On the 19th of September, players of Call and Return will start to tackle a series of creative missions that will send them out across the city exploring places, materials and the way contemporary culture permeates through them.
The city in question could be Birmingham or Tokyo, Bristol or Kyoto, and as well as negotiating their immediate surrounding, players must also negotiate interactions with other people across different geographies, languages and time zones.
Call and Return is the second in the Emergent Game series: projects that investigate group dynamics, collaborative creativity and the use of digital technologies to adjust how we relate to public spaces.
Missions are not location-specific, so players can be based anywhere: all you need is access to an internet connection, a sense of humour and a soft toy to represent you in the game (we play anonymously).
Instructions on how to sign up can be found here: http://ludogeography.org/projects/callandreturn/
(don’t worry, this is the most complicated bit of the process – it gets easier from here on in!)
To complement activities taking place on-line (once again most of the conversation will take place via twitter.com) there are opportunities to get involved in various events:
Then we pull together the contributions from the workshops and on-line conversations in a weekend of creative missions as part of a festival of pervasive games in Bristol:
It doesn’t matter if you can’t make it in person to any of these events – remote players have an equally important role to contribute. Sign up now to join the conversation and influence the directions the game goes in. For a flavour of what it might evolve into, see the Emergent Game website for what happened last time.
Ludogeography
Call and Return is a project initiated by The Ludogeographic Society. The Ludogeographic Society grew from collaborations central to the development of the first Emergent Game earlier this year: Ana Benlloch, Stuart Tait and myself.
To coincide with Call and Return, we are also launching www.ludogeography.org where we will document the activities of the Society. Likewise for http://twitter.com/ludogeography: if you use Twitter follow @ludogeography for updates on what we are doing, or perhaps just subscribe to the RSS feed.
As I outlined in yesterday’s post, Emergent Game is going great guns at the moment with us going to Japan to do workshops as part of Dislocate08 and alongside project space hanare. These then feed into a weekend of intercontinental play and exploration as part of igfest.
And that’s only the stuff that’s happening next month…
Meanwhile, I’ve been approached by the Banff New Media Institute, Canada to apply for their Almost Perfect co-production residency that runs throughout November.
Apart from the obvious excitement of potentially being able to develop work at the Banff Centre, I’m regarding this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with the timing within the evolution of the Emergent Game series being spot-on and the peer advisers guiding the residency being incredibly relevant to my practice.
I’ve submitted a proposal to develop prototype hardware/software that can be placed in the game area that allows your average mobile phone to start interfacing with protocols such as Twitter, Flickr and GPS.
Our experience with Emergent Game so far has shown us a) that it’s a great framework for motivating groups of people to interact creatively but also that b) the extent to which people can use methods of engagement that are technically possible are limited by what features are available with their mobile phone. In the first iteration of Emergent Game we noticed a completely different style of play from a Ludens with an iPhone compared to the majority of participants using older, mid-range phones.
Using GPS and being able to access the internet whilst on the move are towards one end of spectrum that even has something like MMS at the other. Picture messaging may be possible, but cost often makes it prohibitively expensive. We need to overcome some of these hurdles in order to open up the accessibility and make Emergent Game more viable for larger-scale projects.
Before I can get to tackling these projects though, there’s another hurdle to get over: finding the funding to get me to Canada.
Coming so soon after the activities in Japan (I’ll be there for 4 weeks in total) it’s not going to be possible for me to self-fund the trip to Banff. I estimate I need about £3000 to cover airfare, accommodation, food etc.
Arts Council have generously contributed to the funding of mine and Ana’s work in Japan, so for various, entirely understandable reasons they’re reluctant for me to simply put in another application to them. However, we’ve negotiated that I can put in a second application, but this could really only be for a maximum of half of the total budget and I need to match that with cash contributions from elsewhere (NB cash rather than support in kind).
The timing is incredibly tight, so logistically I need to submit any Arts Council application by the start of next week. That means I also need some ideas of where to get the match funding over the next few days.
So, this is a crowd-sourcing post: has anyone any suggestions for sourcing about £1500?
This was an amazing experience in itself, but to turn it into Learning we are doing it again.
Next month Ana and I will fly out to Japan where we will be contributing to the Dislocate08 festival.
Dislocate is an ongoing project examining the relationship between art, technology and locality. Exploring the impact of new media upon our experience and expression of place, Dislocate08 examines the creative potential of the technologies which surround us to heighten our awareness of our locality, transforming our encounter with our direct environment and the manner in which we attempt to communicate this to elsewhere.
Being in Japan also gives us the opportunity to work with hanare: a sort of artist-led space/meeting space/café space in Kyoto. (You may remember the 4649 project.)
On the 8th of September we’ll be doing a workshop at hanare, and on the 13th of September we’ll be doing a workshop as part of Dislocate. We’ll be using these workshops to shape the Japanese component of a long weekend of Emergent Gaming happening on the 19th, 20th and 21st of September. Why? Because Emergent Game has also been accepted as part of igfest (Interesting Game Festival) in Bristol.
So, coming up is the second iteration of Emergent Game in which we’ll be investigating what happens when you have two groups of players exploring places separated by differences in language, culture, geography and timezone.
