one of the first artists that came to mind with the onset of this sprint is Lawrence Abu Hamdan. i first encountered his work at the 2019 Turner Prize where he joint-won with his piece Earwitness Theatre at turner contemporary. this follows earwitness testimonies of a syrian prison saydnaya in which prisoners were kept in complete darkness, relying on sounds around them to grasp an idea of their surroundings. using sound effects, like that of foley artists, Abu Hamdan was able to evoke survivor memories and enable an audience to experience them.

what im most interested in sound is not the medium itself but that it cant be contained, that you cant put it in a box, it will always leak- https://turnercontemporary.org/whats-on/turner-prize-2019/

https://www.artforum.com/news/turner-prize-2019-shortlist-announced-79690

the above image is the installation relaying the survivor stories of the prison that we follow as the text appears as if being typed. the sounds created by Abu Hamdan are transmitted around the space to give the effect of being within these traumatic accounts of sensory deprivation.

https://whitecube.com/artists/artist/Marguerite_Humeau

seeking the sensory within the visual and ways this could occur made me think of Marghetite Humeau. taking inspiration from mythologies and story telling, Humeau creates physical entities of the undeveloped and primitive:

 All the worlds I am creating are based on real facts’, Humeau explains. ‘They are based on mysteries that I am trying to understand. I am extracting real things, and then expanding into “what if?” scenarios. It comes from prototyping worlds that are invisible or extinct, or parallel to ours. They might exist, but we don’t really know about them.- https://whitecube.com/artists/artist/Marguerite_Humeau

nurturing these unsteady concepts must need some sensory means of investigating them, making me think about how this was achieved within a process of consuming and making. the above image The Dancer V, A Marine Animal Invoking Higher Spirits, 2020 is a sort of inlay between the imagined and the evident; how does research and inquiry result in physical art objects?

“Embodied knowledge, while often denigrated and disavowed within the modern colonial episteme, confirms that Western scientistic validity comprises only one kind of knowing. Manifest through poetics, aesthetics, and other bodily attunements, sensuous knowledges open to alternative modes of relation. […] A sensory, embodied, affective, and imaginative relation to the world opens to a different kind of ethics and politics.”

Jenna Carine Ashton’s statement is interesting in relation to how Blue may be conceived within a gallery setting. From Watching Blue, I believe these is a congruity between the visual and what we hear but this visual element is more reliant and conditional upon the voice we hear. With the varying tones of voice, sounds and music, and heavy use of metaphor within the content of speech, the visual may act as a backdrop for these ‘stories and imaginative images to be projected onto the blue square quite meditatively. The emotional context of the piece, when learnt, offers insight into why the blue visual is there, and in turn adds much complicity when listening/viewing within a gallery or any public space. This is easy to say as I have just watched this wearing my cosiest jumper, hot water bottle and eating overnight oats; the sounds people make, what they say around me, or facial expressions are not there to be witnessed, making it much easier to look away or move around on my swivel chair. As he begins to whisper, I begin to lean into my laptop even though I can clearly understand what is being said. I believe this is down to the diaristic (through both words and sound) nature of the content which is inviting a response from us as if having a live conversation where we should have input and thoughts. I also think about the use of pauses by Derek Jarman and if this changes how the visual aspect of Blue is perceived. These give us time to ‘look’, reflect, and anticipate what will come next.  

Felix Gonzalez-Torres offers a more momentary interaction with an audience with Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA), which offers a pile of candy at 175 lbs (healthy average weight for a man) that people can take and the gallery keeps adding to. As this candy is taken, the shape, outline and weight of the overall pile of candy diminishes and would need to be added to, to keep the work alive and going. This change in weight and form is reflective of Gonzalez-Torres’ partner who died of AIDS and equates this participation to the change in form; vital to the artwork and its meaning. From multiple people taking this candy we can then see drastic changes to the piece overtime, whereas Blue is more of an immediate and forward way of interacting

https://www.artic.edu/artworks/152961/untitled-portrait-of-ross-in-l-a

Blue, Derek Jarman, 1993

‘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. 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.’

