Author: Eugenia Bell

Play as Diplomacy: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Designer Kaylene Kau believes it’s time that we begin to repair and foster relationships on a species to species level. Her Animal Diplomacy Bureau is trying—through play—to shed a human-centered narrative of the world.

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?

Play is a cooperative way to imagine new worlds and affect reality.

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.

Turning people into birds is a great way of getting them to spend time thinking about the world through animal eyes.

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.

What was important was not the ideas, but the new ways of thinking people had begun to adopt.

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.)

Inter/De-pen-dence: A Game

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Developed by artists Christine Wong Yap and Sarrita Hunn, Inter/de-pend-ence is a non-competitive, dialogue-based game exploring cooperation, competition, and other themes of mutual support. This is the second installment in a six-part series featuring four artists playing Inter/de-pend-ence.

Learn more and meet the players in the introduction. Play the game! Download a PDF, or draw cards online.

 

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!

A Short Trip: A Game

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Australian artist Alexander Perrin has a passion for meticulous dynamics, detailed digital rendering techniques, and cats. A Short Trip is the first in a collection of interactive illustrations he is creating for the web. Think of his games as “slow play.”

Alexander Perrin has been developed as a study in capturing and respecting the essences and affordances of graphite pencil on paper within a digital context. Players are invited to transport feline passengers to their respective destinations as the sole operator of a scenic mountain tramway. There is no strict schedule on this particular line, so take all the time you need!

Join us in playing A Short Trip.

Inter/De-pen-dence: A Game

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Developed by artists Christine Wong Yap and Sarrita Hunn, Inter/de-pend-ence is a non-competitive board game that encourages deep conversation around questions of empowerment and support. Players share how they practice autonomy and relatedness via questions, examples, tactics, and listening. Inter/de-pend-ence emerged from the artists’ shared interests in mutualism, agency, and artists’ roles. Let’s play Round One: Collaboration.

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!

Bean Bottle Throw: A Story

Posted on by Eugenia Bell
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.

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.)

Play Digest: Cory Arcangel and Mark Bradford

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

PlayTime is open! In celebration of the artists in the exhibition, we’re featuring a series of upcoming link packs on their latest news. This week, we look at Cory Arcangel and Mark Bradford. The work of both of these artists encapsulates our PlayTime manifesto and the themes running through the show: reinventing rules, responding to uncertainty, and rewarding misbehavior—core actions at the very heart of play.

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.)

Rubik’s Cube: A Prose Poetry Game

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Poet Matthea Harvey conceived a series of modified Rubik’s Cubes accompanied by short meditations on its creator, its history, clouds, and some playfully absurd scenarios.

 

OF CLOUDS AND BOXES

How did the clouds get their names? In Genesis, Adam “gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field,” but he didn’t name the clouds. When we name a thing, do we box it in? The names we know clouds by today were coined by chemist and amateur meteorologist Luke Howard in a lecture he gave to the Askesian Society in a London basement in 1803 and published as “Essay on the Modifications of Clouds” in 1805. His first classifications included cirrus or thread/hair cloud, cumulus or heap cloud, stratus, flat or level cloud, and cumulo-cirrus-stratus, later shortened to nimbus, or rain cloud. I picture Luke Howard in a room whirling with tiny clouds, catching them with butterfly nets, and carefully sliding each one into a glass box. But clouds are, by their very nature, changeable, capricious, liable to escape their taxonomic boxes by morphing from cirrus to cumulus in a meteorological instant. They’re the opposite of Rubik’s cubes, which, ideally, after much whirring, twisting, and clicking settle into one static finished form.

 

 

SISTER PUZZLES

My older sister Celia and I both got Rubik’s puzzles in 1981. As the younger sister, I got the easier one, a “sister puzzle” to the original Rubik’s cube—a green and white Rubik’s snake that I laboriously learned to transform into a Scottie dog (although according to the instruction manual I found online I was not making a Scottie; I was making a terrier). It didn’t occur to me that there were more possible shapes, but Rubik’s super-fan Thomas Wolter lists under “Easy Figures” some I would have liked to have learned: Cat, Dogface, Mushroom, and Swimming Bird. A number of them look nothing like their labels—it’s a strain to see the summer or house in Summerhouse, and Cardboard, Casket, Grotto, Microscope, and Snowman are equally iffily abstract. There’s even one called “Noname.” The more challenging list of “Hard Figures” presents other oddities—“Without Name” (how this differs from “Noname” I can’t say), Endless Belt, and Knot on Legs. Their names resemble dreamily looking for objects or animals in the clouds more than trying to create a true taxonomy . . .  Celia had the real Rubik’s Cube and after weeks of maneuvering she managed to get to the point where all the sides were perfect save two, each marred by one incorrect square. Frustrated, she temporarily tossed it aside. I saw a simple solution, however, and helpfully peeled the errant red and yellow stickers off and switched them, leaving the perfected puzzle on her desk. She was (understandably, I see now) not pleased. In fact, switching the tabs makes the cube unsolvable, as noted in the pun-tastically titled poem “A Rubric on Rubik Cubics” by Claude E. Shannon, published in the last issue of Cubic Circular in 1985 (a quarterly newsletter dedicated to the Rubik’s Cube and other puzzles—indeed the world of Rubik’s Cube fandom is a rabbit hole of the first order): “Rude folk might switch two tabs on thee, / The most unkindest switch of all, Into insolubility. In-sol-u-bility. / The cruelest place to be. / However you persist / Solutions don’t exist.”

