Review About Week3 – PLAY&SCORE 01

Before the class, I had an advance preview about the theme of this sprint. The key point we are going to learn is What PLAY is and how we “make a play”. At the beginning of the class, Jake showed us a paper named a summary of the characteristics of scores:

The paper showed a point about ‘Characteristics of Scores’, which included “RSVP”.

• R means resource, like a kind of inventories resources, the motivations, and determine requirements.
• S means Score, describe processes leading to performance.
• V means valuation, incorporate change based on feedback and selectivity, including decisions.
• P means performance, establishes “style” of the accomplishment of the process.

At the beginning of the class, to help understand this theory, Jake divided all of us into different groups, or Basho. We were providing different reading materials. I was in Jake’s purple group🟣, our reading task is a paper of Bengt at klintber, which was from Twenty Five orange events(1963-6).

In public perspective, the text may seemed weird and crazy, but it is a kind of art forms. As I learnt about the writer’s background, I found that he represented a form which was named Fluxus, they aimed at translating cultural, social and political innovation into action. They promote the reform wave of art, promote the art of life, oppose academia, and advocate non artistic reality with the intention of attracting all audiences, not just artists, amateur art lovers and professionals. I also learnt this art theory in the preview reading, the Fluxus created activities or actions combined normal human being life with art. The way of these processes were like PLAY. So let’s look back to theme of this sprint: PLAY.

What is play and how we play?

To play is to be in the world. Playing is a form of understanding what surrounds us and who we are, and a way of engaging with other. Play is a mode of being human. (from Play Matters, Sicart) And also, play can be pleasure and also has its potential dangers within dark play. In many ways of play, it has became the force that pulls us together. It is a way of explaining the world, others, and ourselves.

On Wednesday, we had discussions with other members in different groups. We found that although the forms of Play might be different, but the logic was almost same, all showed playing was happening everywhere in our world, and it connected us became “society”.

In a word, playing is thinking, manipulating, changing, and adapting rules. And I suppose that whether score or the games are just the ways of PLAY’s expression. In this class assignment, we would try to create our own score, games or another new theory based on PLAY’s logic and its inherent rules. In addition to understanding the definition of PLAY and its existing context, we need to be clear about the reasons for doing so, to figure out why we play, and what is the meaning and value of play to the world.

From my point of view, I think that any form of play is to help the society to maintain or regain the original relationship with things that have obviously been lost. In PLAY, we can also arouse emotion and empathy in the form of subjective experience, and enable players to see new perspectives and the possibility of cultural and social change, which should be further explored.

Review About Week4 – PLAY&SCORE 02

On Monday, we had a leaderless group discussion. Our meeting’s theme was creating a score under the concepts of PLAY, Fluxus and anything relevant. We continued the “orange event” of the previous week, trying to start with it, integrate the logic of play, and build our own score world – because for us, it is very helpful to create a small model with PLAYy as the logic when we have not really understood the definition of it.

After a discussion for about one hour, we made our own mind map. The background was Twenty Five orange events. 

• 1/ We dealt with the oranges by following  this score, and we found each movement would stimulate our senses. Step by step, we heard the sound of oranges being peeled and chewed, smelled the smell of oranges, touched the juice of oranges, and basically, we saw oranges.
• 2/ This made us think about the relationship between daily things, senses, human beings and art. In other words, we entered the PLAY mode of thinking.
• 3/ Next, I thought about how to create a world where human senses can interact if sensory relevance is like the interaction of different accessories or elements in games?
• 4/ So we boldly let “listening” replace “eating”! Starting with oranges, it serves as a clue to connect our ideas. When we completed 25 orange tasks, we found that the most used sense was hearing, just like ASMR. We decided to compare the voice of these oranges to code. One day, human beings do not need to eat physically. We just need to sort through different voice codes to get the energy we need.

So our score background was born. We started to make our score – a sound trigger element. We made 25 kinds of orange events sounds into interactive buttons. When people use these buttons, they can sort the sounds triggered by the buttons at will. Each sort will bring different feelings to everyone. This is the early form of “orange sound code”.

Firstly, we collected more than 10 orange related audio as the basic element of our score logic. When I was an undergraduate, I majored in directing, and I was exposed to professional courses of sound design. Therefore, I processed every “organe” sound through software. (As shown above)

Then we integrated our own resources in the group, found the partner who can draw pictures to design the exchange button, and asked the partner who can learn the program to design the interaction page. The interactive page we have created will be displayed to you in the next class.

Our score is highly interactive, and gives each participant the power of “remix”. To some extent, I think we have built an OER platform, because these orange sounds are open. You can choose the order of orange buttons to play audio according to your own wishes, thus forming your own “music”. It is a mini process of: receiving concepts – re creation – producing self-awareness.

On Thursday (make up missed lessons for Wednesday), Jake showed us how to make a Creative Commons License by using Creative Commons Licensing for our score. It sounds like a patent, which means if you’ve got your Creative Commons license, then anyone who wants to use your score on OER, they need to apply for your admission. Although our score was not so perfectly, this license also protect our work of efforts.

After learning from Creative Commons License, we showed our score group by group. Our score was finished by an interactive device.

Click here link to our score – orange events.

This is what I said above. We make this score product through 25 orange events. I think that in this process, we use deconstruction to split the relationship between “oranges” and human senses, and then reshape it through constructivism to connect oranges with human hearing. We use the connectionist way of thinking to build the connection between human physical senses and food in the future world of mankind.

From a critical point of view, there are also shortcomings in our group’s work. Because what we advocate is to achieve “orange code” through these sounds, but due to technical limitations, we can only click the buttons on the interactive page independently, and then play our orange sounds in the order that users like, instead of combining them into a sequential audio work in our interactive program, we can only collect and connected in series through external recording devices, which is also something we need to improve technically.

Sprint2_Week4#Play / Jia Ding / Themes in Contemporary Art (2022-2023)[SEM1] by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0