As some of the players will be in the UK and some in Japan; some having online access and some not; there will be variations in what is possible: part of the game experience will be how your avatar negotiates this. Perhaps you will make friends with a player in another country and barter things with them by post; perhaps you will be a ‘lone avatari’ with a mission of your own; perhaps you will find new spaces online where participants can interact.
We’re still negotiating the starting points for these activities and, of course, the eventual shape of them will largely be determined by those who get involved. But for now the initial instructions from the first game apply to the one coming up in September.
We’d quite like players based in the UK (or elsewhere) to get involved (online) in the two workshops on the 8th and 13th and we definitely want you guys involved in the weekend of the game itself (19th-21st) which is when we’ll be running the mission challenges. The way we see it working is that you now have a few weeks to find a toy to represent you, set up a Twitter account for it and to start some conversations with other players. Be sure to set the location in the Twitter settings to “emergent game” and to follow the likes of @yohmoh and the other soft toys located in emergent game. The rest will take care of itself.
This headstart will substitute for the workshops we’ll be doing with the players in Japan, so use this time productively…
The Ludogeographic Society
During the course of the first Emergent Game, a new collaborative group was formed between myself and two other artists I worked very closely with to realise the project: the aforementioned Ana Benlloch and also Stuart Tait. The Ludogeographic Society will be an identity we will use for future collaborations that explore similar territory to Emergent Game so this upcoming game will be realised as a project under the name of the Society, rather than under my name alone.
We’ll let you know when The Ludogeographic Society’s website is up and running, but in the meantime announcements will be made here and via the usual channels.
I’m spending most of this month working as a mad scientist on a couple of different summer camps for primary school aged children (typically 6-12 year-olds).
Monday’s group was quite small in number but mostly boys and most of them probably around the 10 years old mark. They were pretty rowdy and at one stage we ended up sitting them down in a circle and having a game of wink murder.
It worked OK, but I felt we could up the ante a little so I asked them if they wanted to play werewolf. None of them had played it before so I sold it to them by saying it was “like wink murder; only much better!”. They went for it!
After hastily drawing up some smiley-face cards on torn-up bits of paper I gathered the players all together again and did my best to remember and then explain the rules. Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough in saying that the werewolves should absolutely not broadcast who they were in any way whatsoever because when they were asked to wake up and select a victim on the first night they both promptly (and noisily) stood up! Hey ho, we got through the game some how and I thought that would be that…
…except that for the next day – with about 50% new faces and 50% returning from the day before – someone requested that we played werewolf again.
Again we scrambled for pencils and scrap paper and again we kind of muddled through a game (this time with a text to a friend to check on how the voting process was supposed to go!)
Today things got really interesting.
As soon as I arrived, one of the kids came up to me and requested that we played werewolf again today. Naturally I was more than happy to oblige and since there was still 15 minutes or so before the science activities started I told him he’d better use the time to get some cards ready. [For those of you who aren’t familiar with the game, players are randomly given a card that tells them whether they are a villager, a werewolf, a healer or possibly another specialised character type, depending on the game. More information here.]
Before long, all the other children were gathered around, mass-producing villagers and werewolves. They came up with some beauties – I’ll be randomly peppering the rest of this post with them!
We played 3 or 4 games throughout the day and, other than being delighted that they had been bitten by the bug, it was really good to see the learning curve that came with repetition.
I moderated the start of the first game and, after a re-start when a few people opened their eyes when they shouldn’t have, we were cooking on gas with one werewolf, a healer, a seer and seven villagers. That’s essentially nine people all pointing at someone and screaming “KILL HIM! KILL HIM! KILL HIM!” very, very loudly! My aim for the day was to get people talking more about their reasoning for wanting to lynch a suspect and to be a lot stricter with the voting procedure. We’re not quite there yet, but take it from me; nine people all pointing at someone and screaming “KILL HIM! KILL HIM! KILL HIM!” very, very loudly was a big improvement on the previous days!
Not too far into the game the boy who had asked about playing that morning was killed off and he begged me to let him take over the moderation. I handed over the reins and he preceded to mimic my fairly theatrical commentary. That was amusing to watch!
Things took a twist when the villagers correctly lynched the werewolf. With about 5 villigers still alive and the game already won, our new moderator decided he didn’t want the game to finish! He kept on going through the motions of asking werewolves, healer and seer to wake up and select their chosen ones. Excellent! Our first hack!
I missed a lot of the detail of what happened because I was continually having to take the newly-dead aside and explain to them what was going on. It was interesting to see the range of responses but I think the bewilderment got to a few of them and fairly soon they were announcing it to the remaining players.
In later games we did away with the seer role, and brought in an extra werewolf. We also let the children moderate more – often with 3 boys taking it in turns to ask the various characters to wake up. Nice bit of collaboration there, even if it did still involve a lot of argument!
By about the 3rd game I was starting to notice a bit more evidence of strategy and deduction. Definitely an achievement: our roles were mostly as crowd control rather than as coaches, so this is largely where they arrived at by themselves. We had a healer declare himself as healer in an attempt to prevent himself being lynched, but a good bit of werewolf persuasion meant they eventually got their man (they had tried to kill him for the previous few nights, but he kept healing himself). I wonder when we’ll start seeing some bluffs as defendants cotton onto this as a potential lifesaver?
