London and Tokyo, via Bournville village green.

Since doing an exchange visit there in 2005, my contact with Joshibi University of Art and Design and its students has included: helping to host their exchange students coming to Birmingham; effectively working there as a technician for a month; countless days just sort of hanging out there; keeping in contact with several pupils and alumni, including visiting their homes and having them stay with me in the UK; and hearing from alumni friends their tales of working as artists post-graduation and their encounters with graduates from other universities. As a result, I have a pretty well-formed idea of some of the things I would like to do to shake things up a bit, beyond my low-level “So, have you ever considered showing your work, outside of a gallery context” vibrations.

In 2006, 2007 and 2008 I also coordinated and delivered the social programme as part of the annual Joshibi Summer School. This involved sorting out all the pastoral and evening/weekend social stuff for the 30-or-so students who would spend a month based at Bournville Centre for the Visual Arts (BCVA).

We’ve had many conversations about how the Summer School programme could be improved. The main problems from my point of view are that the students arrive as a group; take over a block in a halls of residence as a group; are the only group studying at Bournville over the summer; have an interpreter with them the whole time; and have negligible contact with anyone outside of the staff and the other Summer School students. They may get to experience something of a different way of approaching art education, but there’s a lot missing in terms of cultural exchange and development of language skills.

I decided I didn’t want to work on the social programme this year, but was later invited to provide a day’s teaching for the Summer School. Based on last year’s werewolf success, and my recent work with BARG, there was no doubt that a game would be involved.

dead pikachu

My contribution was to form a starting point for a larger project where the students would go on to develop work that contrasts London and Tokyo. I ran two workshops in the morning where we compared the places in Japan they recommended I visited to the places that actually had meaning to them in their day-to-day lives. This got us from guidebook staples such as the Emperor’s Palace and Kiyomizu-dera to stories of favourite ice-cream shops, overheard sounds of children playing in campsites and stars as seen above car parks.

We also looked at the landmarks that we give significance to in our journeys through landscapes that we are very familiar with. Taking our journeys to university as an example, we drew maps and uncovered more stories. I’m familiar enough with the bus ride to the Joshibi Sagamihara campus that I could recount my personal map of that journey and compare it to theirs. This experience lasting only a few seconds is so completely and vividly on my map that I’m genuinely shocked to realise now that it’s a memory from 4 years ago.

As expected, the smell of the chicken farms featured prominently in the cycled versions of the journey…

question card

For the afternoon, I’d prepared a scavenger hunt around Bournville Green and the surrounding area.

This was designed as a team game, but with significant components where each student would be very much working alone (…unless they plucked up the courage to ask passers by for assistance!). Use of the Japanese language was, of course, banned throughout.

consultation

The students randomly selected a question to tackle and then had some time to discuss it with their team mates. The questions were worded to avoid typical Japanese constructions of English. I also tried to avoid making them so simple that no discussion was needed to fully understand them.

Examples include.

  • There is a car park at the Western edge of the park. Around it, with one end in the ground, are wooden “dragon’s teeth”. How many dragon’s teeth are there?
  • Stand between the Porter’s Lodge and the church. Look at the church. Can you see the carved wooden panel? How many flowers does it have? What is the man holding in his left hand?
  • Go to the chemists and find a lilac-coloured dog hanging up by a door. What colour is his collar, and how many diamonds are on the front of it?
  • In the alleyway between the chemists and Louise’s, there are some old style posters. What is the name of a UK city written on one of them?
  • Go to the butchers shop. What is the name of the sheep on the counter near the window?
  • Go to the Wyevale garden centre. There is a scarecrow near one of the doors. How much did his hat cost?

There were a range of strategies employed in designing the questions. Some of them, such as the sheep’s name question above, could only be answered if the student asked the appropriate question of the relevant shop keeper. Others would be made infinitely easier if they asked a member of the public for help in explaining what a particular word refers to (e.g. dragon’s teeth).

The other major aim was to get the students out and into parts of Bournville that they would never normally go to. This had the intended bonus of meaning that I had to seek out these places first. I was a student at BCVA for 5 years, and yet there were so many places in that tiny area that I had never been to until the planning stages of this game. I had lots of adventures and conversations: so much of Bournville is hidden away in a secret second-layer-back, and there are some truly class acts working there.

I was also determined that I would work with what was already in situ, and not parachute in any foreign bodies to plant for the game. The sharks, Iggle Piggles and Bill Oddies were all there already, waiting to be discovered and played with.

Right, so we had the basic mechanism of having to go to places and find answers to questions. The other aspect of the game design was about how to make this an intense, sometimes visceral experience.

tech amnesty

Prior to explaining the game rules, we’d confiscated (in a nice way!) all their mobile phones, electronic dictionaries and phrasebooks. This was originally done to ensure that looking things up didn’t replace discussion, but I think it also had quite a wrenching effect, because this technology is usually very heavily relied upon.

maybe the man with the plant knows where the garden centre is

I deliberately made it so that, after the initial discussion phase, each player then had to go off independently to find the answer. This took away another safety net of group decision making.

The other thing to do was to add a magic vest in the form of some hats for the players to wear whist they were out and about.

consulting the map

This covered my usual criterion for having an element of silliness involved in order to break down a few barriers, but as Holly Gramazio pointed out at Hide and Speak, your players look like criminals and, if the students were going to be in the bank counting CCTV cameras, I wanted it to be clear that they probably weren’t dangerous! The “help me find stuff” labels on the hats were intended as an invitation for people not involved in the game to approach the students and initiate conversations.

