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Together with Erich Berger and Laura Baigorri, Daphne Dragona curated Homo Ludens Ludens, an exhibition about play in contemporary culture and society which runs until September 22 at LABoral, Spain. I've been blogging the exhibition over the past few days but i wanted to end the coverage with a couple of questions to Daphne.
Daphne Dragona is an independent new media arts curator and organiser, based in Athens with a special interest in the game arts field. She was the Programme Curator of Gaming Realities (Medi@terra, International Art and Technology Festival) which took place in Athens in 2006, and the Associate Curator of Gameworld which was hosted in Laboral in 2007. She has been involved as an organiser or as a participant in different new media events and since 2004 she is also collaborating with the International New Media Collective Personal Cinema.
HLL presented 4 different themes: previous art movements which incorporated play in their discourse, play in everyday life, contents which invite to reflect on political and social issues and finally an introspective look on games and video games. Why did you decide to adopt such a broad approach? Well, truth is that there are much more themes being discussed. We referred to these 4 categories at some point because the need appeared, as it happens for all exhibitions, to speak of a particular kind of structure. But in reality we were against the idea of grouping and categorising. Works can be categorised according to this scheme or some other schemes. The form of the exhibition is quite fluid actually, with no rigid clusters and units. To come back to your question, yes the theme is broad, but the issue of play in our digital times is huge anyway. Naming the event Homo Ludens Ludens was in a way an intro for a broad approach. Huizinga was already talking about the diffusion of play within culture back in the late 30s. We wanted to explore and present how things have changed, flourished and altered since then; to bring in as many aspects as possible through our exhibition and our conference. There have been a lot of misunderstandings regarding play nowadays: for instance, you speak about play and everyone things you refer to videogames, you refer to play and the issue is considered merely joyful, entertaining and lacking content. We wanted to escape from this, to present play's multifaceted character and raise consciousness about it. So, the approach could have been even broader, but maybe then the risk of its good presentation and perception would be higher.
Which strategies did you adopt to have works which have very different backgrounds and characteristics (the interview with Muciunas, the installation levelHead, the Objects of Desire chase, etc.) cohabit and dialog with each other? You and your fellow curators Erich Berger and Laura Baigorri must have met with many challenges when preparing such a big and multi-faceted show. How did you manage to keep your head(s) above the water? I would not really speak of strategies. Let's say that we located the areas of our interest on one hand, and works we consider interesting and inspiring on the other. We knew that we wanted to have a show that would be playful and critical at the same time. The criterion for all cases of works was not their form, for instance to be game applications as it happens in most game art shows, but rather their playfulness, their ludic mode and the ability to express different situations and notions through it. There were no constraints regarding any types of works - the exhibition was to be explored as a territory, a playground of various contemporary magic circles. This is maybe where the challenge and the difficulty was: trying to avoid usual paths and groupings that exhibitions tend to follow and still aiming to have a perceivable context and content. This is how we came up with dialogues and adjoining of certain works that were implied but not explained or framed. I believe that this kept the flow much smoother and more open. So this way, for example, Wegman's dogs could go next to Stockburger's Tokyo gamers to show play's omnipresence and utter seriousness; Ludic Society's chase based on the desires of particular objects and Savicic's wifi map of gijon as read by his special corset could be adjoined by a magnified copy of Debord's psychogeographical map of Paris; Klima's pink elephant on the war of Afghanistan could sit next to Sanchez's Atari modification for the civil war of Peru. Regarding the references to the old movements of the fluxus and the situationists we felt like we ought to include them, not only as a "tribute" to them but also as an additional element for the audience to perceive the contemporary works we present. For instance, it is important to see that certain notions that are presented in this show such as those of the transdisciplinarity, the appropriation, the detournement, the idea of highlighting the importance of everyday life as opposed to art, they all have their roots way back, in important modern movements.
