art on my phone…” and she shows me a picture of my work in a show I had done. She was like, “I saw this, and it was really exciting.” I didn’t know what to say in that moment, but I was also tremendously grateful that she had picked up the signal.
Part of the reason that I make art is to connect with people. I hope that….in the way that other people’s art has affected my life for the better, or made the world a better place for me to be in—I want that to happen….
With my project at the Oakland Museum (Notes on “Camp”), I received emails about it from people who said, “Hey, I like to spend time in there.” It’s nice to get that feeling: “Oh, OK, the work is doing what I wanted it to do.” Sometimes you don’t really know, unless somebody tells you.
Malcolm Peacock, Tactician
Malcolm draws the Tactic Card, “Find the pattern.”
I am going to interpret that as: Find the pattern between the last two responses. I think the pattern is glaring. Regardless of the type of practice that you have, if you end up caring about the work, the pattern is the desire to connect to people and express.
I think the flaw with a lot of interpretations of people’s practices, or the work, or the success of their work (I am in school right now doing my Master’s) is that there is a construct around how the success is contingent upon the communication of an idea or feeling to the audience (with some sets of tools that were created by the maker). I actually I think it is a really flawed way to evaluate or to think about art. At the end of the day, I think the strongest thing is the pattern that most people, most artists—whether they are in the studio, or having conversations, or whatever the mode of making is—are really just trying to do what Nicole Eisenman talks about in painting, what Chris Ofili talks about in painting, what EJ Hill talks about in performance, what Ralph Lemon talks about in choreography and dance. They’re interested in making work to communicate an emotion or thought to a group of people (in order reach people, in order to communicate) to find and locate their own position in the world.
Ronny Quevedo, Summarizer
The question was, “What makes you feel meaning?” I think, for a lot of people, that translated to how they feel meaningful. Christine was talking about having a clear sense of purpose within the work, and that being reflected in how her skill-set could match the task at hand. She finds meaning in work when people have a very clear experience with the project.
Then Torreya was talking about a specific example at Yerba Buena where someone told her that she had a photo of one of her works and that really flattered her and made her feel better, because someone had really understood what the project was about, or at least appreciated it. That was one thing that resurfaced: that idea of connecting to people and how a good response from somebody really brings it full circle. You never know the success or the impact of the work until people respond to it.
With regards to the tactic card about finding the pattern, Malcolm started talking about the overall desire to connect to people that was in everybody’s response and the idea that the success of the work of art is contingent to understanding the meaning of the maker, and how that can be flawed and very fragile in some instances. He referenced several artists like Ralph Lemon and Chris Ofili, who want to find their position in the world. For the artists he cited, that’s the most effective way of feeling success in a work of art. It reaches people and they can locate their position using the artwork as a reference.
Inter/De-pen-dence game play, Round Three: Receiving Support, will post next week—come back and play along!
KEEP AWAY (FROM CARBS)
Number of players: 1
Description of gameplay: Haven’t you heard? Carbohydrates are the things that make you unhealthy now. Keep Away (From Carbs) constitutes a player’s ongoing attempts to avoid eating delicious starches and sugars.
Game ends when…: The player wins when he or she develops six-pack abs, but the game resets to zero any time the player eats a bowl of spaghetti in the dark. Winning this game is also losing, paradoxically, because cake is delicious.
Missed last week’s game? Find it here. Look for the latest installments of Games Adults Play in the coming weeks.
What makes play play? Many of the actions performed during play are the same as those performed in non-playful situations, yet we are often able to recognize intuitively the playful version as play. A year-old infant may swing a hammer, but compared to an adult, their prowess is clumsy, misdirected, and ineffective. Given that we mostly associate play with young animals, what we regard as “play” may simply be an artifact of immaturity. The problem is that “play” looks playful even when adults are performing the actions that we perceive as playful. Consider adult Japanese monkeys collecting stones, then banging them on the ground, rubbing them together, throwing them in the air, and so on. They look no different to the same actions performed with stones by immature monkeys (figure 1). There is something about playful engagement that is distinctive.
