http://www.thefunfed.com/
This is the website of an organisation that basically offers game sessions for adults. It has all this philosophy of making adults have fun, laugh and socialise. There are also some videos and testimonials. It seemed kind of fun on a first glance but I was a bit sceptical about the 7 pound price, just to play group games...It looks like on the one hand it has this fun-based mentality and a good goal but on the other hand, it fails to surpass the limits of a typically marketed service. I was also thinking of that in relation to some comments on our presentation about the royal festival hall as a space of private interests and its potential differences to other kinds of spaces.
Any thoughts(????)
Thursday 11 February 2010
Wednesday 10 February 2010
Here is the Presentation on Theory of play - presented 11-02-10:
Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays. (Schiller 1967, 107) --Schiller
We would like to demonstrate some of the major theories regarding the concept of play and its manifestation as exploration. In doing so, we will distinguish between the differing functions of play for children and adults.
The concept of play is a vital component of the aesthetic theory of Kant and Schiller.
Schiller’s theory of the aesthetic revolves around three drives, the form drive, the sensuous, and the play drive. 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. Under the form drive, we form things; what we wish is to bring about figures; to suspend time. The form drive is a state of determination and under it we seek an end to change. Play is a way of uniting change and identity. In play we remain exposed to impressions that come to us from the world, and reflect on our relation to the world. Thus we explore our moral autonomy. Play is the aesthetic state, and we must dwell in the aesthetic state to experience beauty. Beauty, as such, is a figure that has come alive and that we are only able to relate to through play.
For Kant, an aesthetic judgment occurs in the free harmonious play between understanding and imagination. Imagination presents a form that seems unitary and coherent without any concept, thus satisfying understanding’s need for unity. It is the play of faculties that differentiates the aesthetic state from all other mental states. With no interest in the object, the subject feels pleasure in beauty as a means in itself, and lingers in reflection. Agamben describes this lingering as pure means or gesture. This gesturality with no motivation towards an end is characteristic of a general notion of play; play is self-rewarding. In “Playstations” Steven Connor says play is free from the sense of independent of purpose or interest; to play is to have freedom to opt out of the normative. The origins of the desire to play are to be sought only in the activity itself, not in an external goal. Play is non-functional- the behavior is spontaneous and undirected. For Kant judgments of taste, free of all constraint by theoretical or moral concepts, are ultimately symbols of moral freedom itself. The freedom of imagination that is the essence of the experience is the only way that our moral autonomy becomes tangible to us.
Likewise play, as an exploratory activity free of concept and determination, may be the grounds where our moral autonomy becomes tangible. Spontaneous play of children within their peer groups is widely believed to demonstrate this concept. Freidrich Frobel, one of the earliest advocates of child centered education, thought play to be “the highest expression of human development in childhood”. Piaget, perhaps the most influential developmental psychologists, adhered to this theory as well. Despite the recognition that spontaneous play (and the inherent activities of exploring and performing) is necessary to a child’s moral development, there is the persistent idea in child-centered education that the child’s spontaneous capabilities must be tamed. The teacher’s goal is to socialize the child, to enforce rules and organization. Piaget notes that at about age 10 children begin to view rules as flexible and are developed to facilitate play, rather than as authority-given dogma. This transition involves a change in moral posture, and a move away from adult influence towards the peer group.
This peer group can be viewed in terms of what theorist Lloyd Reiber calls the microworld. The microworld transforms a space into a place, constructing a trusted zone that nurtures the benefits of play. A (constructivist) microworld is a small, but complete version of some domain of interest naturally found in the world or artificially constructed. Learners immediately know what to do with a microworld – little of no training is necessary to begin using it
In his essay ‘Creative Writing and Day Dreaming’ (1907), Freud discusses the role of play and it’s transformation into phantasy, humour and art. Looking back to the origins of ‘imaginative activity’ he identifies what he believes to be the most favoured occupation for the child, that of play and suggest similarities with that of the creative writer.
Analysing the child’s motives underpinning their play, and determining it’s purpose and characteristics, he links both play activity to and differentiates it from, what he believes to be its adult counterpart - ‘the phantasy’.