Many of the works on show at HLL demonstrate a keen observation of the rules and mechanisms of commercial games but do you think that the opposite is true? Have you ever noticed any interest from the commercial scene for what artists are doing with the game medium? My understanding is that they do follow what happens in terms of creativity. The innovations and the approaches that are often introduced by artists and independent creators are of their interest either in terms of design, content or programming. And they do tend to hire artists often as part of their team, which makes sense of course. But on the other hand, judging from my experience, game companies still hesitate to support game art exhibitions, festivals and conferences. The commercial and the independent/artistic scene have not really merged yet. Probably they are not meant to merge, if we take what happened with cinema as an example. Different works and productions attract different audiences. Not a lot of gamers go to game art exhibitions for instance. The audience for these shows is mainly people interested in the arts and the technology. But at the end, it all works perfectly well for the industry as games are assigned new roles and are being accredited new values. This is the tricky point. As Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn had said, how about if the artistic / independent gaming scene at the end becomes the alibi for the commercial one to keep its character intact?
If i'm not wrong, you distinguish play from game. Can you explain us what makes them different from each other? Yes, we tried to make this distinction visible in Homo Ludens Ludens, although there is no "formal" differentiation between the two terms and there is of course a lot of overlapping. In reality, it is easy to describe games but rather difficult to frame play. I would say play reflects more the idea, the notion, the vivid and spontaneous basis for the action as well as its relation to fantasy, whereas games are closed systems and environments governed by rules which demand discipline and a constraint space and time. Play is in a way the presupposition for the games that are its expressions and forms. Play as a notion is much more open and therefore it may even embrace elements that come in opposition with a game's structure. For instance play has no death or end; but games do, otherwise there s no meaning into it. Or think of cheating. While it can destroy a game by breaking its rules, it is still a part, an act of play. On the same line, while any game forms hierarchies, play creates interrelations between them.
It is all up to the play instinct I guess. We can be playful anytime anyplace, not only through games. Games are basically a construction which is made possible because of this playfulness that already exists in any aspect of life. Nowadays, with the explosion of the videogame industry games have also become a product, a commodity and a subject of control. Accordingly, play became work and life itself started looking more like a complicated game environment. So the question is what happens with the notion of play at such times? This is really interesting: how we have been led from the total invasion of play that the situationists were dreaming of to the gamespace phenomenon Wark describes.
What is your personal relationship with video games? Are you a gamer yourself? I mostly enjoy following what s happening in the online virtual worlds and trying out practices and applications by the independent and artistic scene. I also do try to keep up with the commercial games popping up but sometimes this is not so easy in terms of time and energy. Generally, however, if you ask me about the last months, I must say that -maybe influenced by homo ludens ludens- I also got carried away and inspired by other types of play; from children's make believe play to play being approached by philosophy as a tool for political change... This practically means that I really liked playing a lot with my 2 year old niece on one hand and reading Agamben and Vaneigem on the other. It was quite a weird combination now that I think about it... Thanks Daphne! |
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Pictoplasma is all about the art of contemporary character design. Whether they come from advertising, fine, urban art, music video, animation, or comics, Pictoplasma discovers, archives and showcases the best of them. Because my previous post on the festival might have given you the impression that the screen was invaded by aquatic birds on Prozac, i thought i´d demonstrate in 3 moves that it wasn't the case. At all: Daniel Garcia and Nathan Love directed El-P Flyentology, the story of a guy who refuses to become a Church of Flyentology convert.
Then there´s the PSST project which has different teams of designers, directors, and animators collaborate to produce short films. The technique is derived from the Surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse and the children’s game Telephone and applied to the arts of motion graphics, animation and film-making. I particularly liked the Unreciprocated Surgery Zombie.
Eric Lerner´s series of 5 Mr cityMen which combines 3D animation with live video shots. We were introduced to Mr Fortune whose phlegm reminded me of Huggy Bear, Starsky & Hutch´s street contact and to Mr Sunken who moves through life in constant slow-motion. But there's also Mr DejaVu who experiences the same day over and over again. Mr Scared and Mr Dreamer, who both to their best to deserve their name. I didn't embed any video this time, the plan is to have you explore the artists and designers' websites and find more about their work. The videos mentioned are out there and pretty easy to spot. |
Big crowd at the 
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I was back in Berlin on Saturday just in time to get some provision for the retina at Pictoplasma Animation Festival. The highlight of the event for me was David O´Reilly´s talk. This guy must be what you´d call a genius. After having seen a long string of animation from talented artists during the Pictoplasma screenings, i was starting to get a bit dizzy because of all that cuteness overload. Enters David O´Reilly, not exactly as cheerful as the little penguins and singing bunnies we had just seen, but humble and honest enough to make you like his dark side much more than any peppy character.