 

 

NAMING AND THE CUBE

Until quite recently I thought “Rubik’s” was spelled “Rubix” and had given no thought to a person behind the puzzle. But there is a Mr. Rubik—Ernö Rubik, who is still alive today, a Hungarian inventor who first came up with his cube in 1974 while teaching a class at the Academy of Applied Arts and Crafts in Budapest. His first model was cobbled together out of wood and rubber bands. When the cube first went on the market in Hungary it was called Buvos Kocka or “Magic Cube,” but when it was brought to the US five years later it was renamed “Rubik’s Cube,” because, according to the Rubik’s Cube official website, “Ideal Toy’s executives thought that the name had overtones of witchcraft.” Other names under consideration included “Inca Gold” and “Gordion Knot” (legend has it that Alexander the Great “solved” the impossible-to-untie Gordion knot by simply slicing through it with his sword so perhaps my sticker-switching crime was simply a clever way of solving the problem). A New York Times article notes that Ernö Rubik calls it “my cube. From my mouth, it sounds strange to call it ‘Rubik’s cube,’ … If I have a child, I call it ‘my child,’ not ‘Rubik’s boy’ or ‘Rubik’s girl.’” Incidentally, Rubik has been married twice and has four children—two daughters, Agnes and Anna, with Rozsa, his first wife, and with his second wife (named Agnes like his daughter), a son, Ernö III and a third daughter, Szonja. Rubik’s father, an aircraft and glider designer, was the first Ernö Rubik. Our Ernö Rubik does not identify himself as the second or “II.” Hungarian naming conventions follow Eastern name order (surname first), so at home all three Ernös would go by Rubik Ernö. Rubik is a rare surname (related to Rubel, Rubig, Rubega, Rubiga, Robic, and Rubica), which may mean “a grower of corn oil plants or one who lived by such a place,” while the name Ernö means “serious business” or “battle to the death.” The umlaut over Ernö’s “o” should actually be double acute accents (also known as Hungarumlaut), which means that the letter is thought of as having both an umlaut and an acute accent. I can’t find this umlaut on my keyboard. Rubik’s mother, Magdolna Szántó was a poet, but her poetry is nowhere to be found. Missing: countless poems, the correct umlaut.

 

 

CUBE VOCAB

The origins of the word “cube” aren’t entirely clear. Etymological dictionaries credit the Middle French “cube,” Latin “cubus,” and Greek “kybos,” which refers to the six-sided die with which the Greeks played betting games. Before dice were used, this game was played with any four-sided bone harvested from a cow or sheep, which accounts for a secondary meaning for cube: vertebrae. So solving for etymology doesn’t end in a PB (personal best in cubing terminology)—it’s closer to DNF (did not finish). The Rubik’s cube is made of 26 cubes (in six colors) called cubies or cublets. Rubicubism describes the practice of creating mosaic-style art out of multiple Rubik’s cubes. These include recreations of the Mona Lisa, a photograph of Grumpy Cat, Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe silkscreens, as well as Michelangelo’s “God’s Hand” from the Sistine Chapel, which used 12,090 cubes. Should I call them sculptures or chunky paintings? They’re three dimensional but rely on the flat and they look like cruder versions of Georges Seurat’s pointillism, Chuck Close’s pixelated portraits, or perhaps Mona Lisa through the eyes of a house fly. In Cockney rhyming slang, you’d call those eyes “minces” referring to “mince pies,” which rhymes with “eyes.” Rubik’s cube means “pube” or “tube,” as in the London Underground. When speaking in this lingo, you often hide the rhyme, so you’d say, “oh no, there’s a Rubik’s on the soap!” or “The Rubik’s will get us there faster.” Rubik’s sells Cube Lube for just $5.99 to “achieve record beating times.” Non-Rubik’s brand lubes include Cubicle Silicone Lube, Lubix Cube, Shock Oil, and Jig-a-Loo. Would corn oil work too?