We did see signs of progress with the reasons given for wanting to lynch suspects. Most of the time their accusations are based on hearing movements start – or snoring stop – during the night. Today we had justifications that included the accused not wearing any shoes and someone else having a red mark/blood on his nose (a remnant of the smell-testing quiz).
As for learning through play: there was a beautiful moment when J (one of the more unruly boys in the group) in trying to get the villagers to calm down and vote properly suddenly twigged what a difficult job we (the ‘teachers’) faced in trying to keep the group under control during the sciencey bits of the day. I swear you could see the thought process move across his face!
I think we’re going to lose a lot of the veteran players over the next few days (to parents, rather than to lupine predators) so I’m interested to see how the enthusiasm for the game waxes or wanes accordingly. Can we keep this up for the remainder of the fortnight?
All theotherstuff that happened as part of the Hide&Seek festival was great, but the highlights of the day for me were what happened after the festival had officially finished.
The hardcore gamers loitered around for half an hour or so, not yet ready to concede that it was time to wrap up and go home. A few people were constructing a board game from rules appropriated from different parts of the festival, the stewards were starting to take down the banners and one of the iglab Simons was pootling around on a little orange bike…
Then somebody suggested KerPlunk and half a dozen of us huddled in the corner playing with straws and marbles. One round of KerPlunk (Just for the record, Simon and I won!) was enough to bridge the transition and then suddenly everyone was properly back into game-playing mode and it was clear none of us would be going home just yet.
Gype
I also remember that it was we who invented the well-known and widespread national game of Gype. All sorts of variations and complications were invented in connection with Gype. There was Land Gype and Water Gype. I myself cut out and coloured pieces of cardboard of mysterious and significant shapes, the instruments of Table Gype; a game for the little ones. It was even duly settled what disease threatened the over-assiduous player; he tended to suffer from Gype’s Ear. My friends and I introduced allusions to the fashionable sport in our articles; Bentley successfully passed one through the Daily News and I through some other paper. Everything was in order and going forward; except the game itself, which has not yet been invented. Autobiography_(Chesterton)/Chapter_X
Simon had been proposing a motion that we played Gype since before KerPlunk and, after explaining a bit about the rules (not dissimilar to those of Mornington Crescent), that now took off.
I also had to take off at this point because I desperately needed to take on board more fluids. When I got back from the bar the game was in full swing with 2 pieces of A5 paper, three dice of a sort that I didn’t recognise and the counters from a chequers set.
I haven’t got any photos of this first round of Gype – I was too busy tending to my drink – but you’ll just have to take it from me that it was an awesome thing to watch. These were people who take playing very seriously indeed, given free reign to make it up as they went along. Dare I say there was an element of competition there too…?
Watching it, there was no way you could tell that it was being fabricated on the spot. At one point one of the players drew a distinction between Land Gype and Water Gype in such a matter-of-fact way that I had real difficulty in sorting out fact from fiction. Seriously: probably not until an hour or so later …and now I see the two different Gypes are mentioned in that quote above. Now I don’t know what to think!
I finished my drink and got re-absorbed into the group of players. Another strange position to be in as you try and dream up a creative move for your turn, but the landscape keeps shifting so much after the moves made by previous players that it becomes all but impossible to do anything but wait and then react spontaneously when it’s your go. I found out later, via Jane’s post, that this had been designated a game of Speed Gype. I’m not sure if this was just a follow on from the Speed KerPlunk we had been playing before, but it’s a really nice tweak to keep the pace up and get the creativity flowing nice and fast without too much analysis.
As it happens, I was just planning how I would see if I could score some points by throwing the dice at each of the three counters in the central triangle formation when Simon, the player before me, used a tablecloth move.
Our reaction was similar to that in the video and, to an enthusiastic chorus of “GYPE!” Simon was declared the winner.
Fort Gype
Turns out Speed Gype was just the warm-up.
We then moved over to a court that had been marked out on the floor earlier in the festival (possibly for freemasons) and Fort Gype began.
Fort Gype follows the same sort of rules as Speed Gype, but utilising the cool Southbank Centre squidgy furniture to (we assumed) build a fort. Spectators from the last game joined us as players so we were probably up to about 20 players now.
The opening moves were fairly straightforward placements of the furniture, with the occasional “lock-in” move thrown in for good measure.
Things got more interesting once there were more things to respond to. [How about starting a game of Fort Gype with randomly rolling a few items onto the ‘board’ to kick-start this process?] I was about 10th to make a move and, with my lime green seat-like-thingy I opted for an ‘entrapment’ move with one arm pinned under the furniture. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but the way things worked out I had an increasingly restricted view of what was going on!
From my not-so-much-of-a-vantage point I tried to take a photo every move. You can see the results here on this Flickr photoset.
As the play progressed we started to build upwards and more and more people added themselves to the structure. I think this would be a really good aspect for Fort Gypers to investigate further: I mean, if you’ve got a bunch of people with squidgy furniture it’d be a shame not to incorporate more bodies, right?! OK, OK thinking like that blatantly goes against the fundamentals of Gype! Still, I would have liked to have played a few rounds to see how things got refined.
Eventually the inevitable happened and the tower collapsed: thereby signalling the end of the game. This was good because then we didn’t feel so bad when the member of Southbank staff came over and informed us how expensive the squidgy furniture was and, sorry to be the bad guy, but would we mind stopping abusing it please…? Fair enough!