Here are some notes from his talk: The Irish Berlin-based artist has worked for 7 years in the animation world but it´s only for two years that he calls himself a filmmaker. It all started in a rather classical way: he went to school to learn about animation and drawing. He was actually more interested in drawing but realized quite quickly that not many people give a damn about drawing so he had to turn to Plan B: animation. His first break in animation came very very fast. He was not too stimulated by the school´s animation course, felt out of synch with the rest of his class, etc. So he did something that many students are probably doing: he sent an email to his heroes, the guys from Shynola who are famous for never hiring anyone from the outside. He simply asked them to have a look at his work. He never really thought they would even write him back. They did. In their message they told him that his shorts were the best things they had ever been sent. What he sent were three animations (here´s a link to one of them) which he showed us while apologizing: they look a bit old for him now (not for us, thanks!) Besides, a promo campaign used a very similar character a few years ago and David's comment on this was "I guess that´s what happens when you make super simple characters."
He left school and started to work for both Shynola and Studio AKA. While at Studio AKA he was doing some 2D and 3D designs (they didn´t know he was able to do some animation), he would only create animation at Shynola (who in turn were unaware that he was a good designer). In 2005, he decided to learn everything again and start from scratch. That´s when he realized RGBXYZ which he calls "an angry work". The animation is made of five sequences totaling 15 minutes.
In 2006, he went to work at Fabrica, the Benetton communication research center situated in Treviso (Italy). They asked him to do a test to prove that he could do some animation. He came up with the eerie and gorgeous WOFL. Fabrica didn´t like it too much but many other people did and the work soon appeared in mags and DVDs. Uploaded by makecurves Next Fabrica asked him to create a small ambient animation for the Benetton stores and as a provocation he made a short animation in which animals are shot in the head one after the other. One of his best moments at Fabrica was when he found a space used mainly to screen corporate cinema movies, he befriended the security guy and would lock himself with stacks of movies which have influenced his later works. The movies were more the Ingmar Bergman, Andrzej Żuławski or Gus Van Sant kind than Pixar. After that he collaborated with Garth Jennings, one of the directors of sci-fi movie The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. O´Reilly created some scenes in a toilet cubicle and some illustrations for the pages of the Holy Bible seen in Jennings' movie Son of Rambow. The animation director ended his talk by showing us his latest film which he had just finished working on a few hours before. Serial Entoptics started with a mood, a feeling that David wanted to convey. he didn´t do any storyboard, he just followed what he calls a "punk method" even if the result doesn't look punk at all.
More of his videos in ColonelBlimp. |
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- Alex Beim's Zygote giant colour balls that visually react to touch, floating all over the dancefloor. All the fun in Florence on July 20th and 21st 2007. |
Just for your information and entertainment, here are the |
Videos with Bibi has dug up Ed Wood's 1953 movie Glen or Glenda: Confessions of Ed Wood, The Transvestite, Glen or Glenda? or He or She. The movie is a docudrama about transvestism and transsexuality, and is semi-autobiographical in nature. Wood himself was a transvestite, and the movie is a plea for tolerance. However, it has become a cult film due to its low-budget production values and idiosyncratic style. The sex reassignment surgery of Christine Jorgensen, born George William Jorgensen, Jr., made the headlines in the US in 1952, and prompted George Weiss, producer of low-budget films, to commission a movie to exploit it. Wood took the job, but instead made a movie about transvestism. The movie was deemed too short and too divergent from what was requested, so Wood tacked on a few extra scenes about sexual reassignment and Weiss spliced in two unrelated soft-core sequences, cutting in reaction shots of Wood and Lugosi. Also: Trailer of the film. |
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If you're an (interaction) designer, artist, researcher, architect, or student who has developed interactive installations, environments, sound and/or visual projects for events and public spaces, now is your chance to find out if your work can withstand two nights of extremely intense use in an indoor venue with thousands of people. BIP will take place this Summer in Florence in the context of Elettrowave, the electronic side of Italiawave, the biggest free music festival in Italy (a few names have already been announced for the Elettrowave: Jimi Tenor, Alex Gopher, Cassius, Ladytron, Modeselektor, Noze, etc.) I thought i'd ask Giorgio Olivero from TODO a few questions about BIP. 3 reasons for that: i'm currently spending a few hours in Turin where TODO is based, they did a pretty neat job last year for BIP 2006 the first edition of the event and any event that demonstrates that design/art installations can be successfully shown outside of the traditional exhibition venue is worth more attention. Well, actually there's a reason number 4: TODO's own portfolio shows constant goodness.