(Duchamp, 1946)

This scenario is rooted within process and the individual variables that make up the role of play within artworks. Approaching this sprint was fairly ambiguous, with texts offering multiple angles of what play could be and what this means within an artwork. This research then began, and still is, to correspond more with my own understanding of play, especially when different texts began to connect and correlate against others. Play initially feels like an obvious, visible word and concept but Play Matters (Miguel Sicart) offers much more interpretation and value to the notion of play that I had not immediately thought about. Perceiving play as an open, exposed and ever-changing concept felt difficult to pin down into research and gathering enough information to then discuss this in class was initially difficult to determine and resolve. Some resolution did come as, within groups, we discussed different texts everyone had read and found correlations between these. It was informative to learn about other areas of research that relates to play, some more literally than others, and decide upon a consensus individually of what this theme and overall sprint means. To me, Play Matters feels like a continuous resistance to definition, leaving it largely to the reader to decipher an understanding of play that is linked to individual experience, culture and social standing. Although I did not study the rest of the text as I did the first chapter, later in the book there was more clarification of where play could be found but also what it could be used for or enable within everyday life but also within galleries and museums. I found this to be the most interesting aspect of the reading, perhaps because I have given tours and workshops within galleries as part of my employment with them. Play being utilised within a gallery space, either by an artist or the institution itself, feels important in a societal way and offers an alternative to the already established rules and customs that are always to be found within institutions whether we recognise them or not. This is where I felt uncertain about the sprint; facilitating workshops or anything that requires participation from others is always a very DIY process, something that has to be created, tested, completed and learn from and a part of me felt that this research was lost without the execution and learning from the performance involved. Perhaps this is a reason why it is hardly found in academia, there is a resistance to interpretation that can only be resolved by constructing, attempting and experimenting? This reminds me of the issues surrounding information within making-spaces within galleries; curators insist on minimal language/signage as to what is expected of participants whereas gallery assistants want more of a closed finite example as to enable more confidence and engagement from participants.  

Play and Participation in Contemporary Arts Practices (Tim Scott) took much longer to read and decipher than the previous text, being so dense and full of examples of artworks to complement concepts. This text, through approaching play in a way that is omitting more exposition of ideas and visual outcomes, enabled me to get a better understanding of Play Matters and to situate this in my own experiences and knowledge. It was interesting to learn about The Model- A Model for a Qualitative Society (Palle Nielsen), a very free and open example of play and participation within an artwork. That this was viewed as a ‘qualitative’ way of both viewing society as a whole and as a ‘model’ of what it could be, correlates with Sicart’s view of play as a ‘need occasional freedom and distance from our conventional understanding of the moral fabric of society.’ This could also be a way of conveying the importance of play and participation within public galleries; one of few easily accessible institutions that allows for learning and education. What I find most interesting in both texts is the attempting to define and question the possibilities and limits of play. This is found in a humanist/post-humanist rivalry of what play is and what it is capable of; an all-freeing exercise or something that has many, to varying degrees, limits within a network of variables. This was something my group discussed after completing the WALK score. This score consisted of a set of fairly open and subjective rules that told us to walk to three points in an any open space with differing speeds and times. The subjective nature of the allocating time and speed to the walks and points was something we modified as a collective in order to have a shared understanding of these and to stop questioning what is a long time and what is a slow walk. We thought about the variable involved in this task and what could be added to make this task adaptable and interesting after playing once. We agreed the randomness within many Fluxus scores was a necessary component to prohibit ability that could account for a winner and evens out the already limiting variables. We thought about what-ifs like if someone had a broken leg and their idea of speed and waiting would be vastly different to my own, or if there was a way to visually see the task and the paths created by players choices of points. This was something we thought vital to bring into our own score, even though this was difficult to execute we decided it best for players to be told a location rather than the potential of having a predetermined idea of sections of the library, as a completely random selection of books was vital for the task to work.  

Maybe an important aspect of play is the unexpected which in turn enables the approach and process to be fundamental to participating in play. Miranda July and Phyllida Barlow were the first artists that came to mind when I thought about the theme, these are in vastly different ways but both make work that require levels of interaction with a range of variables, be that materials, ideas, and people. This is found in the process of making which means reaching the outcome of this process is ever-changing and modifiable.  

initial ideas of what our groups score can be and how it can be played. these were quite small so needed ways of being expanded or joined.  we came up with the Rework the Library idea to incorporate a free accessible space that anyone can use and take part in.

instructions to compose your own piece of writing through existing texts. we tried this as a group at eca library and it went really well. our biggest struggle in coming up with these instructions was whether players should pick random books within the library themselves or if they should be given a location. we went for the latter in the form of cards that would be borrowed for the duration of the task. as this was the first time some of the group had been to the library, we thought it was a good incentive to go and see what the library has to offer. being an instagram account, it will be easy for others to see what books the eca library has and if they would be useful for people, students, researchers.