Long-time play researcher Gordon Burghardt puzzled over this problem for years and eventually pulled together all the elements that different observers had noted into a cohesive framework. According to Burghardt, for a behavior to be considered as play, five criteria need to be met.1 For example, consider the difference in the actions of a young child using a spoon to feed himself/herself versus when he/she is using a spoon playfully. When eating, the spoon is used to pick up food and deliver it to the mouth, so that the actions are clearly functional in relation to ingesting food. In contrast, the same actions when performed in play may not lead to such a functional outcome; rather, the spoon may be used to pick up food or some other item, but then, as it is brought to the mouth, may be flung past the right ear. That is, the actions in play are incompletely functional in the context expressed (criterion 1). When eating, the movements are adjusted to facilitate delivery of food to the mouth, as the ingestion of food is what rewards the actions.
In contrast, during play, the lifting, moving and flinging of the spoon are rewards onto themselves. That is, the actions in play are performed voluntarily and are self-rewarding (criterion 2). When eating, the successful delivery of food from plate to mouth constrains how the spoon can be moved. In contrast, during play, the spoon can be moved willy-nilly. That is, the movements are modified from how they are performed in the functional context (criterion 3). When eating, movements that are rewarded by a successful outcome—such as picking up food or bringing food to the mouth—may be repeated over and over as long as the food lasts or the child remains hungry. In contrast, during play, movements that are irrelevant to any such functional outcome, such as flinging the spoon past the right ear, may be repeated again and again, although the speed and exact trajectory may vary from case to case. That is, during play, movements may be performed repeatedly, but not necessarily in an invariant form (criterion 4). Finally, when eating, especially if the child is very hungry, or offered food they like very much, a sudden noise may have little effect other than cause a momentary distraction. In contrast, during play, a sudden noise or some other scary intrusion may lead to a complete cessation of the play and hunger is likely to lead to seeking food rather than for opportunities to play. That is, play is initiated and maintained when the subject is healthy, relatively unstressed and in a secure environment (criterion 5).
This criterion-based definition of play has had some revolutionary consequences. the most dramatic of which has been to find that not only the mammals with which we are most familiar, such as dogs, cats, monkeys, and, of course, people, can produce behavior that fulfill these criteria, but also some birds, reptiles, fish, insects, and octopus do (figures 2, 3, and 4). Across a diverse range of species on the tree of life that encompasses the Animal Kingdom, nature has thrown up animals that can produce the qualitatively distinctive behavior that can be recognized as play.
This drags us away from our self-centered view of play—a property of humans and some other animals that are human-like—to one recognizing that play is a recurrent feature of life more generally. Another consequence of Burghardt’s definition is that it makes clear that play is not about what is done, but how it is done! This ‘doing’ side of play becomes most glaringly evident in its social expressions, such as when two young children playfully wrestle one another to ground. ‘Rough-and-tumble’ play like this exaggerates the actions performed, ensuring that the partner perceives them as playful. How this is achieved has been well documented in non-human animals.
Rough-and-tumble play
One of the most common forms of social play in the Animal Kingdom is rough-and-tumble play or play fighting. In such play, partners may compete to bite one another, as in aggression, or mount or groom one another as in sex and social bonding. The playful versions of such encounters can be distinguished by the rules that govern the actions that are strung together. During the initial phases of sexual encounters the male attempts to nuzzle the female’s nape as a prelude to mounting and copulating. Now consider two rats engaging in play fighting. They too compete for access to the nape of their partner’s neck, which if contacted is gently nuzzled with the snout. The same actions occur during the initial phases of sexual encounters when the male attempts to nuzzle the female’s nape. In play fights, the competition for the nape is repeated, often to exhaustion, without ever leading to copulation. Thus, while the rules for mating allow a copulatory ending, those for play fighting do not. We can derive further rules of play by considering the dynamics of an actual interaction between two rats.
Two juvenile male rats are shown engaging in a play fight in figure 5 starting with the rat on the left approaching from the rear (a) and pouncing towards the nape of its partner’s neck (b).2 However, before contact is made, the defender rotates around the longitudinal axis of its body (c) to face its attacker (d). As the attacker moves forward, the defender is pushed onto its side (e), but then rolls over onto its back as the attacker continues to reach for its nape (f–h). From the supine position, the defender launches an attack towards its partner’s nape (i), but is blocked by its partner’s hind foot (j, k). Following another attempt to gain access to its partner’s nape, the rat on top is pushed off (l) by the supine animal’s hind feet (m), which thus enables the original defender to regain its footing (n) and lunge to attack its partner’s nape (o).