 

 

 

BY THE NUMBERS

Between two hands a whirl of jumbled colors, then the solved cube is tossed onto the table, each side a solid red, blue orange, green, yellow, or white—order wrested from chaos. There are 43 quintillion possible arrangements of the Rubik’s Cube but only one solution. Rubik says of the cube, “it was a code I myself had invented! Yet I could not read it. I simply could not accept it.” It took him approximately a month to unscramble the puzzle he’d invented. Between 1 and 2.5 billion Rubik’s cubes have been sold, if you include knockoffs, of which there are many. Ron van Brunchen, a speedcuber from Amsterdam has over 1,000 cubes in his house, including some in his bathroom and shower. When asked if they are waterproof, he demurs, “Well, I have specific cubes that I save for water-solves, yeah.” According to The Daily Mail, one man recently solved the cube for the first time after 26 years of trying. His wife, understandably, complained of feeling like there were “three people” in their relationship. In 1982 Minh Thai solved the cube in less than 23 seconds. Last year Feliks Zemdegs, age 20, solved it in less than five seconds—4.73 seconds to be exact. I watched a video of his lightning-fast solving and I regret to report that he was very excited by his win—and by that I mean visibly turned on. Only eight percent of speedcubers are women. The most expensive Rubik’s cube, named the Masterpiece Cube was created in 1995. Its value has been estimated from $1.5 to 2.5 million and it’s made of 1360 jewels set in 18 karat yellow gold. It includes 22.5 karats of amethyst, 34 karats of rubies, 34 karats of emeralds, and an unspecified amount of sapphires and white diamonds. The creator and owner of the cube, Fred Cuellar refuses to sell the cube and has said that he plans to donate it to the Smithsonian. According to his company, Diamond Cutters International, Cuellar also made a $2 million pizza for Little Caesar’s with 600 carats of diamonds and other colored stones set in five pounds of gold. Cuellar, who has published a number of books, including one of clichéd aphoristic sayings titled “Fredisms,” was convicted in 1998 for swindling a group of 70 people out of $1 million dollars which was meant to be used to purchase two large diamonds. Interviewed on a podcast titled “The Nice Guys on Business,” he mentions that his mantra is “Live to benefit others.”

 

 

CLOUD CUBES

I’m currently writing a book about clouds called All of the Above, which has led me to take Polaroids of all the cloud and cloud-like apparitions that appear on Keeping Up With the Kardashians (and create a tongue-in-cheek taxonomy for them). That’s a long story for another time, but KUWTK often repeats footage of clouds reflected in an office building gridded with windows. I think that’s where I got the idea to make Rubik’s cubes covered in clouds. I made one Cloud Cube from a vintage print of Wolkenformen (cloud forms) from Meyer’s Koversations Lexicon published in the 1890s. The lithograph itself is already a four-by-three grid of images showing twelve clouds (but only nine types). For my cube I chose two different cirrus, a nimbus, a cumulus, an alto-cumulus, and a cumulo-nimbus. To cover another cube, I used a black-and-white etching from the 1890s that may or may not be from McKenzie’s National Encyclopedia: A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge. Because the British landscape painter John Constable is famous for his clouds and for saying, “I have done a good deal of skying” (i.e. looking at and painting the clouds), there is, of course, a Constable cube. Three of the Cloud Cubes use photocopies of cloud scenes from vintage cloud postcards purchased on eBay and labeled with titles like “Above the Clouds, Mount Wilson, California,” “Moonlight on the Straits of Mackinac, Near Cheboygan, Michigan,” “Sunrise above the Clouds, Mt. Washington, White Mts, N.H.,” “Sunrise above Clouds From Mt. Leconte,” “Above the Clouds from Echo Mountain,” “‘Fleecy Clouds & Seascape’ off Australian Coast,” and “Sunset Over Clouds, Mt. Lowe, Cal.” For a more autobiographical cube, I used a photograph of the back of my head beneath my favorite cloud painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Cloud Study (Early Evening) by Simon Denis, painted sometime between 1798 and 1806). The painting is 8 7/8 x 10 1/8 inches whereas the standard Rubik’s Cube is 2 ¼ inches squared, so the painting could be obscured by placing 17.8 Rubik’s Cubes on its surface. In my eBay searches I stumbled across a set of French trading cards showing six cloud-types. When they arrived, I was thrilled to discover ads for Oxo cubes on the back. Bouillon boo-yah! By accident I’d stumbled upon another world of cubes, whose collectors are almost as obsessive as speedcubers and Rubik’s cube collectors. My trading cards were produced by the Liebig Company in 1933 but the cards began being produced in the 1870’s by a company named for Justus von Liebig who is credited with creating meat extract. Liebig published his recipes in a tract tiled “Extractum Carnis” and his extract was later sold as meat paste or bouillon cubes. The Liebig Company produced 11,000 different sets of these cards. On the front are a variety of images—some of them quite unremarkable, like my set of clouds or a grouping of famous composers, but there are also much stranger categories, such as “Children with Big Cooking Utensils (I and II) ” from 1872–73, in which boys in knickers and caps and girls in short dresses, aprons, and bows hoist a giant teacup and saucer or stab a giant cheese with an oversized knife. Or the equally odd “Race of the Wooden Horses” from 1873–78, in which boys in tiny jockey outfits “race” by hoisting their immobile steeds over hedges or falling off them into a stream. This particular scenario seems like a cousin to my Cloud Cubes, which are essentially unsolvable (if the Rubik’s cube has 43 quintillion possible patterns and only one correct solution, my Cloud Cubes have exponentially more, given that no two squares on any side are alike) and therefore have to stay frozen in their original configuration. Having taken a toy and made it impossible to play with (a Jack-in-the box with no Jack, a pogo-stick that won’t bounce) feels a bit mean, so it’s heartening to see these children playing happily with their inert ponies.

