Author: Rebecca Bednarz

Power Fantasy: An Interview: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

My name is Jane Friedhoff and I’m an independent game designer, play designer, riot grr, etc.

So power fantasy is another one of those terms where I feel like there’s—there could be a very wide definition of it, but right now our understanding of it is pretty limited. So when people hear the phrase power fantasy in relationship to games often it’s usually like power by the already powerful over the marginalized, right? So like Call of Duty where you’re going around shooting people.

I made Slam City Oracles, which is about the two girls sort of slamming into the ground. It’s like the kind of mosh pit metaphor and you get points by sort of shaking everything up.  The more things are moving and flying up in the air, the more points you get.

That was really tied up in a lot of the thoughts I was having about body image and literally taking up space. Instead of having a female character that was small or diminutive or whatever, how could I incentivize this idea of, you know, taking up space and make that permissible?

I have an arcade cabinet of that game and so I’ll see people of all ages and genders playing that game. But a lot of women really like it, you know what I mean? They’ll come in very polite and not necessarily knowing what they’re going to think about this arcade game. And then you see them ten seconds later and they are just wailing on it.

What happens when we sort of explode this idea of a power fantasy and figure out what powers people, you know, who aren’t necessarily straight white dudes need?

When I think about play, it’s that pulling back the curtain, just these tiny little moments when you get to embody something else and kind of see another way of being.

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Dispatches from the Field: IndieCade: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

[music]

IndieCade is an international festival of independent games. We have one event a year that’s a main festival. It’s kind of based on a film festival model.

The easiest thing that I always go to is that it’s the Sundance of games.

IndieCade is a wide tent festival that includes all sorts of games and play that challenge our ideas, both in medium and our ideas of play.

Any kind of game, any way of approaching looking at games, we’re very open to that.

It’s really about interactive experiences.

Make sure you’re doing those tasks! Or management is gonna have a fit! Also, if your phone rings, answer it.

Hi, hello, thank you for calling—

We both have had office jobs and so that definitely fit into it. Uh, we also, uh, like to joke around at home, like, I’m working really hard, by pretending to bang on the keyboard and we thought, what if that was a game mechanic, which we did that so…

Yeah.

Ghosts of Miami is a visual novel. It’s set in 1986 Miami and stars a young Cuban American detective who notices like all of the drug related violence, uhm, immigration, and race violence that’s happening in her community.

We’re looking for things that are innovative, but we know that’s an empty phrase, and so it’s kind of what do people all perceive to be innovative and so then who is chosen to be involved with this process. Um, it matters a lot what their opinion is of that.

You know, this is supposed to be a safe space, so who thought I’d be into this women from the DMV? My name is Anne Dark and I’m a media artist and game designer. Uh, I created a card game called Objective. It’s basically a game about the kind of challenge standards of beauty and the relationship between race, gender, and beauty.

I’m Lishan AZ and I am exhibiting Tracking Ida, which was my main thesis project. It’s an alternative reality game about Ida B. Wells.

Especially with things that involve like awards and nominations, there is a need to have clear values.

Our jury is primarily people who’ve shown games at the festival. It’s like, thank you for being part of the community, thank you for coming and showing, you are a part of this community. We want that community to sort of reinforce and shape itself.

We’ve seen a lot of diversity and it comes out of that original thought about setting up IndieCade in a way that we’re showing games that we care about ourselves, that we want to play ourselves.

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Mediated Experiences: An Interview: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

[string instrument and piano music]

[voice of Henry David Thoreau]

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone in the woods a mile from any neighbor in a house which I had built myself.

A lot of people ask me or they actually assume that Walden is an educational game. Walden is not, at its core, necessarily an educational game. It’s actually built to be a piece of entertainment.

The idea came from a long time interest and love that I had in the book itself and it kind of clicked to me that there was something really important at the core of this book for modern readers. There’s a kind of catharsis one goes through as they play the six hours of this large, open world game as Thoreau. Much of his experiment is about trying to understand how much do we need to say, work to support ourselves and how much time should we be spending really having a connection with nature and, you know, where do our values lie.

The early press that we got about the game was how ironic it was to make a game about living in nature. I find this to be, um, an interesting response. I understand it, obviously. Playing a game about living in nature is not living in nature. But I always ask people, have you ever watched a film about living in nature? have you read a book, perhaps Walden, about living in nature? These are all mediated experiences. I’ve yet to really parse through why it is that playing is not the same level of interpretation and experience as reading or watching, but that difference is there.

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The Yoda Project: An Interview: Transcript

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My name is Gwen Smith. I am an artist, I am a mother, I am a seeker, I am a finder, and I’m a player.

The Yoda series is a collection of images which shows the character Yoda as well as the lifespan of our child, River. My partner, Haim Steinbach, has used the Yoda character since the early ‘80s as an avatar for himself. So when people asked him for portraits he often would wear the Yoda mask. Many people still don’t know what he looks like.

We started a postcard / Christmas card project, and the first one was a picture of our cat, Hector, and he had caught a mouse. I remember sending it to my grandmother and my grandmother was like, This is the strangest Christmas card I’ve ever gotten in my life. And I said, well, you know, hang on, it’s going to get weirder!

So subsequently, each year around November, the Yoda mask comes out. River gets a year older and the series continues.

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Trevor Smith on Teppei Kaneuji: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

There’s two sorts of artists: those that begin with a clear vision of the desired outcome, then there are those like Teppei Kaneuji that play with what’s in front of them, building structures and surface in a more improvisational way. It’s kind of like jazz.

