Space/Time cohort and Internal/External cohort.

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.

Space/Time.

1. The Physical - embodied.
Space: Environment, built environment - Urbanism..
Time: Structure of time, history, in history, historicized, linear.

- Play in Urbanism.
- Play in History.

2. The Virtual - disembodied.
Space: (cross) Dimensional - Communication.
Time: Malleable, rhizomatic, networked.

(The two become confused and inseparable.)

- Play through/via communication.

/////////////////////////////////////////////// (rules of/how to) PLAY:

+ Apply each of Johan's instructions to 1. The Physical and 2. The Virtual.

e.g:

"3. Play is distinct from "ordinary" life both as to locality and duration.

// In 'Second Life' one exists as a resident and one interacts with other residents through a virtually embodied interface called an avatar. Each avatar is a virtual representation of an individual from (what, for the purpose of this exercise we can call) First Life (reality). Residents enact life through this virtual interface; they interact, grow, carry out activities that replicate real-life and so on. Second Life parallels First Life (reality) in both virtual space, composed of a multiplicity of dimensions and temporally, though time in Second Life does not imitate or adhere to time in reality, where for example, one could be aged 20 in real life, but virtually operate as a 25 year old.

Second Life is a computer game, wherein reality is replicated and users can legitimately exist virtually. Here space and time is fused in order to exist in tandem to reality. The nature of the game imitates real life and therefore leads us to question whether real life is falling to obsolescence. In this game, to participate is to play, or rather to play is to participate, like in any other game. But if to play is to engage in an activity that in fact is the image of real life then playing is to experience and to exist, or to be.

Is to exist, to play? ................... " etc, etc.

See: Augmented Reality - Dirk van Weelden. 'Possible Worlds.' In Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographers of Networks and Territories. 2006.

+ See what happens.

Urbanism & Play

“Proletarian revolution is the critique of human geography through which individuals and communities have to create places and events suitable for the appropriation, no longer just of their labor, but of their total history.”
– Guy Debord, Society of Spectacle

The Situationists claimed a society in which play and spectacle in urban spaces are seen as valid strategies to encourage people to “drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and their usual motives for movement and action” , towards a “utopian reconstruction of social space” . The derivé (literally: “drifting”), involving “playful-constructive behaviour and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and (is) thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll”. Is an example of the processual working towards this utopian reconstruction.

Interestingly there exist no fixed instruction for playing. There is no fixed time, no goal. It’s a collective act of strolling, a journey undertaken “in a spirit of adventure and discovery” , without spatial borders. An important aspect is to loose oneself in the play, like Huizinga already defined in his five point method of play to be enacted by the emancipated man (read five point method) – a being apart together. The distinction between seriousness and play becomes dispensable, as well as between art and everyday life. “Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals” , fluctuating “between spatial and temporal registers”. The “temporalization of space was a key situationist tactic and a distinctive quality of the derivé (…).” These urbanist interventions were utilized to bring pleasure, to encourage a social movement and to finally change the society in a light exuberant way.

A further point of investigation is the effect and indeed affect of space and time in play, taking into account communication and miscommunication of and between individuals. This becomes crucial if one sees in play a potentiality of a collective social movement. Urban spaces can be examined through their communicative devices, community integration and meta-networks each concerning our ideas on play.

In our society communities and spaces are not necessarily physical anymore, but virtual through the internet. The aspect of time becomes a completely new importance through the introduction of the new mass communication media. Our communities are not at all regional anymore, instead they are global - our identities are global. We are constantly strolling in virtual spaces, within work and leisure time. Living in a world without boarders, concerning time and space, we live in a way today the utopia of the Situationist International. New Plays have to be introduced - virtual ones.

Addressing the space/time trajectory in this instance was something that in hindsight seemed glaringly obvious from the start. ‘Playing’ and indeed looking at play as both performative and theoretical leads us to question the where and how of play and how exactly/if at all there exists a relation or indeed affect/effect. The environment (of the game) and communication (through the game) being a perfect place to start. We were dealing with communal space and thus affecting the way in which it was being immediately transformed. Using the performative aspect of this as a point of departure, we began to think about just what exactly we were doing. External to the necessary framework that held us together - playing a game together as an experiment of sorts, in order to tease apart our practice in order to assess its transformativity - we looked at what we were doing in space and in time and considered the application of play onto this theoretical model – via ‘the spatial turn’. Play, historically and theoretically is, in terms of discourse, poles apart from the categorical space/time binary, bar the aforementioned intervention of and within communal space, there seemed only a tenuous relation. However, as we considered theoretical models such as Situationism, and furthermore, the derivé, détournement and psychogeography, in their most ‘playful’ senses, their relation to using, manipulating, deviating and indeed transforming space became more of a feasible concept apropos play. We decided that this idea of a transformative practice should be something that does not relentlessly try and forge a relation through compromise or theoretical trickery, nor simply by extracting dense theory and then applying it, but through a processual means; akin to Irit Rogoff’s notion behind an implicated-ness of knowledge production – we are not creating something new, but we are unveiling sets of relations and practices that are already present. We are looking for something new through the creation and application of frictions merging together.