Having established play and phantasy as both distinct and related, Freud draws out the similarities between the activity of the creative writer and that of the child at play. ‘He [the writer] creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously - that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion - while separating it sharply from reality’. Gray (1995, p438)
With examples of the use of play in [german] language he demonstrates that play functions as a suffix - providing a linking of tangible objects with representations of imagination. The suggestion is the artist plays with language [the sign] to form representations of the imagination that maintain a link back to tangible objects.
To play, then, for Freud, involves a type of imaginative activity that links the real world to that of the phantasies of the player, although is not real, and yet is still continuous with seriousness. For Freud, this activity can be seen in the workings of the Joke or through humour.
The point of departure between play, art and phantasy is situated in acts where play becomes hidden or disjunct from reality. The child does not conceal his play which is linked to the real world of growth and development. The adult does conceal his phantasies because they cannot be linked to development. This point of departure for Freud is in the psychical activity that deviates from the world of the real to compensate for unfulfilled wishes and gives rise to types of phantasies that are essential to conceal; for revealing them may cause greater anguish, shame and unpleasure. Thus ‘a person who plays and a person who phantasies’, Gray (1995, p439) are differentiated on account of their motives - ‘which are nevertheless adjuncts to each other’(ibid)
Child’s play is determined by a single wish - ‘to be big and grown up’ and there should be no reason to conceal this. An adult however, believes he is expected to terminate his play and phantasies and at the same time has secret wishes that give rise to them.
The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, every phantasy is a fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality.
A further point of departure for Freud, occurs when a phantasy or art is shared. The ordinary response to a phantasy is to feel ashamed. Hence, when the phantasy is shared the audience will feel ‘repelled or at least be left cold’, Gray (1995, p443). A writer then overcomes this repulsion through a number of techniques that enable the barriers between a ‘single ego’ and ‘other ego’ to be traversed. Aesthetic forms causing pleasures and hence a welcoming reception to the contents of the work whether tragic, shocking or humourous.
In adulthood, it appears we give up our pre-occupation with play as a free and open gesture of pleasure and imagination; and by doing so replace it with jokes, phantasies and/or art. This process operates under the rule of the 'substitute' and 'surrogate', what is given up , if anything at all, is the supposed link with ‘real objects’; instead of playing, the adult now phantasies’, Gray (1995, 438).
Here then we have a single psychic process - the ‘will to play’ transformed by networks of psychical-social forces within child-to-adult growth processes and spaces. A network of libidinal undercurrents flow up into consciousness to be played out within the different social and psychic spaces. These spaces under normative frames are categorised as above and yet we can consider the singular presence of libidinal forces also blur and trouble these categories. The manifest forms all these activities are constituted by sensations, affects, incentive bonuses, fore-pleasures and/or elements of erotic/egoistic wish fulfillment.
In his essay ‘The transformations of Puberty’ in ‘Three Essay on the Theory of Sexuality’ (1925), Freud discusses Fore-pleasure - [we know it as fore-play] in some detail and determines how the purpose of foreplay is transformed by altering the sexual aim.
He begins by defining fore-pleasure in relation to its ‘sexual aim’ proper. Fore-pleasure the pre-orgasmic pleasure, the ‘sexual aim’ orgasm - the ‘end pleasure’. He goes on to identify preliminary energies in childhood that can be related to fore-pleasure and are experienced in the body since infancy ‘although at this earlier stage it is on a smaller scale’, Gray (1995, p281) Freud remarks on ‘an instance of pleasure’ where a minor pleasure signifies the possibility of ‘the attainment of a greater resultant pleasure and thus operating as an ‘incentive bonus’.
Further on in his discussion in ‘Dangers of Fore-pleasure’ Freud describes the process of deviation where fore-play is taken as an end in itself. Concluding fore-pleasure to loose its purpose when turned back on itself and conceiving it as a ‘fixation’ to be deemed ‘perverse’.
In the essay ‘The Sexual aberrations‘ Freud introduces the terms ‘deviation’ and 'perversion' to describe sexual energy that deviates from the sexual aim, he goes on to state they are; ‘activities that either: (a) extend, in an anatomical sense beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union, or (b) linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim’ Gray (1995, p482).