Two important facts about play fighting emerge from this sequence, a sequence that is mirrored in the play of a diversity of animals, from wasps, parrots, dogs, and monkeys to people. First, note that the rats are actively countering attacks with defensive maneuvers. That is, they are actively competing to gain access to the play target, in this case, the nape. Second, the rat that was initially attacked eventually manages to push off its attacker, and launch its own attack. That is, there is a role reversal. Unlike serious fighting, during play fighting, not only are the animals competing, but they are also cooperating. Sometimes the cooperation present in play fighting, which facilitates role reversals, can be very dramatic.
Although there are species differences in how cooperation is injected into play, it is a necessary element of engaging in play. In the rat, the obvious advantage for one partner standing on top of its supine partner is that it can use its paws to restrain the movements of its partner and so block counterattacks (see f–k in figure 5). In order to use its forepaws effectively, and to make any necessary, accompanying shifts of body weight with its upper trunk, the rat on top stands with at least one of its hind feet on the ground; this provides a solid base of support for its upper body movements. By anchoring its body weight on its hind feet, the rat standing on top has considerable stability and so can maintain a high degree of control over both its own movements and those of its supine partner. However, rats will sometimes do something seemingly stupid when on top during play: they stand on their supine partners with all four of their limbs (figure 6).3 When they do this, they have less control over their own movements, and a reduced ability to restrain their partner’s movements. Indeed, role reversals skyrocket from thirty percent when in the anchored position to over seventy percent when in the unanchored position. That is, the rat with the advantage handicaps itself, making it easier for its play partner to gain the upper hand. There are species differences in how cooperation is injected into play, but without some way of injecting a cooperative aspect into playful interactions, they fall apart.
Recall your own childhood experiences. Imagine engaging in play fighting with a partner that always gains the upper hand, or one that you always dominate – both are boring play partners. A partner over whom you can gain the advantage—at least sometimes—and who makes it a challenge to do so, provides a much more satisfying experience, an experience worth repeating again and again. For example, my only brother is six years older than me so that when I was at the height of eagerness to engage in play fighting, between eight and eleven years old, he was already past it. Moreover, he was bigger and stronger so most of my attempts to engage him in play were rebuffed or ended with me being pinned to the ground. Not much fun! Still, he wasn’t past the occasional fun wrestle so, on occasion, not only did he respond to my overtures, but he let me gain the advantage, even if only momentarily. The allure of an occasional play fight, and one that I had at least an outside chance of winning kept me coming back for more. Even though most attempts ended in the same way, the fact that any particular instance did not have a predictable outcome, made continued attempts to play with my brother all the more exciting. In this regard, I am no different to the rats and other animals discussed earlier. It is the assurance of a well-rehearsed routine interspersed with the frisant of unpredictability that makes play enjoyable.
How the brain produces play and how the brain benefits from play
Both casual observation and systematic scientific research show that play is at its most frequent and exuberant in animals with the biggest brains. When comparing the brains of mammalian animals like us with other species, we see that the biggest size differences in brain size are in the anterior regions of the brain, the cortical hemispheres (figure 7). This is the large, greyish folded tissue that would be exposed if the top of your skull were removed. Animals with an enlarged cortex tend to be more playful. However, surprisingly, juvenile rats that have had their cortex removed at birth are just as playful as their siblings with an intact cortex. They play as frequently, perform all the same actions, have the same percentage of role reversals and show the typical age-related pattern of waxing and waning in the frequency with which they play. To understand this seeming paradox, we need to know some neural and behavioral details about play.
Decades of work from various laboratories have revealed the network of neural circuits that are necessary to generate play. Some of the circuits that are activated are necessary for making play enjoyable, some select the actions to be performed during play, and others still are necessary to ensure that play remains reciprocal. Importantly, all the necessary structures comprising these circuits lay beneath the cerebral cortices and hence are not visible from an outside view of the brain (as in figure 7). While play is generated and maintained by this network of subcortical structures (i.e., beneath the cortex), the cortex is not inactive during play. The nerve cells of various parts, especially the prefrontal cortex, are activated.
