Hide&Seek 2: The Lost Sport of Olympia

This was one of the big draws for me: I’ve not been following The Lost Ring ARG particularly closely and have only the faintest awareness of the background narrative and puzzles but I’m fascinated by the Lost Sport that it all supports.

In brief:

A labyrinth is marked up on the ground and a blindfolded runner has to try and exit it as fast as possible.

A bunch of other people become the walls and hum to guide the runner around the labyrinth.

That’s it! Simple, right?

…except that photo above is just the training labyrinth – the easy one for beginners so you can get the hang of the basics. And with 15-20 enthusiastic strangers all dashing around the place trying to get into position (once the runner has gone past you, you need to leg it to the other end of the wall) things can get fairly chaotic.

That’s where things start to get a bit cunning.

Before we could attempt the labyrinths, we all had to do what was essentially a quick personality test:

You can do it online here. This will categorise you according to your strengths (yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it’s flawed but…) and from here you are guided towards different roles within the team.

We each got a couple of colour-coded stickers that identified out different strengths and jobs were allocated for coordinators and time-keepers etc etc. I think the strengths is a really nice aspect of what’s going on because even if they are inaccurate you immediately have a set of goals to work towards and that then means you also have something to gauge your personal development. It also saves a lot of time when you can cut through a lot of the decision-making negotiation and immediately short-list potentials for a particular role (that’s not to say we didn’t stray from the guides later on, once we’d had a chance to develop as a group…)

I am apparently a mix of Sophia (“I bring wisdom, creativity and cleverness to our mission. I am one of the knowledge-seekers”) and Thumos (“I bring courage, energy and determination to our mission. I am one of the adventurers”) the latter of which meant I got to have a quick go at being blindfolded and trying to navigate the small labyrinth.

I can definitely recommend the experience!

We were apparently doing pretty well with our time of about 30 seconds (the records seem to be about 15 seconds) so we were rapidly ushered on over to the next one – 5 7 circuits rather than three:

Here is some video of another group on the labyrinth for what I think might be the first time.

The Lost Sport: 5 circuit walk-through from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

It takes Toby about 1 minute 40 seconds to get around without a blindfold on. What’s interesting here is that you can see the different roles that have been established: the runner; the walls; a coordinator; someone to walk the route ahead of the wall so the wall knows where to go and, naturally, a healthy number of spectator-participants too! I’m not sure if these are roles that have already been identified within the back-story and accumulating research into the Lost Sport, but in our group they (almost identical roles) seemed to evolve fairly naturally.

What’s really, really interesting from my perspective is the team feedback that happens after each attempt. Various people are asked for feedback, the plan is modified a little and something new gets tried. Love it.

Here’s their blindfolded run. (The speeded up section at the start is them seeing if it’s feasible to have people permanently stationed on the tricky corners.) Note there’s now also someone coordinating the hum.

The Lost Sport: 5 circuit labyrinth from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

These guys really got it together after a few goes and I think there may have also been a record set. You’re looking at a time of about 2 and a half minutes. I think I heard someone say the Olympic-sized labyrinth (8 circuits) takes about 8 minutes to complete…

This is fitting right in with some of the things I’ve been thinking about recently and I would absolutely love to use this as a framework for a cross-disciplinary project looking at behavioural issues with perhaps a class of primary school pupils with any group of students to investigate any number of questions involving group dynamics, collaboration and probably lots of other stuff too. There’s so much you could do with this just by backing off and letting the class group figure stuff out for themselves.

Of course I would also be really interested in getting a Birmingham-based group of adults together who would like to spend some time figuring out how to get the labyrinth-running down to a t (it’s all in the wall, it’s all in the wall… and I think there’s a fair chance that less is more). It’s a great challenge, fun, and surprisingly addictive. The surprising thing for me was that when I asked if there were already any groups established in Birmingham, I was told that in the whole of the UK there was only a London-based group and an intermittent one in Leeds. London wins again? Bah!