Particular to perversion is the ‘overvaluation of the sexual object...where appreciation extends to the whole of the body of the sexual object and tends to involve every sensation derived from it’. It is possible for over-valuation to become psychological too and here; the subject becomes as ‘it were intellectually infatuated’ Gray (1995 p249). The term overvaluation appears again in a later in ‘Unsuitable substitutes for the sexual object - Fetishism’ and here Freud links the term to the ‘abandonment of the sexual aim’ where:
‘1- the sexual object is part of the body inappropriate for sexual purposes.’
‘2 - to an inanimate object which bears assignable relation to the person whom replaces it’ Gray(1995 p249).
Where an abandoned sexual aim and the sexual object becomes the ‘sole object’ - the fetish is pathologised.
The absence of the sexual aim, is a standard characteristic of infantile libidinal activity. In the infantile state, the libidinal drive is inter-twined with other instincts and according to Freud at three and five years - at the stage of the first libidinal peak, - the child shows signs of activity akin to research which has as its goal, ‘knowledge’ and ‘mastery of the world'. In this primary stage, the child is thought to be aroused to research by the libido and initially attracted to questions of a sexual nature. In short, the child is subject to a libidinal drive via sensation, movement and affect within the body, that is as much in search for pleasure as an end in itself, as it is in search for intelligence and knowledge of the world
The Libidinal drive in the child then, appears to operate within a different affective register due to 1 - the genaralised erotogenic zone that is the body, and 2 - the absence of the sexual aim; so here, it is easy to begin to see the libidinal energies at play within the activity of play. If we consider Freud’s rationale for child’s play - as a practice for adulthood - we can see that play is adjunct to or perhaps even synthesised with research and thus can perhaps be practiced as a method of research. Considered from the another position, the energies driving research in part belong to the libido, and we can begin to allow for possible research activities to include acts of play, acts of imagination and acts of overvaluation of objects and/or sets of knowledges. In short we can be allowed to become fetishist of theory, knowledge and art productions due to the close proximity and interconnectedness of phantasies, pleasures and the real. To deviate from the determining rules is to create playful, phantasmic, fetishistic and/or aesthetic productions and might be considered an authentic mode of criticality. Using Freud against his own seriousness we can approach his works as a type of fiction or creative writing and could perhaps open to further indeterminate possibilities with further generative outcomes.
As opposed to spontaneous play demonstrated by children, the way in which adults interact has been described in terms of “flow theory,” which is the peculiar state of extreme happiness and satisfaction experienced through adult play. They are so engaged and absorbed by certain activities that they seem to ‘flow’ along with it in an automatic manner. People who experience flow must have the ability to focus attention, to concentrate without distraction. One result of flow is psychological growth – an individual becomes more complex or elaborate.
As mentioned, adult play can manifests through fantasy and humor. In humor, this can take the form of the joke or practical joke. Practical jokes or pranks create a situation from nothing using only actions and words. The humor inherent in a practical joke is ultimately ephemeral. Practical jokes create a dynamic between the prankster and the victim, establishing a power differential between the two. Crucial to the joke is the element of “practice,” in which someone is made to do something, a practice, vs. the telling or reading of the joke. Presently, we are interested in the idea of humor as play and aim to explore this notion further for our final presentation.
Cited by Steven Connor in “Playstations Or, Playing in Earnest”, p.8. From On the Aesthetic Education of Man. From; Gray, P. (ed.) (1995) The Freud Reader. London: Vintage originals.
Tuesday 9 February 2010
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.
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.
Friday 5 February 2010
Monday 1 February 2010
Tino Sehgal at the Guggenheim
A review of Tino Sehgal's new work at the Guggenheim in NYC. At the end of his review, Holland Carter writes " It really is about life. It really is about communication. It really does have no answers. And it really is addictive." This made me think of our game. Thoughts?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/arts/design/01tino.html?pagewanted=1&hpw
Friday 29 January 2010
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
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/
Enjoy!
http://a.aaaarg.org/
Thursday 21 January 2010
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.
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