White Discharge is a great example of this. It’s made out of many objects that he probably sourced at a big box store. Brightly colored plastic objects are piled high on a backyard barbecue. Their contrasting colors are visually unified by a pour of white, plaster-like material.

It’s as if he’s using these functional objects to create a landscape for my imagination—kind of like a post-consumer’s version of a Chinese scholar’s rock. I can project myself into it as if it’s a real landscape and imagine playing on its ramps and exploring its crevasses. It’s a meditation on our culture of overproduction and overconsumption.

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Trevor Smith on Roman Signer: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

Roman Signer applies the forces of nature to everyday objects in highly unusual ways. Each of his works begins with him asking himself, what would happen if . . . ? What would happen if I drove a kayak down the middle of a country road? What would happen if I took my work truck and ran it down a ramp as if it were a toy?

Every day, in moments of quiet reflection, I sit down in my office chair and slowly spin myself around. Roman Signer sits down, asks what if? and spins himself around using rockets. He takes a small, ordinary action and makes it extraordinary, even cosmic.

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Trevor Smith on Robin Rhode: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

When we look at a picture, we can’t help but project ourselves into it. It doesn’t have to be highly realistic to have this effect on us. Robin Rhode, I think, is a great example of this phenomena.

He makes photographic series and videos in which he interacts with a drawing that he makes. The drawings are very simple. They’re the kind of drawings you might see on a wall as graffiti or a chalk drawing on pavement.

He uses this drawing to imagine himself performing feats of virtuosity, making the kinds of balletic slam dunks of a basketball that no human is in fact capable of. What happens is there’s the kind of a space that you become aware of between ordinary physical limits and the boundlessness of our aspiration.

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Trevor Smith on Rivane Neuenschwander: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

In Watchword, Rivane Neuenschwander invites us to play a variation on magnetic poetry. Instead of a refrigerator, we have the world map. Onto this oceanic surface we’re invited to place words that connote responsibility, agency, and empowerment.

The artist has gleaned these from images of protest signs found on the internet. There are so many protest movements in the world today that they are in danger of becoming background noise.

I love how her game shifts our attention to the emotion and language that connect vastly disparate movements. I also love that she invites us to pin these words to our clothes to that we can wear them like a badge of honor.

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Trevor Smith on Pedro Reyes: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

One of the things that interests me about Pedro Reyes is his use of play to engage with utopian ideas about social change. Disarm is one of a number of works in which he has taken guns that were used in the narco wars in Mexico and transformed them into more useful objects.

In one work, he melted down the weapons to cast them into shovels that were then used to plant trees, but what can be more utopian or playful than turning guns into musical instruments?

It is fascinating to watch these weapons operate in ways far from their original lethal purpose, but the music they play does not necessarily invite peaceful reflection. They may also be calling us to action.

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Trevor Smith on Paul McCarthy: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

Paul McCarthy is an L.A. guy. He’s fascinated by Hollywood and legendary figures like Walt Disney, whose work underpins ideas about modern American morality and ethics.

Pinocchio is one of the darker stories that Disney adapted for the screen. It is the story of a wooden marionette who wishes to become a boy. Pinocchio’s nose grows whenever he tells a lie and he’s practically a poster child for misbehavior.

Pinocchio could be the mascot of this exhibition since play offers kind of a safe space to misbehave.

McCarthy calls his boy Pinocchio Pipenose, a brutal industrial metaphor that contrasts sharply with Pinocchio’s loving creation by a wood carver.

Pinocchio Pipenose plays perversely with mass-produced condiments, such as ketchup, mayonnaise, and chocolate sauce. It’s an abject performance of infantile behavior and waste.

When kids play with their food, it’s cute. When adults do it, it’s disgusting.

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Trevor Smith on Nick Cave: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

In the video Bunny Boy, we see a darkened space lit by a single spotlight. Artist Nick Cave, dressed in a pink bunny suit, moves slowly, cautiously, sometimes seductively. He skirts the spotlight moving in and out of shadow as if he’s uncertain of the consequences of his visibility.

Watching this from a narrowing darkened corridor, I get the uncanny sensation that I am seeing something that is both real and imaginary. Even the moments when he steps fully into the spotlight, it feels like I’m watching something private, even secret.

When Cave began making his works in the early 1990s, he likened them to suits of armor so it’s remarkable to see here the artist’s powerful black torso exposed.

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Trevor Smith on Martin Creed: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

I installed a different version of Martin Creed’s Half the Air in a Given Space a few years ago at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard.

We installed the work in the entrance to the museum itself and one of the things that I observed was that when people arrived at the museum they all kind of had a serious expression on their face like they were gonna learn something or that they had to pay attention and then when they went through the balloon room and I saw their faces afterwards, their faces had really lit up and they were kind of full of joy and laughter and it really transformed their expectations of the rest of the experience to follow.

One of the things that I like about Martin’s work is that it’s at one level very simple: exactly half the air is contained by balloons and half is not. In each case there’s a calculation of the volume of air in a room, there’s a calculation of the volume of air in each balloon which gives you the number of balloons you have to blow up. It’s very simple mathematical proposition, but the experience that you of the work is something very different.

You can experience joy and wonder and play and laughter. Some people even might be a little claustrophobic being completely surrounded by balloons. It is such an immersive, playful experience. You can’t really stand back from it. You have to go into it, explore it, be with it. There’s no space between you and the work itself.

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