Avatars are increasingly a part of the digital landscape. How do they (or don’t they) describe the person behind the screen? The PlayTime avatar interactive and game explores just this.
Several of the PlayTime artists—Nick Cave, Paul McCarthy, Angela Washko, Gwen Smith—dress up and disguise themselves or their subjects to explore identity, gender, and environment in order to move fluidly between analog and digital environments. Inspired by how they try on different selves, the avatar interactive and game—available to visitors in the PlayTime exhibition and now online—offers players the opportunity to design their own avatar and to consider how people represent themselves digitally versus in real life.
What’s your avatar? Try the interactive web game on desktop now. Content is generally suitable for all ages.
(Team credits: Commissioned by the Peabody Essex Museum for PlayTime. Game design by Kellian Adams, Green Door Labs. Art by Dirk Tiede, UI design by Vibhuti Giltrap, coding by Andy Hall, Test Tube Games.)
The latest in Albert Mobilio’s series of (very) short stories based on old-time games illustrates how the characteristics of play capture the essence of our lives.
An entire deck of cards is shuffled and dealt face down in rows. The exact pattern, Sandy knows, isn’t important. Sandy knows about cards and she knows about quiet. She thinks more about quiet—and why she can’t keep it—than she thinks about cards, but she makes sure each card has a definite place. The group settles—Jack and Bean were teasing Frank about his attempt to grow a beard last winter; they’ve stopped and Frank sits still and inspects his hands with surprise, as if they were newly purchased. And Jess has found a place to pause in a long tale about this guy at work and the guy he hired and why she’s pretty sure that the first guy hired the other guy to get in his pants and this first guy always does this but it never works because he hires artsy-looking guys and won’t believe Jess when she tells him they’re straight. When the talk stops as suddenly as a spigot that’s been shut they all notice how the air hums with its absence; Sandy tries to tune into and relax within this gauzy frequency.
She can’t. She doesn’t trust the quiet and so she says, “I didn’t know the boy I asked to the prom was, uh, having sex with my, you know, he was, well he is, my step-brother,” but the last few words dissolve in the self-conscious laughter that always devours her awkward attempts to add to any conversation. The ensuing chorus of whats and huhs lacks much interrogative energy; at this provoke such a thought? Once during a discussion of how people can never find their phones at home, she piped up: “I leave my phone in the bathroom because I’m always in there, not for what you think,” a gulping chortle overwhelming the kicker, “even when I don’t need to be.
Her giddiness softens what otherwise would be off-putting for some. Not Jess, though. That voice—the laugh, the way it smudges whatever silly thing that escapes Sandy’s jingle-jangle brain—gets to her, or really gets all over her. Sandy’s talk is an itchy sweater Jess can’t peel off. The confessional intimacy unnerves her. Implicates her; it’s as if Sandy was ventriloquizing an inner life Jess didn’t know she had. But she’s much more bothered by the inadvertency. How does craziness like that slip out? How could your guard be so low? What if Jess just blurted out something like the things Sandy says? Could there be a situation, the right or wrong person, that could cast a spell and loosen words she’d regret? It was frightening. Sandy was frightening.
As the pile of cards grows beneath Sandy’s clasped hands, the wrinkles on the back of her fingers absorb her. The deep creases at the knuckles; the other ones like bloodless paper cuts. She hasn’t said a word since mentioning her prom and permits her-self only a tight anti-smile as she collects another pair. Across the table Jess, too, holds her tongue, holds herself head to toe, and eyes her friend warily. The others—Bean and Jack—are busy elaborating on the kind and degree of Frank’s romantic failures.
The two of them hoot and make noise that would suggest a good time. The game continues until all the cards are removed or turned face up, whichever comes first. ♦
Missed earlier stories? Find them here, here, and here.
(Image credit: Photo courtesy Stuart Burns via Flickr.)
“One side is Commodore 64 loops built on the old computer. And then the other side is Atari loops. You drop it anywhere in the locked grooves and you’ve got a beat.”
Randall Roberts is a music critic for the Los Angeles Times. We asked him if he could explain how the Beige Ensemble’s 8-Bit Construction Set records were made and show us what they sounded like when played together. Are you ready for the sauce?
PLAY is frowned upon.
PLAY is when the kids go to bed!
PLAYing with fire.
PLAY gives life purpose.
PLAY pretend.
PLAY is cartwheels.
PLAY is complicated.
PLAY is queer.
PLAY is performative.
PLAY is daring.
PLAY is not ignoring.
PLAY is _______________.
Visitors respond to the PLAYTIME manifesto in the gallery. What’s your take on the MANIFESTO? #PEMplaytime
Photographer Walker Pickering captures the practice of marching bands in his series Esprit de Corps—and offers his reflections on his former passion and the idea of photography as performance.