The third bus
There was no escaping it: the festival had drawn to an end and it was time to relocate. After a lot of conferring the general plan seemed to be food and then more games. Several people stated the need for showers before anything else happened and so we arranged to meet an hour later in the middle of Westminster Bridge. By this stage we knew that locating food was not going to be a straightforward matter and would involve getting on the third bus and then, whilst on the bus, figuring out the rules that would allow us to then get off the bus…
I told you these were hardcore gamers.
The last train
Unfortunately for me, the last train back to Brum on a Sunday is horribly early so I had to say my farewells before everybody had even reconvened on the bridge.
Whilst the others got up to whatever banana-assisted adventures their journey took them on, I had my own trials awaiting me: “the train is to long, can you all move forward a carriage please”; delays in leaving Marylebone; the train in front hitting livestock…
Sat in the foyer of Banbury railway station waiting for the replacement coaches to arrive at 1am felt so incredibly desolate compared to the atmosphere I had left a few hours before. The stark difference in attitudes between the pissed-off travellers and the Stag-chasing gamers was huge.
I wanted to suggest a game of Gype or Werewolf, but thought I’d get lynched. For real.
I’ve already written 2posts about the now somewhat distant Hide&Seek Festival of social games but there’s still a shed-load of goodness to cover so I’m going to blitz it here and hopefully get most of the important bits into the annals.
I’m warning you now: it was a busy day…
Let’s try for a chronological approach so I don’t miss stuff (and also because that finishes somewhere around Fort Gype and that’s a damn good way to finish!).
Cruel 2 B Kind
I missed out on Cruel 2 B Kind due to Twitter flakiness, which was a pain in the bum but there you go. I arrived in the kill zone at 12 on the dot and strolled around a bit hoping to be the victim (or at least a witness) of an assassination by one of the following methods:
A: Serenade your victim pleasantly.
B: Compliment their eyes.
C: Mistake them for somebody famous (be nice, no famous serial killers or Jade Goody please).
It wasn’t to be though so, pausing to take in Volume, I made my way to the Southbank Centre.
Sleeveface
You know the silly seafront set-up where you put your face in a hole and take on someone else’s body? Well, sleevefacing is where you supply the body and a record sleeve provides the face…
I got coerced into this by one of the stewards (OK, OK, I asked him for his suggestion of what I should do first…) and although it took me a while, I did eventually get quite into it.
I was stood around for ages waiting for The Man With The Camera but it was interesting to watch others being arranged:
This would be awesome with a greater variety of props (or pehaps the other extreme and no props at all). Check out the Flickr pool for some cool examples of some very pre-meditated sleevefaces. However, you have been warned: it’s very addictive…
I had my trusty brown anorak with me, so I opted for a bit of Tony Hancock:
There is a sleeveface website and I also believe I’ve seen some sleeveface-style billboards around town too…
And I Saw
Lists? Compiling lists of noticed things? Lists? Did somebody say lists? Noticing stuff?
Bit of a no-brainer really, of course I was going to wander over to this table and find out what was going on.
And I Saw… describes itself as being a bit like a treasure hunt. And I spy. The difference being that you play by SMS, some of the things you are seeking are mobile, new things are being added all the time and you yourself are being sought.
On joining the game you are given a large sticker with a unique code number on it. You are then sent out into the game zone to seek out other stickers. When you find them you have to text the number on that sticker to the And I Saw… phone number. Because you’ve already registered your number, some automagicery calculates who has seen the most items, which items have been seen the most and which players have been seen the most.
Inside the Southbank Centre was a good place to start because lots of people playing the indoor games were already stickered-up. I was about to head out for the outdoor area (between the London Eye and the OXO tower when I met Lionel Richie again and we got chatting.
We ended up walking together looking for stickers and having a really good discussion about the application of games in our respective fields of work (I think she worked in an adult training sort of context, but I can’t really remember now…) and analysing how And I Saw… was modifying our usual behaviour. This was particularly evident in her case because she was a Londoner and a frequent visitor to the Southbank area.
The things that really worked for me (luckily I have unlimited texts with my phone contract) were a) the way looking for a particular object/objects completely changed the way I engaged with my surroundings and b) the encounters we had with the other seekers playing the game. It was a really nice mechanism for going up to random strangers, sharing a quick exchange and then moving on. I also very much liked the way that most players were developing their own little rituals around what they did when they found a sticker. Most people had fallen into the routine of photographing each location, but others were taking it further and taking photos with mascot toys etc etc.
I only discovered the And I Saw… website fairly recently: turns out I was the 4th most seen player, but only saw a rather pathetic 20 items (compared to angelsk’s 60).
After an hour or so, Lionel and I happened to end up by The Eye as the Cruel 2 B Kind assassins had their end of game picnic. We hung out a bit, chatted, heard tales of trying to assassinate non-players, tales of mass team serenades and generally helped eat the chocolate cup-cakes before they melted in the sun (well, it would be rude not to…).
mscapes
I then had a bit of a gap before the start of The Lost Sport of Olympia and went off in search of padding.