 

 

SIZE MATTERS

There have been multiple attempts at miniaturizing the Rubik’s cube. Evginy Grigoriev initially made a 12mm cube, followed by a 10mm, then an 8mm cube, followed by Callum making a 6mm cube. Grigoriev followed up with a 5.9mm cube and finally Tony Fisher filed down one of Callum’s 6mm cubes to make a 5.4mm cube, though as he points out that this version, while functional, is not perfectly proportional and as a result, “it might not actually count as a Rubik’s cube.” Fisher also points out that the cubes’ measurements do not include the square stickers and that to be perfectly precise, each of the tiny cubes should add 0.2 mm to their final sizes. Fisher does currently hold the Guinness World Record for tiniest Rubik’s cube (listed as 5.6mm so as to include the stickers). YouTube videos of the tiny Rubik’s cubes share a flair for the dramatic. In a demo video for the 8mm cube (3-D printed by Shapeways), the tiny Rubik’s cube arrives in a large shipping box and is ceremonially unpacked and assembled. In Fisher’s demonstration of his modified mini cube, the camera shows a giant Rubik’s cube (Fisher also holds the 2016 Guinness Book of World Record title for the largest Rubik’s cube, which is 1.57 meters (or five feet, 1.7 inches) on each side and zooms in to show the tiny one perched on top of it. Fisher uses tweezers and a magnifying glass to painstakingly manipulate (and solve!) the mini cube. His fingers look the size of shovels.

 

 

 

MAKE IT HARDER

Solve on waterskis. Solve 839 on a 26.2 mile run. Solve in winter while wearing a yellow puffy coat and bouncing on a very creaky pogo stick (ask your exchange student to scramble the cube and time you). Wearing goggles and plaid swim trunks, solve three in a row underwater in less than a minute (yes, Rubik’s cubes float). Solve while strapped into a multi-axis trainer, a hexagon that spins within two giant metal circles to simulate the disorientation astronauts feel upon reentry into the earth’s atmosphere. Solve blindfolded in 1.2882 minutes. On your back deck, next to your doormat and two potted plants, solve in 25 seconds while doing one-handed pushups, shoeless and shirtless. Solve 1,010 while riding a bicycle for over six hours. Solve one-handed while riding a bicycle around London’s crowded Hyde Park. Solve with your nipple. Please note: none of these feats were attempted by women or girls.

 

(Image credits: All photographs courtesy of Matthea Harvey.)

Playfully Minded: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell
Writer Rob Walker looks at some of the works on view in the PlayTime exhibition and finds wonder in the mundane and restlessness in constraint.

As a kid, I wasn’t big on playing traditional sports, but I quite enjoyed video games. This was a long-ago era, and my experiences involved arcade “quarter games” (as my peers and I called them) and a TV-connected console called Intellivision—a rival to the more iconic Atari. I liked playing against friends, even against the machine itself. But I also liked playing with the games.

One vivid example involved an auto-racing game—you’d use the controller to maneuver a car around a twisting track, as quickly as possible, and avoiding a crash with aggressive rivals. But somehow, at some point, I figured out that if you drove off the track, at just the right spot, the car would keep motoring out into no-man’s land, among digital trees and what seemed like odd patches of abandoned track. Crashing ended the game of course, but it was possible to go so far into these virtual woods that you would eventually arrive back at the original course. Perhaps the idea was that you’d driven all the way around the world; perhaps it was just a glitch. But it was completely delightful, and is easily the most distinct memory I have left of many hundreds of hours of game play.

We think of games as a form of distraction or escape—something that removes us from the serious and important, perhaps from reality itself. But is that really the case? The works gathered for PlayTime, as irreverent and fun and even funny as they may be, suggest almost the opposite. If you’re looking for serious insight into what’s important and real, you’d do well to adopt the cunningly playful mindset that these artists display. Over and over, the artists here reveal how games and play can focus our attention on the telltale details and hidden truths that underpin our day-to-day. Play turns out to depend on, and reveal, a subversive way of perceiving and engaging with the world. As with my little car-game adventure, play gets most interesting when it lights to discovery, surprise, mystery, even wonder.