^cards that locate a section of the library

attribution CC BY

the most ‘open’ license that allows people to modify the score and create new licenses.

Miranda July Somebody app, 2014-2015.

choosing to participate in this ‘half-app/half-human’ experience that turns communication into a game. people would react to a message that they would have to relay and judge the best way to ‘give’ the message to the person it’s for. this app requires a high level of participation as there is a ‘powerful’ ability to choose how you can convey messages and in what form. many of the messages sent were everyday scenarios of letting someone know about something, breaking up with someone or declaring love; the strange factors in this being context and unfamiliarity. to take part in this you have to download the app and be willing to ‘change’ into something or someone else to deliver a message or ‘reenactment’ of a message. participants can be creative with the relaying and respond to the message before the person who it is aimed at can perceive it through a third body. this, as an experiment, would test our own limits to what we would say or convey to someone we have not met but also how we interact with one another on a larger, ‘worldwide’ scale. like the ‘walk’ score, i imagine there is no time to familiarise yourself with the task but to do it within that moment and find ways to modify it and make it ‘better’ later, also there is the element of being seen by others whilst carrying out a message which needs to be taken into account.

PHYLLIDA BARLOW

https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/name/phyllida-barlow-ra

“I enjoy the idea of reaching into the space of the space, beyond the human scale, exploring overhead or underfoot – my work is often parasitic or antagonistic to the building. I see each space as something to be explored, rather than just a place to put something.”

thinking of play within an art-making process or how an audience may perceive and interact with the work. Barlow works with large industrial materials that she then manipulates through destructive means of throwing, breaking and putting together, to fill often large spaces with a variety of assemblages. with this process there are elements of the work that come down to chance, of what shape and size it will take once it has been modified by Barlow. i believe Sicart’s notions of play can be found in scale, something that we would encounter so unexpectedly, like Claes Oldenburg’s large-scale projects that puts otherwise functioning objects into a public space.

http://oldenburgvanbruggen.com/largescaleprojects/gartenschlauch-04.htm

going to see Phyllida Barlow’s work at the Royal Academy exhibition (2019) meant a lot of ducking underneath or walking through tight spaces between sculptures. there was no route or entry but spaces, almost like vantage points, where the ability to see the work from different angles was permitted. a way of making and showing what the materials have gone through are not covered up or attempted to be hidden, ‘Barlow, instead of concealing, takes pleasure in exposing the chaos while allowing multiple scenarios to exist simultaneously.’ (https://sculpturemagazine.art/phyllida-barlow). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37I56RHFpz4 within this video she mentions Buster Keaton and his films as being an important influence behind her work. his ability to create impossibly comedic moments in his films through large props that are made to fail and fall apart is seen within Barlow’s work. walking underneath these assemblages gives the feeling of hesitancy and the need to be careful; these are made with the intention that they could fall and collapse at any moment.

https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/performance-at-tate/perspectives/robert-morris

Bodyspacemotionthings, 2009, is a re-staging of a Robert Morris exhibition in 1971. this consisted of ‘interactive sculptures that would experiment with conceptions about sculptural space and human physicality by having museum-goers put their own bodies to the test’. industrial materials in the forms of ramps, cylinders and climbing walls took up the Turbine Hall for four days which was originally intended to be five weeks. ‘Before the show’s opening, Tate staff had posed for photographs depicting the intended method of meeting each challenge; these images were affixed to the appropriate pieces’, these constraints placed onto the exhibition were not entirely followed by participants, who exceeded these limitations to a point of damaging the structures. it can be viewed as contradictory to allow participation as ‘an opportunity for people to involve themselves with the work, to become aware of their own bodies, gravity, effort, fatigue, their bodies under different conditions’ (Morris) but to also situate instructions with each object. to ‘become aware’ of your own body, using these structures to do so, requires freedom and an allowance for flexibility in individuals deciding how something may be interacted with. this could also be a way of enabling play through constraint; accommodating to adult participants who may need more stimuli to engage with each form. the Bodyspacemotionthings version of this was modified to prepare for a similarly enthusiastic range of participants of the 1971 original, by using more durable materials and having more staff present.

all quotations: https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/performance-at-tate/perspectives/robert-morris

this reminds me of an undergrad crit where a fellow student created a free-standing sculpture made of found materials that was intended to be interactive. they were disappointed at how ‘much’ the piece had been engaged with and did not concur with their own perceptions of what would happen. we summarised that constraining methods could ‘help’ the work reach a goal that was closer to what the artist intends, but by giving the work an interactive label is essentially ‘giving it over’ to others versions of engagement and what interactive means. as this happened at a university private view, the variable of who the participant is becomes crucial as art students seeing the opportunity for interaction may take this further as there are less inhibitions and more knowledge around what being a participant means.