About 15 people who fancy an afternoon in the sun should do the trick. Anyone up for it?

Hide&Seek 1: Emergent Game resonances

Yesterday I journeyed to London for the last day of this year’s Hide&Seek Festival. It was a packed day and there’s so much I want to get written down that I’ve decided rather than write an impossibly long post (impossible to read, let alone find the time to write) I’m going to break it down into chunks. That way I can prioritise stuff and hopefully keep the momentum going.

First up I’m going to tackle things that happened on Friday. When I wasn’t there. When things happened that I don’t know about!

Fixed to one of the pillars in the indoor space for Hide&Seek were two tantalising sheets of paper. Perhaps visual aids from a presentation? I don’t know what the topic of discussion was or who was doing the discussing…

Several of the phrases on them jumped out at me immediately so this post is going to be a bit of a Counsel for the Artist on them where I take them out of context and jot down some of the trains of thought they triggered. (Blog-as-notebook: more for me than for you!)

I had much the same reaction to several things mentioned in this recent post from Jane McGonigal, so, since there’s a high chance this panel might be where the visual aids came from, I’m going to bundle them in together…

ARGs for the (socially engaged) arts

Emergent Game! …or rather what I hope Emergent Game might become a few iterations down the line…

[I know it isn’t an ARG and, with hindsight, it didn’t really evolve into a game either. Perhaps in a parallel dimension I named it Emergent Play instead?]

It was reassuring to see Jane’s comments about extent of active participation

…more than 50% of ARGs fail to be good at either of this, not through any failures of the designer, but through the failure of players to show up and actively participate. Which, by the way, is the standard percentage of social media projects that fail to reach a community size of any viability and fold within the first year.

I don’t think the game format helped to overcome limited engagement (one of the problems with getting people involved in participatory art projects that we wanted to explore) but now we’re (nearly) the other side of Emergent Game I still think a game format has a massive potential as a tool to drive socially-engaged projects. I’m hugely proud of the way the Ludens consistently managed to floor me with their generosity of time, energy and creativity – not only in the physical/digital things they produced, but also the extent to which they developed the various narratives and characterisations within the project. How can that effort be harnessed to other goals?

My favorit things from Egor Beaver on Vimeo.

…the pyramid of participation. The power law curve. 80% of your “players” won’t DO anything except casually look at it or poke at it. That’s how ALL social media works. 1% of your players will do 90% of the active “gameplay”. Which isn’t really gameplay by the way, it’s social media creation (wikis, forums, videos, etc.) So when you imagine your great big player base, be realisit [sic]. Don’t try to make social media work like a game. Social media thrives on superusers, not the base, not the typical user.

Is it possible to regard all the Ludens as the Emergent Game power users? Maybe.

We had several players get enthused at the workshops only to never be heard of again. Some players we know dropped out because of work commitments, others because they were intimidated by Twitter, others probably lost interest or decided it wasn’t for them. Generally though, those that took part during the Game phase were very committed.

Power users and the value of spectatorship

Having spoken a lot with Markuz about modes of participation it was important to me that Emergent Game made official provision for an acknowledgement of those who wanted to participate just by watching. We tried to leave the barrier between Sapiens (spectator) and Ludens (player) as permeable as possible with opportunities for Sapiens to get involved although, this pretty much didn’t happen.

A phenomenal amount of my time was spent catering for the Sapiens by way of the daily commentary and @TheLudensShow. Although we didn’t have anyone comment on the website, web stats and secondary write-ups did justify this effort to an extent. By its nature, degree of engagement with Sapiens is a tricky one to judge.

At this point I’m still undecided about whether what grows out of Emergent Game should try to be all-inclusive and cater to the ‘typical user’ that Jane alludes to or embrace the power user and the ‘elitism’ that comes with that. I still stand by “Strive to achieve modest connections” from Counsel as a quality-rather-than-quantity approach but I suppose the final verdict depends on the particular context for which you are trying to use the game. Sometimes elitism can be good, right?