This area of the cortex is known as the “executive brain,” receiving information from the rest of the cortex and having many reciprocal connections, including to subcortical systems that are critical for planning and implementing actions and for regulating emotion. Rats reared without peers during their juvenile period (from weaning to the onset of sexual maturity) exhibit a range of social, emotional, and cognitive deficits that implicate changes in the functioning of the prefrontal cortex. A particularly noteworthy function of the prefrontal cortex is impulse control. In humans, an example of impulse control would be the ability to count to ten before responding to someone’s insult. Rats that have not had play experiences with peers as juveniles over- or underreact to threats and fail to plan or execute a strategy that solves a social problem. They can execute all the rat-typical behavior, but appear to be deficient in modifying the timing and vigor of the behavior that is executed. Indeed, damage to areas of the prefrontal cortex in adult rats produces deficiencies similar to those seen in rats with intact brains, but which have been deprived of peer play as juveniles.
The photographs in figure 8 show what a neuron, a nerve cell, in the prefrontal cortex looks like. There is a central cell body, a long extension—called a dendrite—from which thin branches radiate, much like limbs on a tree. From those thin branches, smaller extensions known as spines receive chemical signals from other neurons. The complexity of the branching and the density of these spines allow neurons to form the many connecting networks that produce and regulate thoughts, feelings, and actions (figure 8). When damaged, the prefrontal cortex does not disable the animal’s ability to execute species-typical behavior; instead, the damage leads to a deficiency in contextually modifying that behavior to correspond with the identity and behavior of a partner.
The behavioral experiences provided by a normal peer compared to those provided by a relatively non-playful partner are revealing as to how these may influence the development of the prefrontal cortex. Rats reared over the juvenile period with a relatively non-playful partner have, as adults, deficiencies in such contextual modulation and atypical development of the anatomy of the prefrontal cortex. These changes in social experience affect the normal development of the neurons of the prefrontal cortex—altering the complexity of the neuronal structures involved in interneuronal communication. How do such changes come about?
The normal juvenile initiates more play with such a partner and has as many playful interactions as does a juvenile with a playful peer, but there is an important difference. With a non-playful partner, the juvenile experiences fewer opportunities to gain the advantage and then to relinquish that advantage by self-handicapping itself (as in figure 6), and so giving the partner an opportunity to reverse roles. That is, the juvenile engages in just as much play, but that play does not offer the opportunity to make social decisions about when to withhold its advantage. When a rat self-handicaps itself, it essentially relinquishes control over its own body, creating unpredictable conditions. Not overreacting to loss of control, coping with unpredictability and deciding on socially appropriate actions are all requirements on the performer when engaging in normal play fighting with a peer. The experiences generated call upon the skills associated with the prefrontal cortex, training this brain area to become more adaptable in an unpredictable world. So, although the cortex may not be necessary for generating play, the cortex, especially the prefrontal cortex, benefits from the experiences generated during play.4
Read on with the second half of Sergio Pellis’s piece on the uses of play for children and adults tomorrow.
1 Gordon M. Burghardt, The Genesis of Animal Play (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
2 Sergio M. Pellis and Vivien C. Pellis,”Play-fighting differs from serious fighting in both target of attack and tactics of fighting in the laboratory rat Rattus norvegicus,” Aggressive Behavior 13 (1987): 227–242.
3 Afra Foroud and Sergio M. Pellis, “The development of ‘roughness’ in the play fighting of rats: A Laban Movement Analysis perspective,” Developmental Psychobiology 42 (2003): 35–43. See also Sergio Pellis and Vivien C. Pellis, The Playful Brain: Venturing to the Limits of Neuroscience (Oxford, UK: Oneworld Press, 2009), to place these actions in a broader comparative context.
4 For further reading, see Sergio M. Pellis, Vivien C. Pellis, and Brett T. Himmler, “How play makes for a more adaptable brain: A comparative and neural perspective,” American Journal of Play 7 (2014): 73–98; L. J. M. J. Vanderschuren and Viviana Trezza, “What the laboratory rat has taught us about social play behavior: Role in behavioral development and neural mechanisms,” Current Topics in Behavioral Neuroscience 16 (2014), 189–212.