Take, as a simple example of subversive perception, Cory Arcangel’s 2003 Totally Fucked. To make the piece, the technically adept Arcangel, whose work consistently displays a kind of hyper-fluency with digital culture, modified the code of the cartridge game Mario Bros. Normally, the protagonist Mario, controlled by the player, moves from left to right across a digital landscape, trying to avoid or conquer enemies and reach an end point that takes him to the game’s next level. On the way, he interacts with floating cubes that may contain helpful items.

With a gesture of elimination, Arcangel makes us think about whether permanent stasis might be even worse than ‘losing.’

Totally Fucked eliminates almost all of this, placing Mario atop one of the cubes, floating mid-air, in an infinite loop, with no ground, opponents, or allies. This scenario is surely nothing the game’s designers wanted players to imagine, and of course it reduces Mario’s epic journey to a standstill. But with this gesture of elimination, Arcangel makes us think not only about what to make of a game environment absent of obstacles or even movement, but about whether permanent stasis might be even worse than “losing.” There is no challenge or competition left; just a hopeless predicament, a character uncomfortably alone in a blue-sky void. Maybe this is what happens when you playfully degamify a game. Certainly it makes the viewer look closely at something she was never really meant to see.

This spirit recurs throughout PlayTime. Maybe the most extreme example of a work that playfully draws our attention to something we take for granted seldom actively consider is Martin Creed’s Work No. 329. It is, in short, a room half-full of cheerful, pink party balloons. Creed has made a number of variations on the piece with different-colored balloons, but in all cases the impact is immediate and clear—and, I would say, pretty funny. And fun: the piece is designed to be walked into and experienced from within itself, by anyone who’s game.

The artist is known for a deadpan sensibility guided by intentional, rule-like constraints, frequently designed to draw as much meaning as possible from the most mundane objects or gestures. The resulting works—confounding to some, no doubt—have included a balled sheet of paper, and an empty room illuminated by timed lights. Work No. 329 is an almost child-like means of raising some pretty serious questions about the nature of art. Is the raw material here the balloons or, more compellingly, air itself? (But only the half in the balloons; the rest of the air presumably remains non-art.)

Wurm has been doing this since the late 1990s, and on some level the series amounts to a constant reinvention of rules.

To take this process of playfully challenging our usual habits of perception in another direction, Erwin Wurm’s long-running One Minute Sculpture series converts the artwork from a thing that you look at to a thing that you do. In short, Wurm presents a set of written or drawn instructions, proscribing a particular interaction with a specific object or object at hand; you are meant to follow the instruction, and hold the pose for a sixty seconds. You might be instructed to lay on your back in a chair, feet pointed skyward. Or stick your legs through a modified table. Or take off a shoe and listen to it. This is the sculpture. Wurm has been doing this since the late 1990s, and on some level the series amounts to a constant reinvention of rules: making the “sculpture” as much a game as a collaborative and ephemeral performance.

Artists surely know as much as athletes about the pros and cons of playing by rules. Mark Bradford’s remarkable 2003 video Practice offers a particularly poetic example. It shows the artist, a six-foot-seven-inch African-American man, moving around a basketball court, trying to dribble and make shots … while wearing an antebellum hoop skirt four feet in diameter, made out of a Los Angeles Lakers uniform.

The practice of using play to reveal rather than to escape can be taken out of the realm of actual game mechanics.

The combination of symbols is both jarring and absurd: Something about this particular set of constraints makes it hard to decide whether to laugh or wince, as Bradford struggles to control the ball, loses his balance, crashes to the hard ground. But on he persists. When he finally manages to overcome the constraints and hit a shot, you want to cheer—maybe for the triumph, or maybe just out of relief.

The practice of using play to reveal, rather than to escape or distract, can be taken well outside the realm of actual game mechanics. Roman Signer’s work, sometimes described as “action sculptures,” is marked by an almost adolescent delight in misusing materials in revelatory ways. Often this entails juxtapositions that feel like the daydreams of a genius juvenile delinquent.

In the video Office Chair, a definitive symbol of stultifying work is transformed into a splendid toy, thanks to the use of handheld rockets. In Kayak, a nature sport crashes the built environment, with Signer dragged in a boat along a road by a truck. Punkt finds the artist pacifically arranged before a canvas in a field, the natural beauty interrupted by the unexpected arrival of an explosive. There’s an air of the successful prank around each piece, leaving the viewer with the definite sense of having watched somebody get away with something—but left to make the final decision about just what that something is.

Revising forgotten toys into beautiful objects, Woodgate plays a quietly subversive game.

Agustina Woodgate’s collection of rug-like wall hangings constructed from the “skins” of stuffed animal toys offer such a different tone that they seem to occupy another world altogether: silent, sweet, beautiful, and oddly comforting. But really her game is not so different.