Collective Intelligence and real world problems

I now firmly believe the “game” needs to be about something real. Pick a real mystery or problem and do a real investigation and give players social platforms like ARG players use, and have puppet masters oversee the pacing/tempo of the investigation, giving feedback and showcasing excellent play/work.

Although we tried to foster a spirit of Collective Intelligence with some of the resource-mapping type missions within Emergent Game, the closest we got to dabbling in it was with the second reconnaissance mission to map free internet access.

We needed to do this in order to assess what options were open to us for the main game play later, but this rather rapidly became interpreted from outside as being a “free WiFi in Birmingham” challenge. We weren’t too happy with this, even though the mission did partially come from awareness of a particular context in Birmingham.

As it happens, a request came through from Sapiens Nick Booth:

I’d love it if the ludens could add anygeo tagged images to this flickr group set up a while back

http://www.flickr.com/groups/514215@N23/

This group map had three images on it before the Ludens came along and added a few. There was also a similar story for several other Brum WiFi mapping attempts we came across: there was obviously a need for this information to be pulled together, but when it came down to it no one had knuckled down to produce it.

Although Recon2 all but killed off our pre-game, in the end I think we did quite well, comparatively.

Is this just because we had an elite team of superusers, or down to working within the motivational framework of a game?

Misc

Other phrases from the post and posters I could go into in more detail – but I won’t right now – are:

• “Engage people in public space”
• “Player ownership”
• “Entertainment” (- important because people are giving up their free time)
• “Children and ARGs” (- more on that in the Lost Sport post I’ll write next)
• “giving feedback and showcasing excellent play/work.”
• “have an actual IP people care about” (- can you use a game to make people care about something?)
• “but it’s ART” (- we had real problems with the art community not seeing Emergent Game as art – mostly it was the educationalists and the social media types who really got excited about it)
• “I don’t want the core experience to be conversation, I want to it to be action and post-action storytelling.”

Probably I’ll be coming back to most of these later (in posts with rather more photos and videos, I promise!).

Re:Flux

Flux Concert

Friday 27th June 2008, 5pm – 9pm
Co-curated by a.a.s. and Ensemble Interakt

I really, really, really, really enjoyed this.

Just as the audience started small in number and gradually grew until there were about 40 people peering over the church gallery, the Fluxconcert started with a few simple actions and then grew through soap bubbles being blown from trumpets and naps being taken on tables to a thoroughly absorbing, multi-layered spectacle of sight and sound.

Although the architecture of the venue (St. Paul’s Church, St. Paul’s Square, Birmingham) could have meant that we as audience could have remained very detached from the main action happening below us, enough of the 40 or so scores brought the performers up into the gallery space that the two levels never felt particularly segregated.

There were also scores that required members of the audience to play an active part in their performance. An example of these being Ice Trick:

pass a one pound piece of ice among members of the audience while playing a recording of fire sounds or while having a real fire on stage. The piece ends when the block of ice has melted.Lee Heflin. Date Unknown

which I particularly liked for the way it allowed the audience to participate in a very low-key and intimate way that was almost 1:1 micro-performance with other audience members.

I managed to leave the house without re-charging the batteries for either my camera or my phone so my photography was limited, however, thanks to this man’s marathon ice-holding session, I was able to turn my camera off for long enough for the battery to recover enough to eventually take this image that sums up the event for me:

Even more so perhaps because he then asked me to hold the ice when he could do so no longer. Honourable mention also to David Miller who I ambushed as he first came up to the gallery and gave the ice to him before he’d even had so much as a chance to get a cup of tea and an apple. (Shame though on the entire representative staff of VIVID, none of whom would agree to taking the ice from me before that!)