(Image credits: Nick Cave performers at the Peabody Essex Museum. © PEM. Two Japanese monkeys playing, courtesy of Jean-Baptiste Leca, University of Lethbridge. Octopus engaged in object play, courtesy of Michael Kuba, Max Planck Institute for Brain Science, Frankfurt. A soft-shelled turtle and a Komodo dragon engaged in object play, courtesy of Gordon Burghardt, University of Tennessee. Drawings of two juvenile male rats engaged in a play fight, reproduced from Sergio Pellis and Vivien C. Pellis, “Play-fighting differs from serious fighting in both target of attack and tactics of fighting in the laboratory rat Rattus norvegicus,” Aggressive Behavior 13 (1987), courtesy of Wiley. Drawing of a rat standing on its partner with all four paws, redrawn from illustration in A. Foroud and Sergio Pellis, “The development of ‘roughness’ in the play fighting of rats: A Laban Movement Analysis perspective,” Developmental Psychobiology 42 (2003), with permission from Wiley. Dendrite images, courtesy of Bryan Kolb of the University of Lethbridge.)
The questions in Inter/de-pend-ence are derived from Yap’s “Artists’ Personal Impacts Survey,” which explored the positive psychological benefits of art practice. We first created the game as a screenprinted edition in 2016, and have included variations on the artists’ survey questions for general audiences as well.
How do we support each other? How and when do we ask for support? How does this empower us to move from competition toward collaboration, from scarcity toward generosity?
Holding space for meaningful conversation requires time, patience, and listening. We believe that with intention, reflection, and interdependence, we can each shape the world we want to participate in.
In conjunction with PlayTime, you can interact with Inter/de-pend-ence in three ways:
— Make your own version: Download the free PDF of Inter/de-pend-ence to print, cut, and play.
— Draw from the online card decks, made with the help of the Peabody Essex Museum.
— Read how four artists played the game. We invited interdisciplinary, socially-engaged artists from around the country to play with us (many had never met each other before). We’re posting transcripts of their gameplay weekly, round by round. This is the first of six entries—you can read Round One below.
How the Game Is Played
In Rounds One through Five, players assume a role and follow these steps:
First, the Answerer (indicated by a question mark on the card) draws a Question Card and responds. The Question Cards are based on a survey Christine conducted to learn how art practices can impacts artists personally and positively; in our game, variations for artists are optional.
Second, the Concretizer (indicated by a cinder block on the card) shares a specific example from their own experience.
Third, the Tactician (indicated by a lightning bolton the card) draws a Tactic Card and uses it as a prompt to give and interpretive response. Tactics cards were inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidts’ Oblique Strategies, a set of cards for breaking creative blocks by encouraging lateral thinking. They are intentionally oblique—there is no right or wrong way to respond.
Fourth, the Summarizer (indicated by a droplet on the card) summarizes the responses from each round.
Between rounds, players switch roles.
In Round Six, players take turns sharing their observations on the gameplay, such as noting common themes or subjective challenges.
Meet the Players
We invited three artists to play the game via video chat one afternoon in December. What follows is the transcription edited for clarity and concision. In addition to our invited players, Sarrita Hunn facilitated the game and Christine Wong-Yap was the fourth player.
Torreya Cummings is a visual artist in Oakland, CA. Her work is project based, and includes installations, photographs, videos, and performances. This work usually relates to notions of time, fiction, and place, and how these narratives shape and are in turn shaped by identity. Cummings also works in a collaboration called Shipping + Receiving, and was a member of the curatorial committee at Southern Exposure (SF) for several years. Cummings large-scale video installation project Notes from “Camp” is on view at the Oakland Museum of California through May 2018.
