Dispatches from the Field: Come Out and Play: Transcript

5 4 3 2…[whistle]

[music with clapping]

So Come Out and Play is an annual festival. We’ve been running it now for twelve years.

It offers free games created—original games created by designers from all over the country, sometimes outside of the country.

You know, we think of it as a big street game field day festival.

People go out and use this dowsing rod to help you find different types of sound.

Right now we are at Come Out and Play Family Day here on Governor’s Island in New York City.

Myself and my colleagues at Brooklyn Game Lab are out here demoing Battle Lab, which is our physical live action roleplaying program.

What we’ve brought today is actually a couple different games that our campers have designed this summer. We go through the whole process from brainstorming, writing the rules, play testing, fixing it, and play testing it again. And finally playing and sharing our games.

Come Out and Play is a festival that started off just really for  teens and adults, and has expanded to have games for people of all ages.

I played games. I went to the fencing. I went to the throwing the ball and putting it in the bucket.

We really think about, like,  how do we get people to play together in different ways. It has to feel surprising and fresh, right? There’s nothing sadder in this world than a hopscotch grid that you’ve seen like eight times. They want a game that allows them to hang out with their friends. It’s a three-minute game that between like three and twenty-one people can jump in and play. It takes me like a minute and a half to explain, and once you’ve seen it played I don’t really have to explain it to you at all. And if somebody doesn’t like it, they’re like, alright, I’m going to go do something else. And then somebody else is like, this is my jam, I’m going to do this all night! This is our practice. This is, like, how we think about making something. We just want people to have experiences that they think are joyful and fun.

[music]

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Pedro Reyes

“It is very important to train ourselves in our capacity to play, to be a little bit foolish.”

 

WHO

Pedro Reyes (born 1972, Mexico) lives and works in Mexico City. Having studied architecture, Reyes is keenly interested in how people interact with structures—both built and imagined. While his projects take many forms, they often explore ideas of utopian societies and social revolution. His choice of materials is often inspired by political or social issues, such as gun control and citizenship.

 

WHAT

Disarm Mechanized II is a mechanical orchestra made out of weapons seized by the Mexican police in Ciudad Juárez. As a response to the drug cartel wars, Reyes dismantled the guns to create this work. He collaborated with local musicians to design and build the instruments, and also to compose the music you hear.

 

WHY

The prevalence of gun violence in Mexico and the United States led Reyes to explore how deadly weapons could be turned into agents of peace and social change. By repurposing the guns to make music, he rejects their original violent function.

 

LISTEN

PlayTime curator Trevor Smith discusses how Pedro Reyes uses play for social change. Read the transcript.

 

 

WATCH

Pedro Reyes on the relationship between play and creativity. Read the transcript.

 

 

 

WORKS

 

Disarm Mechanized ll, 2012–14
Recycled metal from decommissioned weapons
Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery

 

(Image credits: Photo by Allison White/PEM; © Pedro Reyes; photo by Allison White/PEM.)

Finish This Sentence: Play Is: Transcript

Pedro Reyes: Play is central to the creative process. To have room to play is to have room to say what if?

Eric Zimmerman: There is the play of shadows on the wall. There’s the idea of playing a musical instrument.

Jade Ivy: Going outside and playing Woodchucks with your friends, like, on a warm, sunny day. You’re just kicking back, relaxing.

Eric Turiel: Relax, take a load off.

Tritemare: Very reminiscent of childhood, early things. Things that ordinarily aren’t fun become fun.

Charlotte Richards: Starting from when we’re really young, it’s the foundation of how we learn, how we have fun.

Mattie Brice: Play is a context where we practice or live through—sort of—alternate realities and experiment with new customs and protocols for various forms of catharsis or exploration.

Travis Larchuk: You’ve got work, rest, and play. Play is the one that is not work or rest.

Jaden D. Francis: Dancing with my mom. And I play with my bike.

Tracy Fullerton: Play is movement within constraints.

Jane Friedhoff: I tend to think about play as existing within a set of confines or constraints, and thinking about creative ways to kind of move in, out, and around them, to subvert them, to take advantage of them.

Sam Roberts: One of the things that lets us immerse totally into play is when we know there is a safety net there, right? It’s like, you’re not happy to jump from a height unless you know something below can catch you, right? Play is a trust exercise. Close your eyes and fall backwards and hope that they catch you.

Alioune N’gom: Play is putting yourself in a situation that is not reality and interacting with other people in a situation that is not necessarily a one-to-one match with reality.

Everett Phillips: Play is laughter. That would be my one-word answer.

Duke DeVilling: Play and sports just go hand in hand.

Kristen Skillman: Relaxing and it takes your mind off of the more serious things.

Randall Roberts: It’s almost like meditation with a smile. It’s chasing after that, it’s chasing after bliss.

Amanda Penny: Play is imaginative because you get to put your own way to everything and it’s just kind of creative!

Courtney Price: Play doesn’t necessarily create anything. It isn’t necessary. It’s funny because I think it’s so necessary. [laughter]

Stephanie Barish: Play is my favorite thing.

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Cosplayers at PAX East: Transcript

So I’m cosplaying as Lucina from Fire Emblem Awakening. It’s probably my favorite in the Fire Emblem franchise. She’s also playable in the Super Smash Bros. so she’s probably a little more widely known.

Today I’m cosplaying as old Luke from The Force Awakens.

My name is Tritemare and I’m the Kigurumi King. I’m a Twitch broadcaster of three years, and this is my costume and character.