I’ve been lusting over mscapes for a couple of years now, but not had a chance to try it out so, when I returned back to the hub in the Southbank Centre and saw that the mscapes table seemed up and running, I jumped at the chance to sample Duncan Speakman‘s Always Something Somewhere Else.
Despite a few technical hiccups at the start, I can only reiterate what the people on the video at the previous link said: a beautifully haunting, in-your-own-world experience. I particularly remember the point at which the voice of the narrator invited me to find some stone and I reached out to place my hand on a pillar of the Thames-side architecture…
London-as-Tokyo
I’d been keeping watch for Momus’ transposed tour, London-as-Tokyo all afternoon, so it was a tough call when I came across them part-way through Always Something Somewhere Else, but I did have to turn off the iPaq and listen to some beautifully wonky descriptions of wherever it was that we were.
Here’s a short extract of them taking about mobile phones and then going off on one about “chotto”.
Whilst Momus was holding forth confidently on a wide range of subjects it was worth taking a few moments to tune into the reactions of passers-by who weren’t aware of the context for London-as-Tokyo!
I had no idea (no pun/old joke intended) what this was about but the crowd that drifted back from the labyrinths just sort of evolved into the Stag Hunt crowd and I had no complaints… It turns out the game was massively oversubscribed, but we got around that by working in pairs.
Getting the first balloon onto the stag’s antlers was fairly straightforward, it was after we’d returned to the Southbank Centre, collected a new balloon and started out to try and find the stag again that things got really interesting…
By this time the stag had moved further away and the initial crowd had dispersed so we genuinely had no idea where to look inside a large playing area (10 mins walk from the Southbank Centre in any direction …except for the river). We occasionally saw clusters of balloons moving around, but nothing that suggested they knew where the stag was either!
We began to ask passers-by (in an incredibly deadpan manner) if they had “seen a man wearing a morning suit and a large white stag mask that people were tying balloons to”. We had an interesting range of responses including: the who-are-these-loonies look; grins; detailed information of what direction they had just come from; and, winding us up with false sightings. This is what really made Stag Hunt for me – the leakage of the game out to include ‘non’-players.
Alas, no-one had seen the stag but we continued to scout around and managed to collect a few more team members before we eentually found the stag again.
Time was running out now so there was a frantic succession of attempts to win the stag’s favour as he made his way back down the waterfront towards the Southbank Centre.
Often they involved ruthlessly employing the services of a small, cute child.
The rules were now being much more strictly enforced so there was a leap-frogging effect as threesomes located themselves in the stag’s path, at 5 pace intervals, poised ready to put their flattery tactics into action. It was fab. People were getting really creative! We had serenades, human pyramids, human letter-forms spelling out S T A G (didn’t work) and all sorts. I have no idea what the non-playing public in the area thought must have thought all these nutters with balloons must have been doing. Hopefully there are a few tourists who now believe this is a traditional Sunday-afternoon pursuit…
Anyway, when it came to the count we (the purple team) lost out on first place by one single balloon…
Anyhoo, I can genuinely say I was thoroughly glad I had taken part. Stag hunt: hilarious, exciting, creative and just plain silly. I would love to try variants of this game that allowed for greater use of tactics in locating and tracking the stag as well as, as Jane asked, interfering with the balloons of other teams.
Things wound up with a great photo-opportunity with a business card that had been planted in someone’s bag (presumably as a trail-head into some new ARG):
Not going home yet
Stag Hunt was officially the last event of the festival, although there were still pockets of activity and board game construction going on inside the building. Mostly though there were lots of people who know that they should go home now, but also that they really didn’t want to.
Singapur am 27. 2. 02, 11 Uhr, sonnig und schwül, sieht genau aus wie das kühle, beschneite Prag einen Monat später oder der Gaza-Streifen am 2. 6. 05 um 14 Uhr: nach nichts. Oder vielmehr: nach einem leeren Glas mit Metalldeckel und Schraubverschluss. Die britische Künstlerin Nikki Pugh hat im Jahr 2001 begonnen, solche Gläser zu kaufen und sie Freunden und Bekannten mitzugeben auf Reisen. Mittlerweile hat sie mehrere hundert “Wetterproben” aus allen Teilen der Welt, ein paar Dutzend stehen derzeit im Hygiene-Museum in Dresden. Ein fein ironisches Bild dafür, dass uns das Wetter, obwohl wir zu jeder Sekunde mittendrin leben, durch die Finger flutscht wie nichts.
Approximately:
Fear and Poetry
Singapore, February the 27th, 2002, 11 o’clock, sunny and sticky, looks the same as the cool, snowy Prague a month later or Gaza on February the 6th, 2005 at 2 am: it looks like nothing. Or rather: it looks like an empty jar with a metal cap and a screwtop. In 2001, the British artist Nikki Pugh began to buy such jars and give them to friends and acquaintances to take them with them on their journeys. Nowadays she possesses several hundred of these “samples” from all parts of the world, a few dozen are now exhibited in the Hygiene-Museum in Dresden. A fine, ironic image for the fact that the weather, although we are living in the middle of it in every second, slips through our fingers like nothing.
Here are some photos of the doings (for my Mum) and some thoughts about display (for me, ‘cos one day I’m going to nail the presentation of this piece of work).