The weather was drizzly, the students were extremely tired after spending a long weekend in London (not to mention the jet lag!), energy levels were low, and I had to tweak some stuff on the fly to increase the pacing, but it all worked! It worked a treat!

magic hat and green

run

It was great to see the balloons bobbing around on the green and in front of the parade of shops. It was fun to see the teams playing jan-ken-pon to decide the next runner, but substituting diddle-diddle-dum lyrics so as to avoid the 50 point fine for speaking Japanese. It was satisfying to hear small groups of students with nothing to do standing around and chatting in English. It was worrying to hear that one girl hadn’t been seen for 25 minutes, but heart-warming to hear from the search party that she’d been found in the park with a gang of kids around her trying to help her solve her clue. We giggled to hear the story of people offering to help count dragon’s teeth. It did nothing less than warm my cockles to hear someone describe the hats as being magic, a comfort, and to thank me for making them wear them.

relocation of the Bournville factory, as explained through the medium of leaves

thinking hat

changeover

All three teams did really well and the rain mostly stayed away until we had finished playing. The final scores were in the region of 120 points (average 10 points per question) with only maybe 4 failed questions per team.

I finished off the day with a more formal presentation about the use of mechanisms and rule sets to instigate interactions with spaces; how presenting something as a game contrasts with presenting it as a piece of performance artwork; the importance of stories; the importance of magic vests/hats; the importance of silliness (and how it’s easier to be part of a large group doing silly things rather than being by yourself doing silly things) and how doing projects in public spaces confers ownership of that space to you (in the sense of responsibility and empathy, rather than of power).

Anyway, it looks like I may yet end up doing some social stuff with the group on Saturday: I may take the opportunity to quiz them on how the game has affected their perception of Bournville…

reunion

I spotted an old friend from last year:

paper figure

end of phase 1

After 4 weeks based at Joshibi, I have now left my rented room in Sagamiono with its views of the mountains and the vegetables on one side…

sagamiono view

…and the crazy firemen on the other.

firestation

This week I will stay at a friend’s house in the North of Tokyo and then on Friday I will start my travels: Kyoto, Kobe, Hyogo and Kumamoto.

All the everything is always punctuated by lots of food with friends, but this week I have also had a chance to start thinking about my own work as well as continuing to see some interesting exhibitions.

Let’s see what happens in phase 2…

[short interval]

Normal service will be resumed once the birthday celebrations have finished and I’ve stopped needing to use the laptop for editing ultrasound footage.

izakaya and…

Last night a friend took me to an izakaya.

The amazingly delicious food,

counter

subdued lighting,

table

and restrained atmosphere,

washing up

were followed by a quick game of pachinko:

pachinko

Welcome to Japan.

lump

Because she is

pregnant

this week I have mostly been smearing my friend with Vaseline and flicking stuff at her:

orientation

I’m in a different part of Sagamiono compared to where I was last year so this morning I went for a short walk to see what’s what.

I can now confirm that I live above a shop called Dog Style [ed:it’s a pet shop]; next to a fire station (calm down Cath!); and just around the corner from the Co-op (you still get carved up by trolleys in the aisles, but people will bow and apologise profusely whilst they’re doing it!)

Oh, and I’m not sure where it’s coming from, but somewhere close by plays the Westminster chimes over a loud speaker at noon each day. If I remember correctly, this is also what they use at Joshibi University to signal the start and finish of lunch, so I wonder if I’m going to start developing some sort of Pavlovian response to it…

Volume 0

A few pages from Volume 0 compiled at the Peer-to-Peer Sketchbooks launch party.

Peer-to-Peer Project Launch

A few images from the launch of the the Peer-to-Peer Sketchbooks project.

[photos by Nikki Pugh, Makoto Shindo and Karin Kihlberg]

that drawing thing

I’ve written and spoken several different times about the exchange visit to Joshibi, but there’s one bit that always seems to get overlooked: the two mornings I spent in the painting department.

One of the problems about writing about it 7 months later is that I deliberately did not keep any of my work – once again I wanted the emphasis to be more on the way I was working rather than what I produced.

The only documentation I have of that time is a handful of photographs – most of them quite blurry.

paintbrushes

Day 1: Looking

The first day was a really welcomed opportunity to just be in a new space and look. And then look some more.

It was great: everything from the paint splodges on the floor to the quick sketches of my hosts as they worked or chatted.

I taped one of my drawings of paint splodges to the floor next to the original. I wonder how long they both stayed there for?

Day 2: Collecting

On the second day I felt the need to gather things together a bit. I wasn’t sure, but I suspected this was going to be my last session in this space, so I wanted to collate stuff into a mini-project of sorts. So, that’s what I did: collate.

I spent a long time moving around the studio looking at the all the unfinished canvases on the easels. For each painting I found a line or a detail that I found interesting and I drew that out of context of the rest of the painting.

On returning to my own easel, I then collated these stolen fragments into a composition of my own. I didn’t talk to anyone about what I was doing. I wonder if anyone recognised any of their own work?

trainers



Copyright and permissions:

General blog contents released under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa license. Artworks and other projects copyright Nicola Pugh 2003-2024, all rights reserved.
If in doubt, ask.
The theme used on this WordPress-powered site started off life as Modern Clix, by Rodrigo Galindez.

RSS Feed.