Play and Participation in Contemporary Arts Practices (Stott, Tim, 2015)

Precursors to Ludic Participation

‘diverse arts practices moved away from the studio-to-gallery model of artistic production and began to investigate more performance-based or event-based models’ (pg 16). using specific artwork examples, this chapter looks into how artists manifest an idea of participation and play in their works and how these examples fit into theories of play.

humanistic– ‘allows players to take pleasure in mastery’

post-humanistic– ‘to be in play is to be played…mutually entangled and conditioned upon other player/objects/dynamics’

The Model- A Model for a Qualitative Society (Palle Nielsen, 1968) was a large-scale ‘adventure playground’ situated within Modern Museet, Stockholm for three weeks and saw 20,000 children participate. ‘Nielsen believed the spontaneous, self-organising children’s play to be an instance of a living community that could serve as a model for adult society’ (pg 17). this work fits into a humanist argument of ‘play as the optimal achievement of a human agent…most free’ (pg 18). as an ever-evolving piece, having tools shared to continue the construction, it fits into Reichadt’s four categories of toys and play objects as ‘must involve participation in its construction’. to achieve the ‘most free’ form of being, one cannot give out or rely upon rules that would constrain play, leaving an allowance for an ability for the player to maneuver and manipulate a space freely. an interesting contender for this way of theorising play is Victor Newsome’s example of a girl playing with a doll, observed by her mother (pg 23). this is outlined as an ‘entanglement’ (pg 29), with all the elements interacting with one another. these elements are: to the girl, the doll is a real child like the girl playing with it; the mother is also participating in this play as the child’s play turns into a plaything she is getting enjoyment from. there is also the variable of the child’s interaction with the doll as a set-up for her as learnt behaviours from her mother. this example depicts a need to theorise play, not just as having an embodied ‘freeness’, as dependable on a set of variables that determine play and how something will be engaged with.

https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/15/385

later in this chapter, an example of play was Yoko Ono’s, White Chess Set, 1966. i thought this was interesting as by removing the black and white rule of playing with a chess set, Ono is eliminating any insinuation of ‘war’ within the game and what is left is ‘negotiation’.  of course playing chess is possible but players must know where all their pieces are on the board, thus turning into more of a memory game where the chess rules are not as valued by the participants. due to this modification of the game ‘players have the capacity to redefine the conditions of their play’ (pg 28), allowing or encouraging participants to to negotiate a way of playing or to set their own rules entirely. this allows players to be present in the construction of game rules which could be ‘remade with each play’ and enables players ‘increase
complexity in participation, and to prompt players to organise in their play according to the changed conditions of the game itself.’ (pg 29)

Play Matters, Miguel Sicart, offers a theory of play that is all-encompassing and boundless; a form of engagement or participation within the world and with one another. He alludes to  play as being amid ‘order and chaos’, (pg 3) not one or the other; an active, organic permanence within all actions and ventures. play lies on the ‘verge of destruction’ (pg 3) where expressiveness and freedom are to be found, an estrangement from inhibition and regulation. ‘Like any other form of being, play can be dangerous; it can be hurting, damaging, antisocial, corrupting’ (pg 2), distancing itself from ‘playful’ and ‘fun’, play is proposed as ‘a way of being in the world’ with its own choices and agency.

‘We need play precisely because we need occasional freedom and distance from our conventional understanding of the moral fabric of society. Play is important because we need to see values and practice them and challenge them so they become more than mindless habits.’

play is outlined here as an approach or way of accessing an alternative way of being, one where we can see, play with and rearrange the rules and customs that surround us. play is a way of ‘expressing ourselves’ and learning and adapting, to and from, ‘what makes us human.’ how this happens is complicated with an intricate web of variables; the context of a ‘game’ and its agency, the players, objects being interacted with and ‘rules, negotiations, and locations.’ how do we know when we have stepped into play? when these new rules and ways of interacting have to be negotiated and set out? this introduces questions of how fluid a process of starting play is and to what extent it is ‘designed’.