Launch event
I’d suspected it was going to be big, but first response on seeing the museum building was something along the lines of “eek”. Other adjectives that came up over the next few days included ‘imposing’ and ‘didactic’. Here’s why:
I should therefore have guessed it would have been rather more of a formal launch event than I was used to: speeches started at 7 and lasted for close to 2 hours.
After the speeches drew to a close there was a bit of a mass exodus as probably about 500 people descended back down to the main entrance hall and the bar.
Waiting staff periodically emerged bearing trays of cheesy sticks, pretzels and sandwiches etc to be swarmed around by the guests. I wish I’d got some good photos of that!
We eventually made our way to the exhibition halls which were, by now, only fairly rammed rather than being completely rammed! It’s hard to describe the feel of this place: part science museum with interactive bits and pieces; part civic museum with dimmed lights and watchful attendants; part at gallery, part… The best way to get an impression of the mood and the scale is to have a lookatthephotos on the German-language section of the DHMD website.
Exhibits ranged from the exploded shards of lightning-struck trees through to a small canister of top secret recipe snow-globe snow. Nice.
the weatherproject was in the third room, curated by Novina Göhlsdorf to bring together different cultural responses to the weather. My jars are temporarily hanging about with the likes of one of Her Majesty the Queen’s umbrellas and latex casts of hurricane-flattened homes.
It was quite strange to see a tiny fraction of the entire collection at once looking so small and also so big. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m glad I didn’t have to make that selection of 30 jars from over 10 times as many in the complete collection!
Display
I arrived at the museum not knowing anything about how they were intending to display the jars and record slips. This was intentional because I’ve always struggled to present this work and wanted to give them free reign to see what solutions they came up with with their resources, experience and expertise.
It was really interesting to compare their method of display with the one I used for the threshold exhibition back in 2004. My solution for threshold was to construct an 18′ long table with a folded plastic cover that arched quite snugly over the jars. (the cover is removed in most of the photos at the previous link because of the way it attracted the dust…). At the DHMD, the designers had made a similar cover out of similar materials and of a similar scale with respect to the size of the jars. All much more skilfully executed though! Rather than heating and folding a single strip of polythene/acrylic they had cut and glued individual pieces of much thicker stock to give some really nice clean corners. I’m jealous…
The DHMD installation also paired each jar with its record slip and gave each pairing quite a lot of space. At threshold I had 250 jars and was using the opportunity to get them all out on show en masse as physical objects and so they were a lot closer together. The threshold jars were all closely bunched together and the record slips available digitally at one end of the table.
The DHMD approach had a strange homogenising effect – both through intentional selection of collections made in the standard jar and with no additional labels/contents etc and through the omission of the individual ephemera such as postcards and photos that accompany most of the jars. This and the lighting/mid grey plinth colour led to quite an austere effect. Very different to what had gone before and I suppose made possible by both the exhibition and curator’s distance from the people who had made the contributions.
I can see how this was appropriate to the task in hand here, but the work did lose some of it’s quirkiness that I think is one of it’s strong points. I don’t dislike this format, however, and it may be something I experiment with more in future presentations…
I loitered a bit and watched how people interacted with the display, and have to say that I didn’t see many people do more than look at one or two of the jars. I’m not sure if this is an observation worth basing any theories on seeing as how people were having to zip around quite fast to try and see everything before closing and, well, if there’s a bank of empty jars labelled up in a different language next to an interactive display of snow-globes which one are you going to choose! I know which one I’d go for!
Actually, as it turned out, I got totally drawn in by a black and white film of rain in Amsterdam in the late 1920s. Regen by Joris Ivens and Manus Franken (here with soundtrack, although it was silent at the Dresden exhibition).
Another thing I found interesting was watching how people’s engagement with the work shifted. Typically people would glance at one or two jars and then, sometimes, go and read the accompanying text describing the work. That was the hook! If they did this then 9 times out of 10 they’d go back to the jars and have a closer look – often with a smile on their face and usually grabbing whoever they were with and getting them to have a look too!
So, all in all a method of display that brought along a whole bunch of new things to consider, but also reiterated old hunches too. Hopefully we’re getting closer to the ultimate weatherproject format…
If you happen to be in Dresden over the next few months I can recommend you stop by and check out the exhibition. Take the randomness of the weatherproject and then multiply that by 4 large rooms full of stuff both curious and scientific. There’s a whole range of interesting things all brought together here and you’ll definitely find something that whets your appetite.
And finally…
After the launch had officially ended we found our way to the after-party in seminar room 8. A good time was had by all, despite the strangely prison-like surroundings and the stinky cheese!
I’m going to finish up with these two photos that I really like (party lights and top-end museum security) and, more importantly a big thanks to Family Göhlsdorf et al for making my trip a lot easier than it could have been otherwise.
Lever, crank, bell crank, cam and ratchet was an installation of a series of sculptures I made specifically for the GOODS In group exhibition (Saturday 28th June, a one day event in a disused warehouse space).
It was the first time anything like this had happened in this space and location-wise it was outside the usual destinations and a little bit tricky to spot (amusing considering the size of the place!) so it was good to see so many people track it down and come and have a look over the few hours it was open.
As per usual I ended up producing something that needed active participation from the audience in order to function: Lever, crank, bell crank, cam and ratchet consisted of 5 small cardboard models of each of the named mechanical components connected to each other and to weights via threads that arched across the room.