Among my favorite recent podcast discoveries is WQXR’s Meet the Composer with violist Nadia Sirota. I’ve given a lot of thought to the role of performers lately, and season three begins with a pair of episodes focused on performers’ experiences within the realm of classical music. Sirota discusses her métier as musician and her realization that composers tend to write exclusively with the audience in mind:
“I don’t listen to a lot of music in my spare time. Almost all of the music that I participate in is as a performer. And in a way, none of it was designed to be experienced that way. I’m supposed to just [ . . . ] exist as a conduit so other people can listen to it, but that’s my main access point to this stuff as a work of art; is as a performer. It’s kind of weird that I’m experiencing it all wrong [ . . . ] or from the wrong side of the TV set.
Maybe that’s why I want to make this [podcast, because] I feel like there’s all of this stuff that, for me, is what makes up music. [ . . . ] It’s just strange to me that my entire experience of music is unintended.”
I can trace my earliest public performances to church choir in preschool (of which there is VHS evidence), but given my proclivity for the spotlight, I know that in-home performances for friends and family began even earlier. Although Sirota’s commentary has since moved me to reconsider my thinking, I worried for years that the associated endorphin rush I derived from performance had an egomaniacal basis. This, despite the obvious reality that audiences, too, had something to gain from being entertained.
In my own practice as a working artist, I often struggle with the need to articulate exactly what I’d like to make, against the idea that breakthroughs occur more frequently when I work together with others without restrictions. There is a certain kind of effortlessness that emerges from this casual, collaborative inventiveness, which might explain why, as someone approaching the dreaded middle age, I fight the urge to form a “jam band” or some similarly stereotypical pursuit.
A video camera was glued to my hand at all times during high school. My group of friends developed and acted-out ideas for the tape, knowing that we were both performers and audience. Although the ideas were poorly executed, I still long for the creative output of those few brief years. It’s only now that I’ve come to realize the reason we created so much had more to do with our desire to play together than anything else.
Like high school itself, marching band forced a number of unlikely collaborators together in pursuit of a common goal. The rush of performing on field had less to do with how good we were, and more with the fact that we’d come together to make something. Real creativity emerged during water breaks or after practice, where it was common to see more accomplished musicians showing off for their peers by playing a difficult passage of music or an impromptu group forming to improvise.
When I embarked on this photographic project, I had ulterior motives: I anticipated my proximity to the action would stir feelings of nostalgia, as my final appearance on the field was well over a decade ago. I found the performances themselves blasé, designed for the spectators off in the distance. Instead, the spirit of the group in the hidden moments—the esprit de corps—was far more charming and playful than anything made for public consumption.
Flourish. A Santa Clara Vanguard color guard member practices on the field, Santa Clara, California.
Hornline.
Rifles. The Cavaliers Drum & Bugle Corps rifle line rehearses, Lehman High School, Kyle, Texas.
Scouts Trumpet Line. Trumpet players in rehearsal, Madison Scouts Drum & Bugle Corps, Forney High School, Forney, Texas.
Stretching in the Rain.
Trombone Player at Rest. A trombone player rests on the field after a football game, Cornhusker Marching Band, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska.
“The slipper isn’t glass or golden. Not one used for ballet or tightrope walking. An ordinary slipper.”
Albert Mobilio’s fictional stories are based on old-time games played in parlors, basements, and fields with balls, brooms, blindfolds, and cards. As winners and losers emerge from dodge ball, word games, and balloon contests so does the theme of our inner life as ceaseless competition. There is calculation, envy, humiliation, and joy, and there is always the next round when everything might change. Here, he reads the story “Hunt the Slipper.”
“These charts contain a lot of truth,” artist Andrew Kuo says about his series and how he repurposed trivial minutiae of everyday life into pie charts, flow charts, and other forms of visual data sorting.
You’ve always wanted to be a chess master! But you aren’t one, are you? Now you can at least look like one! Pretend you’re playing chess! Make moves! Act like you feel things! Smirk! Frown! Weep! Chess!
Game designer Pippin Barr doesn’t make popular video games. It Is as If You Were Playing Chess not only poses the idea of a chess game you merely pretend to be playing, but brings it to life and so allows you to participate in the experience itself. Barr says, “The central image for me in this is that of a player sitting at their computer or using their mobile device while be observed by another person. To the observer it should look as though the player is genuinely playing some kind of game. In this case the idea is for them to look as though they are playing a game of chess, making the appropriate motions (to drag chess pieces around), facial expressions, eye movements, and so on. ‘It is as if you were playing chess’ is thus an interface designed to support you in pretending that you’re playing a game of chess.”
PLAY is apparently terrifying.
PLAY lets us discover what kind of mind we have.
PLAY is toys.
PLAY is better than kale.
PLAY with stuffed animals.
PLAY more board games.
PLAY encourages.
PLAY is reading.
PLAY is building towers.
PLAY is playing cars.
PLAY is marriage.
PLAY is _______________.
Visitors respond to the PLAYTIME manifesto in the gallery. What’s your take on the MANIFESTO? #PEMplaytime