While open to various interpretations, the pieces remind me first of the familiar bearskin rug: the grotesque (to me) trophy of a sporting hunter. Woodgate has described the series as evolving from her relationship with a childhood toy, a teddy bear she had named Pepe. The object had outlived its intended use, but she was reluctant to throw it out. Buying up other neglected stuffed animals from thrift stores, she began repurposing their “skins” into complicated and colorful mosaic rugs (often in a more Eastern aesthetic far removed from the cringe-worthy kitsch of the pelt-as-décor). Revising forgotten toys into the raw material of freshly beautiful objects, Woodgate plays a quietly subversive game.

I invoked video games at the beginning of this essay because the digital realms we access through consoles, computers, smartphones, and smart watches have collectively become perhaps our most pervasive space for play. They may also be our most contested. These are places where we indulge in private fun—and where others do the same thing in ways that sometimes worry us: When, we wonder, does diversion become detachment?

Cao Fei made her name through explorations of digital play spaces.

Chinese artist Cao Fei made her name in part through incredibly adventurous and original explorations of digital play spaces, with a particular focus on the personal-identity games that attach to the virtual-world avatar. In doing so she demonstrated a remarkable fluency in everything from “cosplay” to Second Life, practices and realms that allow participants to blur lines among reality, aspiration and fantasy in ways that seem distinct to our era.

She’s carried that fluency into an increasingly far-flung and ambitious territory. In PlayTime, examples pop up, tellingly, in two distinct sections within the show. The installation Rumba 01 & 02 repurposes the popular vacuum robot as artworks—an amusing gesture, to be sure. But it’s the video Shadow Life that, despite or really because of its own aesthetic charms, takes her game to another level.

Reportedly inspired by an official state broadcast of a Chinese Spring Festival Gala from the artist’s childhood, the video unfolds in the form of a remarkable shadow puppet sequence, backed by propagandistic martial music. A silly dog shadow emerges from a demagogue’s shouty face; clutches of mindlessly applauding hands morph into a childish dance; fists dissolve into animals; accusatory fingers chase a rabbit into a sweet embrace. But the visual gags often get dark: the rabbit held in a threatening grip, a swan shadow puppet suddenly gripped by the throat. It’s ultimately a grim story that plays out in two dimensions, black and white. When does this game subvert terror, and when does it simply disguise it? Can we still tell the difference? The answer surely matters.

Way back in the quarter-game era of my adolescence, the phrase “game over” made the leap from the final screen of any given play session into daily parlance, signifying a definitive end, any decisive victory or defeat. The artists in PlayTime offer a collective rebuke to the idea that a game ends, or that it’s always possible to identify its beginning. Play simply persists, or it certainly ought to, all the time and everywhere. Not because we need it to escape, but because it helps us find different ways to engage. We need to play. Game ongoing. ♦

 

(Image credits: Courtesy of the artist, photo by Bob Packert/PEM. Courtesy of the artist, © Cory Arcangel. Courtesy of the artist, photo by Bob Packert/PEM. Photo by Bob Packert/PEM. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Zurich. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Courtesy of Spinello Projects, photo by Joshua Aronson. Courtesy of the artist, photo by Allison White/PEM.)

It Is as If You Were Doing Work: A Game

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Game designer Pippin Barr’s game It Is as If You Were Doing Work does not only suggest a potential future without human labor and the sense of value we draw from it, it positions you as an agent in that very world.

Game creator Pippin Barr writes about the game, “I decided to style in interface so it looked like Windows 95 to some extent. Having a kind of clunky ‘old-timey’ UI style made the game lighter hearted . . . . It pretty quickly settled into more of a desktop OS model of windows and dialogs popping up, with the user performing tasks that both looked and felt like work: typing, moving sliders, clicking on icons.”

As you click your mouse and tap on your keyboard, you are interacting with that future in ways that go beyond an intellectual understanding of its possibility: you are able to entertain how it might feel. You are able to experience the thrill of achievement associated with success in the game as well as the inevitable hollowness that the cumulative “achievements” lead you toward.

Now, get to work—playing!

 

New Babylon: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Part 2 of critic Owen Hatherley’s essay on the socio-architectural implications of turning cities into theme parks and cultural experiences into “adult playgrounds.”  Read Part 1 here.