Virtual Space is disembodied, yet we, as users embody virtual space. Virtuality is no longer a fetishised trajectory of sci-fi, or a conceptual possibility of the future, it encompasses an entirely disembodied space, a space that is not only made up of dimensions that we as users of this space exist within, but a space that is in constant flux, is malleable and not predetermined and a space whose prevalence and power is something that is contesting both the necessity and legitimacy of reality, of physical space.

The space of which I am referring to here is not just cyberspace, and that pioneered by and navigated through the internet, but a space, or multiples of spaces that exist concurrently and harmoniously to one another, that are channeled through dimensions that are above and beyond the physical, those spaces which transform and transcend communication and geography. These spaces accommodate and create networks and through our practice we aim to engage with play on this level. This concept of space is near to indefinable, it is thoroughly merged with and into time, to the point where both time and space as separate parallels are rendered futile constructs, yet are entirely necessary for one another other to exist.

This idea is drawn out with close reference to the concept of ‘Augmented Reality’, mentioned in Dirk van Weelden’s ‘Possible Worlds’ text in Else/Where Mapping, edited by Abrahms and Hall. This research program aims to establish the contingent coexistence of the physical and virtual; like the way that the space and time binary is made obsolete in virtual space, the physical and virtual (as a binary) will too made obsolete. For example something that is disembodied: an avatar in Second Life, can become thoroughly embodied by the eradication of the view that Second Life is in fact second to reality, but instead would be a reality. The fusion of the physical and virtual and thus the manipulation of the original model, would lead to the assumption that through a means of transformative practice we are able to look at a new kind of play that, in form produces an hybrid integration of all our original components: Theory as historicized, Space/Time as changeable and Peformance – the internal/external perspective.

At first we decided to split into two distinct micro groups one observing the internal communication and psychological dynamics of the group and the other observing the relation with an external public and the reactions to our game. Once our investigations started we noticed that it was difficult to distinguish these categories as they are continuously influencing each other. A text that inspired us was an extract from an interview between Obrist and M. Abramovich, in which the artist affirms while talking about her performances that “scientists are always observing but they don´t make observations of themselves. I wanted the observation to be central in you first, so you are the first one to be observed and to be changed and transformed. So that was the next step that I made- the public body, the public as performer. So this was really important to shifting the rules of the game. The problem of serving art is in there somewhere- so the public became the art, together with the project.” The idea of transformation is central to Abramovich’s practice, not in the sense that she wants to transform the public in a one directional way but that she too is transformed through her awareness and interaction with the public, which becomes the performer itself. The idea of transformation doesn’t have to be necessarily something permanent. It is linked to the event and the performance and it is to do more with role and position and how these can shift and merge between themselves. We thought of our game in a similar way, as a mean to explore our subjectivity and position in relation to each other and in relation to those nearby. Abramovich talks about a flow of energy between herself and the public. In our case it was interesting to observe the flow of energy and dynamics within the group and with those outside of the group. We treated ourselves as the object of the experiment and once we started reflecting on our game we started realizing how we were affected by it. It almost seemed as if the outside was affecting us much more than how we affected it. Playing between ourselves or playing where others could see us changed the way in which some of us felt for example when we were stopped by the guards our game continued in an almost more dramatic way as if we were feeding on the attention becoming more performative. Another interesting aspect was the fact that at first we were all quite sceptical about playing the game but we became more and more enthusiastic about it. Because of these observations we realized that it was useless to divide the outside from the inside as they are intrinsically connected. From this idea we started thinking about our game in terms of space and how space is created. Irit Rogoff deals a lot with space in her work making reference to Lefebvre saying, ‘space is not something understood through the named activity for which it is intended (a tennis court as a place in which tennis is played) or through the titles that its buildings or other solid entities might uphold. Instead an active process of spatialization replaces a static notion of named spaces and in this process it is possible to bring into relation the designated activities and the physical properties of named spaces with structures of psychic subjectivities such as anxiety, or desire or compulsion.’ Through our game we created a space that was elastic and merged with the outer context even though we weren’t directly influencing it. We became a part of the spatial framework that made up our environment.
Our investigation therefore is to think about the balance between creating a space that is open and in some way engages with the outside without trying to force participation as people are already implicated within the space just as we are affected by their presence. This also is related to the outside/inside group dynamics, as in our game we were directly affected by the outside even though there wasn’t an overt engagement. And this is the whole point of the game; something occurs without there being a specific purpose, it still has agency within itself and in the way it engages with subjectivities and space.