Malcolm Peacock is an artist and runner living in New Brunswick, New Jersey. His work centers the lived experiences of Black individuals and groups. His work is committed to exploring and expressing his fascination of the potentiality of Black lives in order to question and contemplate who we have been, who we are, and who we may be in the world. Access to arts engagement for people with disabilities is also a major part of his life. He is a 2016 Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant nominee and has received fellowships from Mason Gross School of the Arts, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Ronny Quevedo has exhibited nationally and internationally at the Queens Museum; The Drawing Center; The Bronx Museum of the Arts; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Emerson Gallery (Germany), among others. Upcoming exhibitions include Pacha, LLacta, Wasichay: Building the Indigenous Present at Whitney Museum of American Art. He is a recipient of the A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art and Queens Museum/Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists. He received his MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2013 and BFA from The Cooper Union in 2003.
Round One: Collaboration
Torreya Cummings, Answerer
Torreya draws the Question Card: “In what ways do you collaborate with others/on art projects?”
There are a couple of ways, maybe more … I have a collaborative, collective side project called Shipping + Receiving, which is me and two other people. We usually do one project a year. I think it is more of a true collaboration—versus the other kinds of collaborative work I do—because there’s no originator. It’s mixed up. We have a conversation, and then somebody starts laughing, and then: “Oh, we could do this …” or “Oh, it’d be better if we did this …” If we are all just laughing hysterically, we say: “OK, this is something we actually need to figure out how to do.” We really don’t have defined roles. We work together pretty organically.
The other kind of collaboration I’ll do is if I have a performance project. Then it’s more of a director role. So I ask people if they want to participate, give them an outline, and, usually, give them instructions. Then through following those instructions, things emerge that I couldn’t have planned for. But that is a scenario where it’s my project, and other people are participating in it. I’m setting the stage and letting the action emerge from that.
Otherwise, like with the glove project, I just asked everybody I knew for worn-out work gloves, and then that formed the piece.
Malcolm Peacock, Concretizer
When Torreya mentions giving a general overview or impetus for a project to a bunch of people, that is when you are setting the stage for them to partake in the project or experience. In early June this year, I was in Richmond, Virginia, where I used to live. I went back there to work on a project at the location where I first started making performative or experiential-based works. In revisiting that site, I wanted to work with the people that had given me objects that I carried through the slave show that I had attached to my body. But the second time, instead of having them be implemented in the piece through a physical object, like a stand-in, I really wanted them to have a bigger part, a more integral role in the process, from start to finish. I presented them with a project I wanted to make about liberation, through looking at the Gabriel Prosser Rebellion, the largest failed rebellion in the South that ended in his and thirty-six other people’s deaths. What ended up happening was that there was much more openness in the project. It wasn’t so confined to: “You must give me an object that means X, Y, Z to you.” It was more: “Can you describe the most liberating experiences you have had while living in Richmond, Virginia?” That left the project way more open, with everyone understanding they could overrule consensus or the impetus of the work. My role became more like “organizer,” losing a little of a role of “director,” and integrating everyone at the same level.
Ronny Quevedo, Tactician
Ronny draws the Tactics Card, “Make it more positive.”
I’m thinking about making collaboration more positive … and I don’t know how effective that would actually be—because I feel like if you’re trying to make something more positive, at some moment it was negative, or you’re not happy with it. So positivity, in certain cases, is really projections of what people find to be positive. … Collaboration can sometimes deal with really serious contexts, and sometimes it’s not necessarily about creating a positive space, but how to discuss ideas.
Christine Wong Yap, Summarizer
Torreya had three examples that you could see as three levels of collaboration. One is clear, a “true” collaboration. She talked about how if you’re doing an idea and you’re laughing a lot, that’s one way you know you’re on the right path. Then there’s another type of collaboration, where you’re the director, and you invite people to do something that is your own art project—you have authorship. But then in giving them instructions, sometimes they improvise and new things can emerge. And then there is another way of collaborating, where the contributions are more minimal. The participants give their gloves and then Torreya transforms them into a different kind of sculpture, so the interaction is fairly limited.
Malcolm gave an example which spoke to the three layers, and he talked about moving from a lower tier of, “You give me this contribution,” to a more open-ended and dynamic tier. His example was a site-specific project located at the largest failed slave rebellion in Virginia. He ultimately ended up asking people to talk about liberation. So rather than just reflecting on something and then handing over an object, there was more open-ended dialogue.
Ronny’s tactic was, “Make it more positive.” But he was saying that’s kind of a weird question, because it assumes that it’s not positive enough to begin with, or is somehow lacking. I think all these examples are pretty positive already, so maybe that’s a reason why it’s hard to make it more positive.
