The fun fed

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(????)

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!

...?

Hi all, have listed a few texts that could be useful regarding reading up on Situationism. Just to confirm that for next week we need to have our proposals on the blog. This should be a lot more straight forward than the other. Just to let you know am deleting the Tumblr blog and will transfer Tom's post on Brixton Village.

Susannah.

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