The 5 Characteristics of Play

I've been searching for articles online and came across a book written in 1938 by a Dutch historian and cultural theorist, Johan Huizinga. In his book "Homo Ludens" (Man the Player) he defines five characteristics of play. Though this text is dated, I thought his points were interesting since I don't think we've come up with our own definition of play.

1. Play is free, is in fact freedom
2. Play is not "ordinary" or "real" life
3. Play is distinct from "ordinary" life both as to locality and duration
4. Play creates order, is order. Play demands order absolute and supreme.
5. Play is connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained from it

Something to think about...

P.S. see the wikipedia entry for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Ludens

The best slice of internet, ever.

Hi all, just stumbled across this, whilst having nothing to do specifically with anything at all really, it's probably one of the most useful resources ever. There appears to be a few texts we have mentioned, plus hundreds more. You do have to register, but once that's done you have access to thousands of texts, entire books, essays and the opportunity to contribute too.

Enjoy!

http://a.aaaarg.org/

Schiller, Theory of Play and the Aesthetic

We’ve been discussing notions of play and the aesthetic, so I thought I’d post my understanding of Schiller’s theory of play, from his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.

Under the play drive, the sensuous drive and the form drive are united.

The sensuous drive looks for our experience of time to be filled with content; we expose ourselves to determination by things. To be determinable is to be alive, to expose ourselves to the world.

Under the form drive, we form things; what we wish is to bring about figures, suspend time. We seek an end to change, it is a state of determination.

Play is a way of uniting change and identity. In play we remain exposed to impressions that come to us from the world, and think ourselves. Play is the aesthetic state, we must dwell in the aesthetic state to experience beauty; beauty is a figure that has come alive (form + sensuous), and we are only able to relate to it through play.

travel around the world (?)

not so much about travelling around the world, or otherwise, but that what is essentially the same set of actions/the same event is taking place in all these different locales/contexts... something that we may want to think about in terms of staging and documenting 'the play'. enjoy!

Visa Card World Currency TVC With Matt Harding

(and also see this wikipedia entry for some info on the guy in the blue tee: matt harding)

10 Dec & 14 Jan - Lab Discussion

In our last two meetings, we continued to narrow our areas of interest, and I have combined our notes, thoughts and discussion here:

PLAY

Allowing experimentation, dialogue and exploration of the concept. Drawing on writing by Steve Connor and projects by Space Hijackers, Flash Mobs, Association of Atomic Astronauts.

Can take any or all of the following forms/formats within a public space:

1. Game - group activities remembered from childhood (sleeping lions, bulldog, tag, charades, races - wheelbarrow or otherwise, telephone or the formation of a new type of game). Possibility for a public to be incorporated into the game.
2. Event - spontaneous event such as a dance party/dance intervention (i.e. flash mobs, snowball) involving communication, interaction and/or dialogue with a public or audience. The audience would get involved in the event with us.
3. Market - (re)creation of a marketplace or carnival or festival in which tangible items are traded/bartered or sold to a public, including food, tea/coffee, desserts, ice cream, etc. This also includes the "sale" or transfer of non-tangible items such as secrets, jokes, fortunes, kisses as well as gift-giving/presentation of items without a charge to a public. The market could take place in one or more locations that we will determine or can take the form of a mobile market place (traveling food truck or cart) that can interface with different areas of/in London.
4. Presentation - this would be a planned performance or event directed toward an audience. We could invite people to attend or we could invite and organize a public within a given space to attend our performance. The performance can take any form: of a game, a dance event or possibly the organization of others to do the performing under our guidance/direction.

Possible aims/goals/things to consider:
1. To create of a space for play and potentiality; for ourselves and/or others
2. To blur boundaries between public spaces within London associated with either work or a bounded idea of "rest/relaxation" and play
3. To create an interruption
4. To engage with one or several communities DYNAMICALLY (may need to define dynamism for our project)
5. Develop an understanding of our how activity has produced/encouraged/developed a transformation of a space
6. Define who our audience could and should be
7. To document the process from its inception to realization through video, still photography, this blog and potentially other formats
8. Determine if we should use a concrete space, a public space, all spaces via mobility or no space; the WHY and the HOW and its relationship to transformation

Resources:
Dessert trucks: http://www.desserttruck.com/
Los Angeles food trucks: http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-foodtrucks22-2009jul22,0,7542552.story
Flash mobs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mob
Tino Sehgal's artwork: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tino_Sehgal
Steve Connor essays
Association of Atomic Astronauts: NEED LINK OR INFO...perhaps from Rachel?

Next Steps:
Meet at 1pm on 21 January at Southbank Centre upstairs balcony area
Bring ideas or tools needed for a game and we will PLAY!

proposal of a starting point

After having read Steven Connor's text "playstations", and a bit about "psychogeographies", and after all these discussions that we have had, I was thinking that we would be legitimised to use a game as a transformative practice, but we would need to insert more levels of transformation. (Also it could be fun...) A game transforms its nature as it is played, when the players need or feel like setting new rules or reinvent some of them. Our theory can be applied here also in the sense that the game acquires its own autonomy(!!) as a process that depends only on the mood of its players at a given moment. I was thinking specifically of what happens in games like charades or "mime it down the alley" where the players have to act objects, concepts, film titles etc. Apart from the obvious transformation through acting, from my experience, these games can also transform the aesthetic images that we relate to the concepts/words /situations we are trying to act to each other. FOR EXAMPLE, when someone has to act "pride and prejudice" and you are in his team and you know the movie that his is trying to act, then you get a new perspective of how one could act it and if you have to act the same thing, in another game session for example, your aesthetic ideas of the film title will have been transformed and you will have incorporated parts or elements of his acting in yours now. Or, in "mime it down the alley", for example starting with freedom, the message/concept/movie title is acted through the line of players and usually takes other forms until it has been totally changed. If we filmed all the different stages where for example one's acting of freedom becomes the next one's acting of escaping and so on, then the explanation among the players of what they really acted, and if we filmed several game sessions and then edit all that in a good way, we can make a video of a game as a transformation of itself, of the concepts communicated and of the players' aesthetic images, and thus, acting manners for various concepts.

Art (?)

Meant to blog about this when I saw this a couple of weeks back. Anyways, here it is, the article from the Guardian (Dec 18, 2009):

Glass act: student fined for smashing gallery window and calling it art

What do you guys think? Can we think of this act as being what we might typically think of as 'art'? If it is art, in where does the aesthetic experience reside? What is 'art?'

Anyways. Happy TwentyTen, and hope that the new year has been good to all of you thus far!