Being phoneless also meant I was unable to take part in the live-documenting of the event by MMS sent to the Re:Flux Flickr account. It was really interesting to see the performers pausing during the middle of sawing up an electric guitar (for example) to snap a picture and then continue with slicing up the woodwork. I think the flood of incoming photos may have proven a bit to much for the relay to Flickr and the photostream is incomplete, but this is definitively an approach I’d like to play with more in the future.

I’d also like to see the Fluxconcert become a regular event: with permeability in the group of performers and people taking up the challenge of inventing new scores…

In the meantime, here is a slideshow of some of my photos – if you go to the pages on Flickr, the descriptions include the scores for each action shown.

GOODS In set-up

Working on the installation of Lever, crank, bell crank, cam and ratchet for the GOODS In show this Saturday.

weights from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

Other pieces of work are starting to filter into the space now too: you’re going to have to see the ladder to believe it!

Some folks were having a little bit of trouble knowing which building the show is in so here’s a photo so you know where to head for.

GOODS In

Saturday 28th June, 4-8pm
332 – 346 Moseley Road [map and directions]

Coming up…

Due to what I can only put down to being a momentary lapse in concentration, I seem to have inadvertently got myself into the position of having tangible objects on show in exhibitions over the coming weeks …not only once, but on three separate occasions!

GOODS In

Saturday 28th June, 4-8pm
332 – 346 Moseley Road [map and directions]

First is GOODS In: a one-day exhibition curated by Charlie Levine and Harminder Singh Judge

This is a group show with the works chosen for the theme of “mechanics, engineering, the factory and multiples” in response to the location: a disused bed warehouse.

This is a must see – of course for the work, but also for the building itself (of which, unfortunately, you will see only a tiny fraction). There’s a lot of potential here and the owner, Sham, is working hard to turn what is a HUGE amount of space into a viable venue. Help get the momentum going.

I’ll be exhibiting a series of simple cardboard mechanisms that interact with the space.

Contents May Vary

Thursday 3rd July, 6-8pm
Castlefield Gallery, 2 Hewitt Street, Manchester. M15 4GB.

Ages and ages ago I submitted some work for the second Contents May Vary publication.

The gap between what we can assume lies beneath the visual world and the potential possibilities of what it conceals has given our imagination the opportunity to wander. Our minds reason that the inside of a rock is simply more of the outside. But we can never quite come to terms with the possibilities of what is hidden. To split the rock in a quest for this knowledge is futile when you discover that instead of revealing the internal, all you have achieved is even more known external. As artists we are faced with a decision on the format with which to start a discussion. With accepting what we see is real, a book as object involves seen and unseen material. This inanimate object can engage us on many levels when we begin a relationship with it as both creator and viewer.

My work is a map relating to the Sites of Potentiality Guidebooks series.

The publication is a 16 page, black and white limited edition with contributions from myself and artists: Andrew Bracey, Alice Bradshaw, Chris Clarke, John Dellar, Stuart Edmondson, Michael Farquhar, David Martin, Liz Murphy, John Sauve and Richard Shields.

You can pick up your copy at the free launch event at Castlefield Galley or, after the launch, by sending an A5 SAE to: CMV issue 2, Castlefield Gallery, 2 Hewitt Street, Manchester M15 4GB, UK.

theweatherproject

July 11, 2008 – April 19, 2009
Stiftung Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Lingnerplatz 1, 01069 Dresden, Germany

Part of the 2°. Weather, Climate, Man exhibition at what looks to be a really interesting institution. I’ll be flying out for the opening, not for the networking – which I’m terminally hopeless at, even in my native language – but to see if the exhibitions live up to my high expectations based almost entirely on this image from their website.