My character’s name is Mei. She is from the game Overwatch. She was a scientist and she was cryogenically frozen because of an accident that happened. And I like her because she’s just so bubbly. She’s so happy and she’s ready to take on the world.

My character is from the game Overwatch. It’s a fun first-person shooter game. She’s also a female gamer—a Korean female gamer. And since Korean female gamers kinda get a lot of hate and a lot of sexism and stuff, like, it’s really cool to have a character that exists that, you know, represents something that could be.

It’s something that you can’t do anywhere else. You can’t go and dress up as your favorite character and walk out . . .

I went to Dunkin’ Donuts this morning and people were staring at me like I was nuts!

Well, it’s overall something that sets you apart. And it’s another way to make yourself unique.

Instead of being the shy person that fixes computers, I can run around and say, nerf this!

She’s very shy normally. Like, this is the most I’ve heard her speak in, like, ten years.

I’m very specific with my work now. Like, my gloves took me eleven hours to make, my shirt took me about seventeen.

Everyone has the pose they come with and that’s the character they embody. So when someone asks me for a picture, I do that scene at the end when he pulls his hood off and gives Rey that dopey look.

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Games for Social Change: Interview Transcript

So, I’m known really for many of the social change–based games that I create. Whether it’s the physical, fiscal sport Budgetball that’s played on the National Mall and talks about what it feels like to go into debt and what it feels like to get out of debt—both on a personal and federal level—to a game that gives a history of activism in different cities called Re:Activism, which has been played across the country.

You know Brecht used, had a quote, something about, “Art should not be a mirror; it should be a hammer to shape reality.” And I think there’s something interesting there, and I do think that games and culture provide us with an opportunity to push against the boundaries of a system and the rules of the system so we really look at all the possibilities. We break out of our own thought patterns and find new ways to think, and new perspectives and new points of view.

It lets us play as a kind of person that may not be socially acceptable in real life. So, you know, I can go out there and explore all kinds of issues without the kind of serious consequences that I might have in real life. So, play gives us that opportunity to really try things out, and then, maybe when we’re done, to think about how we can apply that kind of playful mindset to the world we live in.

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Let’s play!

Let’s play!

While the PlayTime exhibition ended in May 2018, PlayTime on pem.org is still up for engagement. We started the conversation here: how is play changing our lives? Check out more on the artists involved and explore the shifting role of play in art and culture with us.

LEARN MORE

Playfully Minded: An Essay

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.)

Board Gaming the System: A Comic Series

For this month’s Board Gaming the System comic, Adam Bessie and Jason Novak draw a new set of cards for Parker Brothers Sorry!

“PIETY, HONESTY, TEMPERANCE, GRATITUDE, PRUDENCE, TRUTH, CHASTITY, SINCERITY”—these were the only ways to advance to a Puritan Heaven of The Mansion of Happiness, the template upon which game of Sorry! was later created by Parker Brothers of Salem, MA. The Mansion of Happiness—widely considered the first mass-produced board game, published in 1843 (also in Salem)—popularized the use of “track” gameplay with which we are all familiar, and which Sorry! is built around. In track games, a single, rigid path takes players toward the final destination: progress is determined not by virtue, but by the luck of the draw, and strategy with the cards you’re dealt (which in Sorry! means trying to knock your opponents off track). What cards are we being dealt in the new year?

Come back for next month’s installment in the Board Gaming the System comic series. Missed the last one? Check it out here.

Playground of My Mind: A Memoir

In our final installment from Julia Jacquette’s visual memoir, she shows us the unexpected importance of play spaces—their geometry, their geography, and the minds behind them—and how they shape us into adulthood. Need to catch up? You can read Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

 

Playground of My Mind: A Memoir

In the next-to-last installment of her visual memoir about playgrounds, artist Julia Jacquette reveals how the play spaces of our youth impact the shape of our lives. Need to catch up? Start over here.

 

The final installment of Playground of My Mind will appear next week.

Disarm: An Interview

“To make a guitar or to make a violin or to make a drum set we were working very much like cavemen. You know blowing and scratching and banging these pieces of metal, trying to figure out how to make sound with them.”

Artist Pedro Reyes talks about the collaborative effort to produce Disarm Mechanized II (2013). This work, which will be shown as part of the PlayTime exhibition, features musical instruments created out of discarded weapons. When constructing Disarm, Reyes invited musicians to help him design and build the instruments and to compose the music they play in the gallery.

Read the transcript.

Board Gaming the System: A Comic Series

This month, comic duo Adam Bessie and Jason Novak offer us a new spin on the Milton Bradley Company classic The Game of Life.

The Game of Life has always reflected the times, even at the start of its own life, a year before the Civil War. Known first as The Checkered Game Life, Milton Bradley’s seminal game was really just checkers with spots which reflected the values, hopes, and worries of the era: Intemperance, Idleness, Speculation, Ruin, Honor, Suicide, and Happy Old Age (50). Since 1860, every generation has updated Life as a mirror—not of what life actually is, but of what the dominant wisdom tells us it should be. And just what should today’s The Game of Life be?

Adam Bessie and Jason Novak, The Game of Artifical LifeAdam Bessie and Jason Novak, The Game of Artifical Life

Adam Bessie and Jason Novak, The Game of Artifical Life

Adam Bessie and Jason Novak, The Game of Artifical Life

Adam Bessie and Jason Novak, The Game of Artifical Life

Adam Bessie and Jason Novak, The Game of Artifical Life

Come back for next month’s installment in the Board Gaming the System comic series. Missed the last one? Check it out here.

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