‘It is not designed exclusively in the Bauhaus-inspired tradition of a creator who shapes an object for a function, but in a weaker sense: designed as mediated by things’

these are designed and facilitated for the ability to change over time and remain unfixed for all variables and players involved. sets of ‘rules’ can change over a period of time with fashions, as play is deemed important now within gallery spaces, is this way of participating a permanent fixture to galleries and museums?

SCORE

as a group, we followed this ‘score’ and commented about it against the A Summary of the Characteristics of Scores, Anna, Lawrence Halprin.  when we thought we understood the task we began. We had to work out issues along the way- how to assign numbers, how many and what length of time is short/long. Finding an end point= was the walk something we collectively made or would there be a ‘winner’? We laughed a lot as it felt strange to be a part of a group but everyone is standing far away from one another. As the times of walking a staying in an area is different, there was time to watch one another to see what they were doing. Did this fit with individual ideas of time and distance? Why was this so funny? If completed many times it may become more of a deliberate act? We focused on an ‘equality’ within the score due to randomness of numbers but also a 0-9 way of calculating speed and time is subjective, we changed this through the process of completing the score to see if would form a different response. With added clarity we felt more comfortable as a group to do our own ‘task’ of getting from one point to another with added ‘rules’. when talking through the score we thought about ‘what-ifs’ like if there was a winner or if there was a visual aid to the score to show the movements and paths created by its players. 

“Weird Studies” is a scholarly field that doesn’t and can’t exist. The Weird is that which resists any settled explanation or frame of reference. It is the bulging file labelled “other/misc.” in our mental filing cabinet, full of supernatural entities, magical synchronicities, and occult rites. But it also appears when a work of art breaks in on our habits of perception and ordinary things become uncanny. ‘https://www.weirdstudies.com/about …’

participating in the weird-o-verse was useful for visualising research and find connections between different research stages/areas. i had found my research so far to be quite jumpy, maybe needing some further explanations of how areas connect but i found, to myself and the group, it was simple to follow and connections made sense.

through presenting the boards individually, we started to place pieces of our research into the middle board when we felt things were connecting. this started as a very medical focused board but then found it was developing into other areas: iconography, speculative fiction, hallucinogens; we realised many of these new things added connected to POOLCORE, so used this as a ‘centre’ for the board. this, in the form of a subreddit or youtube video, is an aesthetic that is calming and peaceful to the viewer. i like the natural and neutral words we have for describing the textural qualities of water and what it feels like to be submerged inside it. these pools are often reflecting a wavy interpretation of what is above the water, most likely a grand looking staircase, often taking up most of the image. we, as the voyeur of the image, feel the benefits of water from being far away from it but maybe that’s the point? letting ourselves glance into a stage that feels so alien/empty/backlit/still. we discussed the connection of this and well-being or natural medicine; how these places are often marketed for us to experience or maybe even prescribed.

CONSPIRACY THEORIES

positing fictions into a real/known world- harry potter- roald dahls the witches-

unable to step out of it like you would if it were a game that was being played-spirals continuously like the world has a creator which then has to have a creator… the internet also makes it spiral

why?- distrust in politics, people, systems may push people towards these conspiracies

tolerance levels

why do i own tarot cards?

having a lucky number

permission- high quality literature/high art/academic voices/famous people

https://www.theonion.com/

correlations/ anomalies

as a group we used our shared miro board as a starting point to create a new conspiracy theory that contains enough narrative to work. it was interesting to use the correlation generator to witness correlations between random things; the one we used is about swimming pool drownings and US nuclear power plants. it was an easy process to find material via scientific websites to backup this  correlation and make a sound ‘argument’ for it.

we found a recent article that we thought contained enough similarities to fit the conspiracy narrative and backup the fiction we have created. we then found a physics article that we thought gave the swimming pool one more sense in relation to the correlation we are aiming for. as the pool article contained ‘hot tubs’ we thought, as many people around the world own one, it would create much traction in bringing the conspiracy to light.

it was useful to watch the reed berkowitz interview where he details the relations between playing video games and participating within a conspiracy theory, especially his research into discordians and apophenia. basing a kind of ‘religion’ on the law of fives (5 fingers/toes, limbs..) seems like something that would be difficult to believe but my coffee and cake, later that day, came to five pounds and i tried to concentrate on the circumstantial reason for this. what happens when a ‘five’ appears? who are the creators of such religions/groups/conspiracy theories?