The sculptures were made so that rather than forming an array of mechanisms that combined to produce some overall useful effect, each one worked in isolation and therefore was limited to a basic repetitive action.
Apart from a few extras to form the axles and pivots (and the occasional rubber band, of course), the units were made from A4 cardboard picked up when I worked as a temp for an examining board. This is the cardboard used to reinforce the envelopes in which adult basic literacy and numeracy exams are returned.
I’ll leave you to form your own connections and meanings…
The way it worked out, there was no signage to accompany the works in the show so it became quite interesting for me to watch and see how people overcame (or otherwise) the usual gallery barriers to interact (or otherwise) with the mechanisms.
Many people wouldn’t operate the levers and handles – even when told they could, and even when they’d been looking at them for some time presumably wondering what would happen if…
As usual, the best way to get people participating was to lead by example and just get on and have a play and then invite them to join you. There were some nice cascades where for a while we’d have 3 or 4 people all operating different parts of the installation.
Also, as with other projects, those that got over that initial participation barrier tended to become ‘power-users’ [to borrow a term from a recent post] and get properly stuck in. I’m definitely talking about Pete here as demonstrated by the final scene in this video:
Saturday was the big ‘closing’ event for Emergent Game (again, we all seem to have trouble thinking of it in terms of being the end) and, as usual, my head’s full of stuff that I’m going to inflict on you as part of the process of sorting through it and pulling out threads. There are lots of photos to be shared and stories to be told, but I expect this will be done in a different place and in a different voice.
Here are some initial thoughts from the point of view of organising the event:
What is?
Partly through needing some distance and partly through commitments to other projects in the interim, there was quite a long gap between the NGA festival-related part of The Game (up until 20th of June) and the Grand Finally.
Though I didn’t have a lot of time for directly organising stuff, it did give me the opportunity to think a lot about more general things like what sort of an experience I wanted it to be. The event had been presented in terms of being a combination of the City Wide Treasure Hunt mission (coming from random descriptions in the festival literature) and the Ludens’ Tea Party mission – both big scorers within The Game and ideal ways to combine cabaret and collaboration.
As it began to take shape in my head though, I increasing lost sight of this and, especially after going to Hide&Seek last weekend, was thinking more in terms of the types of behaviours I wanted to encourage.
That sounds odd. What I mean is…
…that after much thinking I decided that the aim of the day was not to discover the location of some object or to solve a puzzle; it was to give people the opportunity to do things they wouldn’t normally do, within the framework of a larger context that added layers of excitement such as trying to remain anonymous when you knew there were other Ludens criss-crossing the same space at the same time.
Looking back at it now, I’m wondering if it’s enough to regard the larger context as being the day’s event, or whether you have to include all the play that came before it? Would the Grand Finally have been possible/as successful had there not have been the 2 month’s worth of conversation and interaction that built up the characters and narratives involved?
Certainly when I was planning who should do what, a lot of the missions were based on references to things that had developed out of the game. @egorbeaver was given a lot of teaparty themed activities, @cross_triangle’s day was based on glyphs and @LeonHerring got to spend some time at the beach. With other players I knew who they were in real life and so was able to build in references to things outside of Emergent Game.
The other benefit to having been through all the missions and stuff beforehand was that I’d got a sense of what, for me at least, provided the buzz: knowing that you might find yourself at a drop-off point at the same time as another Ludens; having to work with your avatar in public locations; having to either explain to Sapiens what was going on or pretend that nothing out of the ordinary was going on and it’s perfectly normal to be taking photos of this soft toy in this shop thank you very much.
By the time it got to In Deep End-Dance day I knew that I wanted In Deep End-Dance Day +1 to be based around the following:
A Common starting point and a common end point (i.e. the pub!)
Going to parts of the city you probably hadn’t been to before
Interactions with Sapiens
Remote interactions with Ludens – i.e. transfers of information and objects
Possibility of accidental direct encounters with Ludens – i.e. crossing of paths
That and 2 things to follow up on after a barrage of phonecalls and texts to possibly friendly Sapiens were pretty much all I had to go on at the start of spending the day in town looking for ways to string it all together…
Interactions with Sapiens
In moments of optimism I had thought it might be nice to have Sapiens tweeting in tasks etc over the course of the event, however the degree of interaction from Sapiens up until this point had been, frankly, disappointing so I gave up on that idea.
In comparison, the support I had from random strangers as I wandered around town and made strange requests was phenomenal.
First stop was the Borders bookshop in the BullRing where a supervisor friend volunteered two front-of-store staff to be in on the Grand Finally. Thanks to them I was able to leave several mission packs in a couple of different locations.
Four of the Ludens and two watchers passed through this space in the first hour or so of the event – I’d like to see the cctv footage!
Likewise, assistance from the staff at the Pen Room really made a huge difference. I’d only had a glimpse of this place a few years ago and wasn’t disappointed on going back for a closer look. I strongly recommend you do the same.
In the 2nd of the two pen room rooms is was immediately apparent that this was somewhere to send not only cross_triangle, but also the stamptmeister Loki. A big thankyou to Malcolm both for his enthusiasm and his assistance in relaying contents of emails.