Like a lot of Bourriaud’s ideas—like a lot of the more questionable influential ideas of the avant-garde in the last forty years more generally—this emerges at a remove or two from the critiques of “spectacular” art, culture, and politics mounted by the Situationist International at the turn of the 1960s. In what they called “administered” society, everything was experienced at a distance, through screens, provided for a passive audience through mass media and through the various cultural organizations set up after the Second World War, from the institutions of Gaullist France to the Arts Council or the board of governors of a municipal art gallery. In resistance to this contemplation, which they linked perhaps questionably to an equally distanced approach to politics, in which technocratic rule proceeds without democratic contestation, they posited brief, unrepeatable “Situations.” One of the things they considered missing from art was a sense of play, the open-endedness and enjoyment of children’s games; the “Situations” they tried to “construct” were like Hegelian, theoretical versions of these. The more putative, would-be-permanent of these environments were the architectural model of “New Babylon” constructed by Constant Niewenhuys, where all work is done by a robotic labor force leaving the city as an endless labyrinth devoted solely to play, or the “Formulary for a New Urbanism” of Ivan Chtcheglov, where the city is zoned like a theme park, devoted to particular pleasures.

Public art museums have become multimedia interactive extravaganzas: one part factory, one part theme park, one part mall.

The more muted echo of this in Britain centered on the Fun Palace, a cult unbuilt project devised by the architect Cedric Price and the Communist theatre director Joan Littlewood, which would be essentially a giant distribution shed of interactive culture, that would shift and morph and move to the demands of its—totally engaged, totally active—users. Like a lot of radical ideas of that era, it was realized in a form that its authors couldn’t possibly have envisaged, in a neoliberal culture where public art museums have continued, and continued to be publicly funded, but in order to continue attracting visitors and hence continue attracting advertising and sponsorship revenue, they’ve become multimedia interactive extravaganzas: one part factory, one part theme park, one part mall, one part New Babylon, and one part, to use J. G. Ballard’s words describing Tate Modern, “middle class disco.” Some places deal with this better than others—London’s South Bank Centre, for instance, has devolved into an assemblage of toys, street food markets, pop-ups, slides, boats, and gewgaws to the point where any moment of rest or repose or thought is rendered absolutely impossible. And, of course, in that it has had enormous success—it isn’t just the difference in the kind of cities that we’re dealing with that explains how the City Art Gallery is usually almost empty, with two or three people haunting its airy rooms, and the South Bank always teeming with visitors. It’s their totally different conception of art and its role.

In his critiques of interactivity, Mark Fisher would write of a resistance in neoliberal culture to the idea of paternalism, of artistic provision, as being symbolized by the notion that culture was “spoon-fed” to a passive population, and he questioned the idea that this was disempowering for working class audiences not habitually exposed to elite culture. The post-war “paternalist” culture was indeed almost wholly undemocratic, bar perhaps for the distant role that Labour parties and trade unions played in setting it up. It played at being for everyone, but the manner in which it was set up—without explanation, without “outreach”—meant that in practice, it was enjoyed only by those who already knew about it. There is much truth in this critique, of course, but oddly it comes seldom from working class users or from working class experiences.

The sense of quiet and hush, the sense of distance and space, of being somewhere “different” made it more exciting.

My own enjoyment of City Art Gallery as a teenager, long before I had any idea who the artists and art movements showcased were, or what their significance was, suggests that alienation and distance are not a one-way street. In fact, the sense of quiet and hush, the sense of distance and space, of being somewhere “different” where commodity logic didn’t feature, was absent, where the entire atmosphere appeared to be something apart—all this made it more exciting, not less.

And this is precisely where the “playfulness” that so marks the art created in the last twenty years leaves me uncomfortable. The belief today is that in making something that one can engage in, a game that you can play, in laying out a multitude of attractions, of offering different activities, you are in fact being less condescending than the paternalist artistic culture of the post-war welfare state, when a discrete cultural object was created by an elite bureaucratic institution (from your taxes!) and then offered up for contemplation. But which of the two approaches can we really say treated us like children? ♦

(Image credit: courtesy Michael Pickard via Flickr.)

Lost Wage Rampage: A Game

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Game developer Jane Friedhoff—known for her inclusiveness and female-forward games—has designed a new game exclusively for PlayTime. Two mall shopgirls find out they’ve been stiffed wages that the men in their department haven’t. Can you help them make up the difference? Welcome to Lost Wage Rampage!

Lost Wage Rampage is a fast-paced riot grrrl driving game: Grand Theft Auto crossed with Thelma & Louise. Designed for teen and mature audiences, the goal of the game is to steal as many valuable objects from the mall as possible, in order to get the money that should have been the girls’ in the first place. Drift, skid, and rocket your car through the mall, crashing into and collecting valuable loot to add to their payback. Get your score as close as you can to the money they should have made while navigating infinite and constantly changing mall layouts. And look out: an ever-growing presence of mall cops is intent on stopping your heist.

Lost Wage Rampage is a cheeky take on the gender pay gap, a satircal game based on the all-too-common female experience of discovering you’re being underpaid and wanting to do something about it.

Ready to play? Download the Lost Wage Rampage app for Mac or Windows here. This work contains strong language and comic mischief that may be unsuitable for younger players. Please use your discretion.