Inter/De-pen-dence game play, Round Two: Meaning will post next week—come back and play along!
The number of stars may be infinite; the number of beans to be used is fixed. There will be ten. They are dried and hard but their color and relation to symmetry can vary. They are lima, they are pinto; they are kidney; they are coffee and chili. They are any one of several dozen kinds of beans that might be easily acquired and deployed in this test of skill. There is nothing particular about any one choice, only that the bean exhibit a beanly essence; a beanness, so to speak. This farinaceous seed is to be pressed into non-edible service, as beans often are in bean bags, bean bag chairs, or as bingo beans, counting beans, or metaphorically, bean counters, bean balls, or the beans one might be full of or spill depending on metabolic or moral inclination. A literal bean counter provides each contestant with ten and, after confirming the number, assessing the shape and aerodynamic character of the bean, she turns her attention to an upright milk bottle placed four to five feet away.
The bean will be aimed and launched with the intention of entering the mouth of the bottle and thereby scoring a single point. Much whooping may attend the successful accomplishment of this task. The excitement is likely to build if a contestant continues to—over that distance of four to five feet—pitch beans into the container. It is possible though, that a player or two or three will attempt to distract the bean thrower, to disturb their concentration and calculation as they prepare their toss. The devilry flaunted by poor sports is a sad testament to the growing lack of respect for bean-based competitions. A few of the more typical tactics include: standing close to the bean thrower and shouting loudly about the decades-old government conspiracy to make Americans increasingly docile by the manipulation of daylight savings time; standing close after having doused oneself in lighter fluid and holding a lit match; kneeling behind the bottle begging the Lord of Hosts to visit locusts upon the home of the thrower; and stripping bare, painting the extremities blue, and gyrating to Joe Turner’s song “Flip, Flop and Fly” directly in the thrower’s line of sight.
While distracting, these methods are not the worst witnessed. There is a report of one competitor asking another if she has ever brought owls to Athens; another details an individual who quietly wept in his car in the parking lot outside the game emporium and thereby disconcerted arriving players; and even more shocking is an instance when a contestant advanced an anti-Copernican argument with the fervor of a Jehovah’s Witness who is under quota for converts and being threatened with transfer to a neighborhood where “Armed Response” signs are visible on many lawns. The thrower in that case sent all ten of their beans so wide of the mark that several passersby came under the impression that a burrito had burst in the vicinity. The bounds of propriety and fair play were irretrievably crossed and all the competitors in that match were inconsolable for days afterward. They spoke of anger-soaked dreams in which anthropomorphic planets took turns reciting Moody Blues lyrics.
Such behavior was not what Bean Bottle Throw, Bean Drop, Bean Shooting, Beanbag Three-Two-One, Quincunx Bean, or any of the multifarious family of bean-to-target endeavors was ever meant to incite. Rather, the sport was designed to reward skill and engender pleasure. These antics pervert that goal, diminish its players and fans, and ultimately denigrate the blameless bean itself. Observe the bean when thrown; its rotational progress to-ward its goal should inspire us. The bean may be small, may be merely a seed, but the bean moves through space with a purposeful yet insouciant grace. Know the bean, know its longing for the bottle, for a place within. ♦
Missed earlier stories? Find them here, here, and here.
(Image credit: Lewis Hine, Pitching Pennies, Providence, RI, 1912–13. Courtesy Library of Congress.)
Cory Arcangel is known, among other things, for his work that consists of modified video games. In the PlayTime exhibition, we can see two of his video game hacks, reinventing the rules and resituating the expected outcomes of play. Trevor Smith, curator of PlayTime, suggests that while “sports video games allow us to bowl or shoot hoops without ever having to get off the couch,” that “professional athletes are so good at what they do that the extraordinary often appears effortless, which is why it’s really, really fun to watch them fail. So when Arcangel reprograms the game to have Shaq throw nothing but bricks, it’s like watching an extended sports blooper reel.”
Challenging expectations has been one of the key themes of the exhibition. Arcangel was the subject of a New Yorker profile in 2011 in which he explained he wasn’t a gamer, even though the games works are what made his name in the art world. “We had an Atari early on, but we never had a Nintendo. I’d watch my friends play when I went to their houses, but that’s it. I think that’s why my pieces are about watching, not interacting.”