For those who don’t know, the weatherproject began in late 2000 when I started asking volunteers to collect samples of weather for me. Each person gets an identical weather-collecting kit and can then choose when and where to collect their weather. Some of the results are documented online, but, despite difficulties in asking people to take mysterious containers abroad with them nowadays, actual numbers are now something like 300-400 jars (I can never keep track) and still increasing…

Here are the names of the people whose jars will go into the show:

Sophie Maughan, Lucie Slámová, Nigel Prince. Graham Dix, Suping Tian, Gill Lawson, Sandy Hewat, Afaq Qureshi, Petra Nieth, Kate Lang, Elizabeth Batters, David Taylor, Astrid Bergmann, Emma Hunter & Charles West, Cathleen Jackson, Martin Weaver, Rachel Jack, Judith Evans, Scott Smith, Clark Crawford, Xenia Snetkov, Jane Tapley, Simon Tapley, Tomoko Okada and Sylvia Gardiner.

Only 30 collections have been selected for exhibition, but I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed to the project over the last 7 years or so.

Um, also, if anyone has any suggestions for a cunning storage solution for several hundred small glass jars…

Come out and play

We’re holding the first of our public workshop sessions related to Emergent Game tonight at Rooty’s in the Custard Factory. [map]

Although it’ll be a good chance to find out more about The Game we’re intending that it should also stand alone and be of value to anyone who’s interested in the Big Game approach to collaborative creativity and exploring what’s around you.

So, armed with a pocket-full of technology and a soft-toy avatar, we invite you to join us in seeking out some interesting parts of Digbeth. Tonight, drop in from 4.30pm until at least about 7pm. It’s free – just bring yourself, your mobile phone/digital camera and a sense of humour.

Bearwood Snooker Hall

I few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be invited to join some of the Crowd6 folks exploring the old theatre space upstairs at the Bearwood snooker hall.

I think we spent a couple of hours there – mostly in silence – each exploring and making our own little discoveries.

Many photos were taken. I’ve done my best to edit them down, but the slideshow below will still take a while to get through…

Free Internet Access?

The players in Emergent Game are currently working on a challenge where they’ve been asked to map any free internet access they can find.

Judging by the Google map for the mission they’re finding it hard going. So far they’ve logged a few libraries and a couple of free WiFi connections.

The issue of free WiFi in Birmingham (or the lack thereof) has come up a bit recently, and the idea of mapping free WiFi nodes is not new – although it’s often hard to distinguish between genuinely free resources and those you have to pay to use.

We’re appealing here for anyone who knows of a free WiFi connection or, (even better for the purposes of Emergent Game) anywhere members of the public can use an internet-connected computer for free, to let us know in the comments on this page. Then we can hunt it down, add it to the map and use it later as part of The Game. Of course, you could even add it yourself, if you felt so inclined…

The recon2 map is here and it’s public access for anyone to view. Like the resources it maps, it’s free. Use it.

Emergent Game: Call for Ludens

We invite you to play Emergent Game and help us explore possibilities across appropriated digital and non-digital spaces.

For the last month or so, a small group of people have chosen to describe themselves as Ludens – those willing to take part and play – rather than Sapiens – those who will only watch. Together we have been exploring an open-ended game format known as Emergent Game.

It’s a bit hard to describe because as new people get involved their interactions influence what is happening… although I think it is fair to say that we have now arrived at something that is utilising a range of web applications (photo-sharing, video-sharing, map-sharing, idea-sharing…) to catalyse re-imagining the everyday stuff around us.

There is some commentary on the Emergent Game website that describes this in more detail than I can here, but even that is really just scratching the surface.

If you are interested in any of the following, then this could well be the The Game for you:

• exploring use of public spaces
• exploring the edges
• exploring groups of people
• examining modes of participatory practice
• messing around with technology
• messing around with language
• messing around with ideas
• interacting
• playing for the sake of learning
• playing for the sake of playing

However, if you think you must be any (or perhaps all) of these types of people to join in, then please think again. Simply put: Emergent Game is what you make of it.

To help you decide whether to become a Ludens, a Sapiens or to go ahead and forget all about it, I recommend you first have a look at the Sapiens section of the Emergent Game website. Here you’ll find some commentary to give you a flavour of what’s been going on so far.