(Team credits: Game design and code by Jane Friedhoff. Art and animation by Marlowe Dobbe. Procedural level gen engine by Andy Wallace. Music credits: “Twisted” by Kevin MacLeod and “Blood Robot” by Streepthroat.)

The Power of Play: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

A board game deconstructs the mystifying traditions and abuses of power inherent in traditional arranged marriages and a game designer learns that her game is the perfect platform to start a dialogue about matters that would otherwise go unspoken.

I have always felt that play is one of the easiest ways to bring people together. Families and friends congregate around games, and the worst result might be an agitated player flipping over the board.

My belief is that if a game like Monopoly can trigger such strong emotions, a game with an underlying narrative can be the perfect platform to start a dialogue about matters that would otherwise go unspoken. This is precisely what I do with the games I design. For me, game design is a medium that provides an accessible, interactive way for people to discuss serious topics—and the most serious, nerve-wracking topic in my life has been the prospect of an arranged marriage.

When going about an arranged marriage, one cannot avoid the “Rishta Aunty:” the disingenuous matchmaker that most girls meet in order to be paired with an eligible young man. My teenage years were overshadowed by this prospect, and I grew up under the Rishta Aunty’s watchful eye. I was expected to behave and dress in a manner that would endear me to her, so that she might consider better marriage options for me. What was most alarming was that these auditions were never about who I was or what I wanted. What mattered was my appearance and family background.

I realized that being away had made no difference to the pressures and norms in my country.

After years of societal pressure, I took things into my own hands, and enrolled in an American university in an effort to escape the prospect of an arranged marriage. Little did I know that once a Rishta Aunty knew of my existence, she would play an unwanted role in my life, until death (or better, a marriage) do us part. The first time I returned to Karachi for a family wedding, I realized that being away had made no difference to the pressures and norms in my country. Once again, I felt I was being auditioned for roles that I hadn’t chosen: a submissive daughter-in-law, a doting housewife, a baby factory.

While I watched this unfold, I could see the collateral damage of the Rishta Aunty among my friends and family. Most of my friends hid their unhappy marriages from society, but would confess to me in secrecy a common wish: that they hadn’t gotten married. I was frustrated and saddened for them, while at the same time terrified for myself. Of course, I couldn’t say anything. These issues were taboo, and speaking ill of a Rishta Aunty is like signing away your future. I needed an outlet for that pent-up anger, and so I did what I knew best. I turned it into a board game.

I began by listing all the methods I had used to make myself as ineligible as possible: wearing fake engagement rings, pretending to have a boyfriend, spilling the tea tray in front of the aunties, and getting a tan, to name a few. I added issues and ideas that I’d never been able to discuss back at home.

I then turned this list into a light-hearted game dedicated to running away from the Rishta Aunty. While the girls draw scandalous cards to move away from the Aunty, she moves closer to them as she discovers their proficiency in the kitchen or their sizeable dowry. Upon landing on the same tile as a girl, the Aunty marries them off to a less than desirable man.

I created this game to renew my sense of power and to provide some catharsis.

The game reaches a climax with the entry of the Golden Boy, the dreamy Mr. Right, who supports their careers and doesn’t live with his parents. When Mr. Right appears, the game dynamic shifts as the girls switch to the Golden Boy deck in order to flaunt their talents and potentially marry him.

I originally created this game to renew my sense of power and to provide some catharsis. However I also hoped that when people play around with the lives of three fictitious women, they would realize that the lives of millions of real women are also being played with.

The most important point of the game is that you can’t escape—the game cannot end until everyone is married. This harsh reality reflects how powerless many women in these positions are.

 

Plato once said: “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”

It was when I played the game with my close friends that I experienced this firsthand. I learned things about them that I never would have, due to the safe, open space created through the gameplay. One friend revealed that she was approached by an Aunty on the day of her father’s funeral. Another friend revealed that she met her husband on the day of their wedding. I realized not only how shameless some Rishta Aunties really were, but how all of us had suffered in silence. On the other hand, when men played this game, they discovered that women went through all of this psychological trauma right under their noses and they didn’t have a clue!

Arranged! has raised awareness through its satire and commentary.

Arranged! has not only spurred a global dialogue, it has also raised awareness through its satire and commentary. It has taken women around the world on an emotional journey, and has helped South Asian women gain the courage to speak to their families about avoiding some of the misogynistic traditions that accompany arranged marriages.

Catharsis wasn’t the only benefit of this game. In bringing to light all that is wrong with arranged marriage, I have blacklisted myself in the eyes of all Rishta Aunties. If I am ever approached by an Aunty who doesn’t know me, I now only have to say: “Just Google my name, and you won’t want your son to marry me.”

They can play my board game, but they can’t play with my life anymore. ♦

(Image credits: All images of Arranged! courtesy the author.)

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