Some of their past projects: Face2Face2Face, a real-time visual engine that uses the faces of the public as the content and message (video); an interactive system using figures by artist Han Hoogerbrugge for a series of 5 events for a fashion brand world exhibition; Oneword, an SMS interactive system that samples and displays the audience's feelings and moods during an event (video.)
The interaction and media design collective is also currently teaching 7th/8th grade students graphical programming with Design By Numbers. TODO sometimes act as designer and some other times collaborate with other organizations as event curators/producers. A few days ago they even founded a non-profit organization to separate the two areas of activity. NADA for culture and non-profit. TODO is for the design business.
As you write on the call for projects page, the audience at the Elettrowave festival might be a bit "unrespectful and challenging", extreme or drunk. However, a look at TODO's portfolio shows that such environment might have some stimulating sides. So what are the advantage of showing your art/interaction design work in an electronic music festival? When we think about the clubbing space, the fundamental materials are not concrete, glass and metal but rather technological ones. Sound, light and images operate a profound transformation on the space, as Arata Isozaki wrote 20 years ago about The Palladium Disco "the technology shower creates new desires". Our design question is: how can one fulfill the relational and social needs of a space that is used (and needs) to be continuously redefined by technology? In a festival the context and the public expectations are really different from the usual 'white cube' exhibition spaces. It's a multi-modal experience, it's a playground and a perfect stress test for the robustness of your project!
What really happened during last year's festival? How did the audience interact with the installations? And how did the works enhance the experience of a night event attended by thousands of clubbers? It's really about the experience. Last year we upgraded the concept of the 'chillout zone': you don't go to a festival just to get wasted and dance all-night long. We do love clubbing, pounding techno-music and all the rest of the electronic circus. But the dancefloor alone, in a festival, is not enough: there's the need for some kind of contrast and balance. So we asked in the call for works for interaction design projects that would enhance the context of the clubbing experience. We selected four projects, Light Tracer (later selected at club transmediale 2007), Electric Moons (which left for Siggraph right after the BIP 2006 festival), Wrong Plug and Mossalibra that would act as a whole to address the need of a functional fracture. If you think about people on a dancefloor as excited molecules, then offer them some focal points to aggregate in less anonimous clusters, provide them with different kind of relations, social dynamics, surprise and unexpected situations.
What are the characteristics that makes an installation a perfect candidate to be selected at BIP? Playful, relational, experimental, open to ambient noise and interferences, spectacular and low budget! :)
If i'm not wrong, last year was the first edition of BIP. What have you learnt from the experience that you'd like to repeat this year? Will the 2007 edition of BIP be different from the 2006 one? We were really excited by the quality of the previous edition submissions, so we decided to keep on with the same concept for a while. There is still a wide space to be explored in the dialog between clubbing and interaction-design. We also added TouchDown!, an intensive 3 days workshop headed by Yaniv Steiner and me on DIY game controllers so the idea is to exhibit some of the workshop outcome during the night along with the other projects. Who should be interested in the workshop? Do participants have to come with particular skills? We encourage attendance from visitors from multiple backgrounds and all skill levels. Everything will be really fast. We are going to explore game controllers. We'll hook up the projects to some kind retro videogames. Participants will need to collaborate with each other to get the most out of the little time available. We'll have a couple of days for technical session, presentations, research, prototyping and documentation. It may be as crazy as it sounds. Then on the third day they will present at the festival and enjoy their projects being abused and destroyed :-) Grazie Giorgio! Deadline to submit project proposals for BIP is May 10th, 2007. Last goodie! Get an idea of what TouchDown! might be like by checking out the outcome of an intensive week workshop at Interaction Design Venice where Yaniv Steiner taught students how to build their own Wii remote (Wiimote) and design original Wii mini-games. |
One of TODO's latest projects is 