When fellow artist Mary Heilman interviewed him that same year he said she wondered whether the artists behind Super Mario ever looked at Georgia O’Keeffe paintings. Arcangel responds, “I feel like it’s possible. Those games aren’t art objects, but they came out of culture. I always assumed those graphics were influenced by Pop art. At least that was always my interest in those graphics. They are so simple. I thought, Oh, I could put this in a gallery and people would probably think it was art.”
More recently, Arcangel spoke with curator Venus Lau for Ocula about his company Arcangel Surfware, which makes everything from fidget spinners to sweatpants to books: “A lot of these things I am making do not present themselves as this kind of revelation; they present themselves as almost a kind of borderline, or an insult or something, in order to create a grand monument. Our electronic lives are so silly. We are surrounded by all this junk! That’s the energy I am after. That’s ridiculous.” We’ve heard you can also find Arcangel on Are.na, an artist-designed social network.
Defying expectations (as revealed repeatedly throughout this 2015 New Yorker profile) brings us to Mark Bradford and his piece for the PlayTime exhibition, Practice (which he discusses the making of here). Bradford’s height (he’s 6’8″) has always led people to assume he pursued basketball (he actually worked in his mother’s hair salon). Curator Trevor Smith explains, “Bradford plays with both career expectations and gender norms by wearing a hoop skirt to practice basketball. The flowing skirt gets in the way of dribbling and trips him up as he drives for the basket. It’s a way for him to create an image of tension between appearance and desire.” In his (Practice-related) photographic piece Pride of Place, the artist once again dons the Lakers hoop skirt and engages in an indelicate choreography that challenges racial, sexual, and gender norms.
Last spring, Bradford represented the United States at the 2017 Venice Biennale and, in the fall, he debuted a new work at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. He spoke with art critic Carolina A. Miranda of the Los Angeles Times in February about his most recent paintings, which employ comic books as media: “I read comics as a kid. Marvel. Archie. Superman. Batman. Wonder Woman. The classics. All the movies you see now. Comic books are always about the meta. The archetype of this or the archetype of that. It’s civilization on steroids — and so it kind of fit with this moment. Everything is exaggerated. That’s what we’re living. . . . Plus, the colors in comic books are pow, kabow! They’re more in your face. They are these epic landscapes that you fall into, but they are also a grid. It’s just boxes. And they are these grids and grids and bubbles. If you abstract it, it’s like a Mondrian. It’s this art historical grid that goes back to Euclid — you know, back in the day.”
Check in next week for a new roundup of the latest play news and stories.
(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, Switzerland.)
PLAY is thinking! a means to an end.
PLAY is a way to communicate.
PLAY is healing.
PLAY is a day without a schedule.
PLAY is forgetting your obligations.
PLAY is being a child forever.
PLAY is being yourself.
PLAY is Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor.
PLAY is freeing.
PLAY is ritual.
PLAY is laughter.
PLAY is _______________.
Visitors respond to the PLAYTIME manifesto in the gallery. What’s your take on the MANIFESTO?
#PEMplaytime
PEM’s resident neuroscientist, Tedi Asher, writes in an upcoming PlayTime post: “We are all driven to play. We are motivated to solve the problems that keep us from winning games, completing puzzles, or scoring points. Yet, explaining this is difficult, as play is often characterized as an act without purpose …. Researchers are now harnessing this robust and universal motivation to play to treat patients suffering from psychiatric disorders.”
What if part of a surgeon’s credentials had to include his or her high score in Sonic Mania?
Research scientist Janelle Shane trained a neural network to create names for Dungeons & Dragons spells.
Can games extend your life span? Gamer and video game advocate Jane McGonigal thinks so.
Should video games replace textbooks? This former gaming company executive wants to “bring a more modern experience into the classroom.” You decide.
Turning Alzheimer’s research into a crowdsourced game. It’s “hardly Candy Crush,” but there is optimism.
Check in next week for a new roundup of the latest play news and stories.
(Image credit: Photo courtesy Dirk Schaefer via Flickr.)
