Duchamp mentioned in the 1946 that “The great trouble with art in this country [the United States] at present, and apparently in France also, is that there is no spirit of revolt— no new ideas appearing among the younger artists. They are following along the paths beaten out by their predecessors, trying to do better what their predecessors have already done. In art there is no such thing as perfection. And a creative lull occurs always when artists of a period are satisfied to pick up a predecessor’s work where he dropped it and attempt to continue what he was doing. When on the other hand you pick up something from an earlier period and adapt it to your own work an approach can be creative. The result is not new; but it is new insomuch as it is a different approach.”

When discussing this issue, I think that this is not only happening in pioneering countries, but also in countries where contemporary art is lagging behind in its development (because at present, as long as the art world is taught on the basis of Western art history, the understanding of the classics is convergent, but art based on indigenous national art, for example, still inevitably falls into the cult of the predecessor and (In turn, in the creation of art, it can fall into the multiple constraints of creative form, creative theme, innovation, etc.). The reason for this is that the old is a major constraint on the creation of almost all art subjects, and in the field of art criticism it puts young artists in the awkward position of having to compare themselves to predecessors. So by innovating in old things, with wit, and by conducting a series of playful experiments are some of the means and methods that young artists have adopted, and perhaps these approaches have enabled them to gain new interpretations and inspiration. This reminds me of a passage in Sprint 1 from ‘Werid Humanities‘, where it is mentioned that because humanism is evolving, it will inevitably extend this generosity, that is, become more inclusive. Inevitably there will be what is called a strange situation. “I would urge that a future of humanism as a scholarly field of inquiry will be to extend this generosity-this going wide and perhaps unavoidably also going weird- further still.”

“ These people were not “professional rhetoricians” (or necessarily professional anythings) but they were cool literary amateurs, and I’ll wager that many had tastes as Catholic (and as profane) as Pietro Paolo Andreini’s. We could call these eclectic minds “latter day” humanists or “amateur” humanists, I suppose.” I think the concept can be reused here.

In an era of growing economic interests in the play industry, declining ‘street protests’ and civic action, and a general lack of time and sense of agency among citizens, Play as a means of responding to provocation, combined with the spirit of activist art, has gradually spread a unique path through a large number of contemporary artworks. In Critical Play Ridical game design, Mary Flanagan refers to numerous cases of how artists have been able to challenge ideas, beliefs and social expectations, and subsequently transform them in their work.

Jack elicits the concept of play in this sprint, launching us to create an art project out of the basho we are in. It is a set of rules for a game, a score, a piece of radical art, a program, etc. It can be any form that is intended to be played. It can be any form of notation intended to be played, or even a combination of scores, while the basho works together to find material that can be used as a team, and to set certain rules for the product. Just as the game uses ‘elements’ to form small goals and game tokens to manage resources.

Here our group worked through the process of thinking about an orange as an objective. The process of constructing the idea was based on the design model for critical games, starting with “set design goals + value goals” and continuing with “verify values, revise goals ” and so on. As there was no division of labour between storytelling and me (Zhiqian Zhang and I were responsible for the interaction design part), I didn’t know much about the value goals and revise goals part. After discussing the presentation of the whole orange project, we decided to:

1, with the Orange logo and the corresponding audio as elements,

2, a random combination of audio to show the exploration of food and the future of food,

3, to present the final interaction by means of a principle.

We need to collect: various audio and visual materials related to oranges. Finally, the work is divided into the collection and organisation of materials, sketching and so on.

In summary, I have gained a certain understanding of Play in this sprint, especially in this stage of learning, the innovation of Play in participatory art practice, and the concept of Play as different from games, which broke many of my previous stereotypes of perception.

Claire Bishop writes, the artist is now a col- laborator in the production of situations rather than the sole producer of dis- crete objects, the work of art is an open process rather than a finite, portable commodity, and those who were previously viewers are now participants.

This is very inspiring to me. As the environment in which we live changes, artworks become more broadly positioned, more diverse in their approach, and more challenged (like the recent industrial and academic shakeups caused by ai painting). I’ve been thinking a lot lately about whether the right ecological zone for researchers in the arts is the university, but clearly I think the current onslaught is looming over this conservative area. Each iteration of technological progress has led to an explosion of output, and new technologies can even reduce the process of thinking and acting by re-creating the work of predessors, just as new artists have done before, or, as in the case of computer games, by creating a greater ‘white space for thinking’. It seems that the barriers of art are about to be broken down even more.

I wonder in what way art will make peace with the new technologies and take on a new life in the face of this new wave of change.

Sprint02 Something about Play / Lisirui Wang / Themes in Contemporary Art (2022-2023)[SEM1] by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0