Don’t worry if it seems impenetrably technological – The Game doesn’t assume dizzying amounts of computing knowledge; only a willingness to give things a go. Likewise you don’t need the latest smartphone or satnav (but we do recommend a mobile phone, access to the internet and perhaps a digital camera).

As you may have noticed, each Ludens is anonymous. Emergent Game is played through a customised soft toy avatar that represents you both online and for the real-world aspects too. How far you take this customisation is entirely up to you.

If you can see the potential in all this and are ready to get involved, here are your initial instructions.

If you can see the potential in all this, but see yourself as more Sapiens than Ludens, here is your news feed.

If you have a group of Ludens, are ready to challenge our notions of place, but need to discuss language support, here is your contact form.

If you have an agenda, and need to discuss either incorporation or a splinter group, this is also your contact form.

Either way, we’re looking forward to talking to you.

The small print:

Emergent Game is supported by the New Generation Arts festival, 2008. Our main flurry of activity will be in early June, but things are already getting started now and could well run on for longer than the festival too.

For those of you based in or near Birmingham, UK, there will be various workshops and events – please watch either this or the Emergent Game website for more information as it is made available.

Pub Cnversations: Melanie Carvalho and Ross Birrell

Please note that there has been a change in venue and this pub conversation will now be held at The Spotted Dog.

The Spotted Dog, 104 Warwick Street, Digbeth, Birmingham, B12 0NH.
Tel: 0121 772 3822
Tuesday 29th April
7.30pm

Places are limited, so please email selfservice@hotmail.co.uk to book.

Melanie Carvalho

Melanie Carvalho is an artist working and living in London. She has shown in solo exhibitions (Cubitt gallery, London, 2002; Hidde van Seggelen, London 2006) and group exhibitions (East International, Norwich School of Art and Gallery, 2007; Where the Wild Things Are, Dundee Contemporary Arts, 2006; The Impossible Landscape, UMass Fine Art Centre, Amherst, Massachussetts, USA, 2006; Collage, Bloomberg Space, London; Solar Lunar, doggerfisher, 2004; Plunder, DCA, 2003; Viewfinder, Arnolfini, Bristol, 2002). She also co-curated The Poster Show with John Maclean that was shown at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, in 1999 and Cabinet, London, 2000. Carvalho studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and the Royal College of Art and received a Rome scholarship in 1998 . She recently published a book entitled Expedition: A Journey in Search of Tropical Scotland, (which includes an essay by Ross Birrell) as part of a piece of work of the same name, whereby she travelled around the west coast of Scotland drawing, painting and filming the palms and sub-tropical flora that grown there. Her work is in private and public collections, including the New Art Gallery, Walsall.

Ross Birrell

Ross Birrell is an artist and writer. He has shown in group and solo exhibitions including the 4th Gwangju Bienalle (2002), Utopia Station (Sindelfingen, 2003), Envoy, Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam and BüroFriedrich, Berlin (2003), Between the Lines Apex Art, New York (2003), Homo Ludens: Works from the Envoy series 1998-2005, Friesmuseum, Leeuwarden (2005) and most recently the survey show curated by Jörg Heiser, Romantic Conceptualism, Kunsthalle, Nürnberg/BAWAG Foundation Vienna 2007. Since 2005 Birrell has collaborated with David Harding on a series of films and installations, Port Bou: 18 Fragments for Walter Benjamin (2005) and Cuernavaca: A Journey in Search of Malcolm Lowry (2006) commissioned by Kunsthalle Basel. In December 2007 they were awarded an SAC Artist’s Film and Video Award for a new film to be shot in Havana and Miami in Spring 2008, to be premiered at CCA, Glasgow in January 2009 on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution.

Ross Birrell is a lecturer and researcher at Glasgow School of Art and editor of the online journal, Art & Research. He is represented by Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam.

Pub Conversations

For more information regarding Pub Conversations, the Pub Conversations podcasts and Self Service, go to www.pubconversations.co.uk