A meeting in a coffee shop then secured the assistance of Zebra Scraf Woman on the Fluxus boat trip …and also the name of a friend’s mum librarian …which led onto one of the players being shown some of the Central Library’s Shakespeare Collection.
The other big contribution came from the security staff at the Victoria Law Courts at the top of Corporation Street. This is a favourite hidden gem where I usually take visitors to the city. Once you’re past the x-ray machine you’re immediately in another world of 19th Century architecture. Check. It. Out. (information sheet available from the desk inside)
I checked to see if they’d be open to the public on Saturdays and at first it looked like they wouldn’t and that I’d have to come up with another idea. So I asked them if they could think of any alternative locations and that drew a blank. …and then suddenly I’m proudly being shown the portcullis over [under] the main entrance [can anyone confirm this is the only one still in use in the world?] and we’ve worked out a deal that if I send a player along first thing then they’ll probably still be there and everything will be OK. Love it – and what’s more it sounds liek they were conducting their own personal treasure hunts when LeonHerring turned up with Leon’s mission:
As the Grand Finally progressed we also had encounters with various unsuspecting members of the public including (but not restricted to) most of the staff of Borders, someone with a clipboard, the man with the cigar photographed with egorbeaver at a prominent Birmingham landmark, the person ad Hudsons who took temporary custody of the receipt for the mug that had the photo of the man with the cigar photographed with egorbeaver at a prominent Birmingham landmark printed on it and the patrons of the children’s library. Job done.
Timetabling
Some of the players had to get to certain places by certain times before Law Courts shut or boats set sail. The timetable looked like this: (click for larger)
Needless to say most people werelate turning up for the start and a few coffees later quite a few things had to be jiggled. Didn’t seem to matter too much in the end, but lesson learned to leave more allowance for this sort of thing next time around.
Love it or hate it we relied on Twitter really heavily through all stages of Emergent Game. It’s caused us headaches on more than one occasion so I made sure everyone had my phone number before the Grand Finally began. Just as well really, because somewhere between Manchester and Brum egorbeaver discovered egorbeaver was suffering from the same PIN thing that had prevented me from playing Cruel 2 B Kind the weekend before.
So, for the first hour or two I was relaying instructions to egorbeaver by text. Luckily I did then manage to log onto egorbeaver’s account from the Grand Finally HQ in Coffee Lounge and get things working again later!
One thing I hadn’t really anticipated was the extent to which 7 people tweeting would eat up the battery life on our phones. We’ve talked about the benefits of using Twitter for a decentralised method of communication, but my phone gave out about 20 minutes before the end and we came really close to losing a few of the others too.
Next time around we’d have to consider either a) doing things over a shorter time-scale, b) doing things over a much longer timescale (i.e. you can go home and recharge between missions) or c) making more use of direct messages so that players only recieve tweets for them and not so much of the general chit chat. Hmmm, not sure if I’d want that or not…. I’m curious to find out more about egorbeaver’s experience of playing for a few hours with Twitter silence to see what this is like in comparison to having an awareness of what the other players are doing.
The other thing I like about public tweets is that they are then available as an archive of what happened in the way that direct messages are not.
Documentation and commentary
Puppet Mastering the Grand Finally was an intensely hectic experience. I didn’t get a chance to pause for the whole 3 and a half hours and only got the chance to go for a wee when Loki’s brain went bork and Loki joined me for a few minutes before going to collect the mug.
I’m definitely thinking in terms of this being a two-person job next time around. There certainly wasn’t any time available for live blogging or LudensShow tweeting for the benefit of any Sapiens.
I’m really glad that Alex and Vanessa agreed to join us as Ludens Stalkers and help document the event. I’ve now got some great images of various players at different points of the game and it seems like most of them were unaware they were being followed!
Although we heard a few tales in the pub afterwards, I’m really hoping the Ludens will take the time to write up their experiences so we can start to piece together what happened and, more importantly, what it was like to be in it.
The meet up
So, the guessing game is over! Now we know who they are! (Well, some of them, anyway.)
A bunch of Ludens in a pub eating beevapoo… who could have known that would have made me feel so happy! :)
One of the things several people commented on as the Ludens started to appear was how so many of them were women. Normally I’d pay as much attention to gender labels as I do to those for Art and Science (i.e. I try not to), but it does seem this is something significant. It would be interesting to find out who all the other players are to see if this trend is carried out across the whole Ludens population.
It’s interesting to look back now with hindsight and look at the different assumptions I made about whether Ludens were male or female. In my mind’s eye egorbeaver was male until I got the furball in that box and somehow the handwriting was female too. Oh, and the singing voice!
Ditto for cross_triangle: female handwriting on the labels that accompanied the treasure. What the hell does female handwriting look like?!?! How do I have an opinion about what female handwriting looks like?!!?
It occurred to me this morning that what we had in the pub was a bunch of web-literate people talking about digital stuff …who mostly happened to be women – and it all felt very, very different to the one blogmeet I’ve been to.
Anyhow, it feels like it would be a heinous crime to reveal anyone’s identity, so I’m going to leave it there.
Lessons learned and a big thank you to all those to whom I owe thanks.
My main area of enquiry is centred around interactions between people and place: often using tools and strategies from areas such as pervasive games and physical computing to set up frameworks for exploration.
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