Black Elk and friends
It’s getting closer to delivery of my Larkin’ About / Library Theatre Company pervasive gaming commission at Manchester Histories Festival, Saturday 3rd March. The play test earlier this month was a valuable opportunity at a dry run, given that restrictions at the event site are preventing the design group from access prior to the day. Sure, we can pop in, sign into the visitor’s book and walk around, but we can’t know how our activities will bed down or clash with the existing usage and architecture of the building until the doors are flung open and we storm the palace.
Sioux warriors in Salford
My own game, Prairieland, requires participants to hunt down the animal totems of six Native Sioux who found themselves abandoned in Salford and Manchester after Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Exhibition and Congress of Rough Riders left after a successful extended stay in 1887-8. The animals are represented by transparent, colour-tagged balloons, camouflaged in full sight against the ornate gothic ceilings. On the reverse of each tag is an encrypted message, which must be decoded by the player using a sacred strip to reveal the name of the associated Sioux, although some are empty and require repeat attempts.
One of the Native Sioux Indians affected, Black Elk, wrote about his subsequent two-year journey to return home to North Dakota via London, Paris and Germany in his memoir, Black Elk Speaks. The fate of the rest remains unknown, although additional members of the troupe, including Sioux, stayed on in Manchester and Salford, married and integrated amongst the population. It is likely that some of the accompanying animals, from bison to elk and bronco, died of natural causes during their sojourn and are even now buried in local soil. Desiccated, dissolved and dispersed, their spirits seep and bleed through burrows beneath the ground to emerge and regroup in latex bubbles above.
A distant rumble
If the experience of playing a game is intended, for the most part, to be joyful, then consider that the experience of attempting to create a game – from scratch – involves much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Planning and brain-bashing for the Larkin' About and Library Theatre Company commission continues. How to estimate a duration and end point, to avoid fatigue or boredom? If I don’t want one winner and many losers, how do I gently console those who don’t complete the requirements, whilst still celebrating those who do? Are themes of memory, loss, mourning and the silent cry of purgatorial souls suitable material for a playful treatment involving balloons? What of unknown latex allergies? Ai-ai-ai. Still, the initial shape is done. The play test awaits. My craft box has a few more items I am unlikely ever to use again, but on the plus side I have some lovely Ladybird books purchased as ‘research’. Here is an image from a bison hunt, which may have something to do with the work in progress. Oh, and I have a name for it at last.
Prairieland.
Curious Pursuits: open call
Art Historian Collective Porter & Jenkinson are looking for artists and writers for their first exhibition, Curious Pursuits, at the Portico LIbrary and Gallery Manchester from February 2nd - 29th 2012. Artists are invited to respond to the idea and aesthetics of Victorian Dark Societies, the Curious and the Peculiar. Submissions are welcome from the following that wish to exhibit work fitting this theme: illustrators, printmakers, painters, zine makers, writers, book binders, photographers, sculptors and I imagine anyone working in any mediums not listed also! More information here. I've had a pop myself with some micro fiction but hurry as there are only 24 hours left before the end-of-year deadline!
Larkin’ About & Library Theatre
Today I received news of a brilliant early Christmas present. I've been selected following an open call for proposals to collaborate with local pervasive gaming collective Larkin' About in partnership with The Library Theatre Company to create my own dollop of in-situ, explorative silliness as part of Manchester Histories Festival 2012. The festival will see an exciting day of pervasive gaming around the mosaic hallways, vaulted chambers and Gothic cubbyholes of Manchester Town Hall on Saturday 3rd March.
I submitted two ideas, both of which they liked although I must now choose one to take forward, responding to a couple of obscure but fascinating lesser-known subjects relating to the city's past, as I wanted to avoid the usual suspects (industrialisation, sport, Engels, votes for women, the Baby computer etc. no disrespect to any of these areas intended!) The process will include a game mechanics workshop, one-to-one mentoring, play-testing and of course the delivery itself.
It's going to be a wonderful start to 2012!
Nick Broomfield Q&A
Last night I was fortunate to host a Q&A with filmmaker Nick Broomfield following a screening of his latest doc-venture, Sarah Palin: You Betcha! The night was a sell-out and it was amusing to see that this former L'enfent terrible, once jeered and challenged for his highly personalised style (whereby he appears on screen in his films just as much as the subjects he's pursuing), now treated with the veneration of an elder statesman by the many young documentary makers in the audience. One question from an attendee stuck with me: "Do you think Sarah Palin is mad, bad or dangerous to know?" Nick replied, "All three!"
The most chilling moment in the film for me is when Palin takes to the stage at a women's evangelical rally after another speaker has denounced gay and lesbian rights with the poisonous epithet, "We're judging you". That Palin should share the room, the bill and endeavour to pander to the same audience speaks volumes about her moral coda. In a recent interview with the G2 supplement of The Guardian, Nick Broomfield talks of his films as being 'portraits by omission'. Often it's what is not said, not done, not admitted (and indeed those who remain unspoken to, in the case of Palin, Thatcher, Courtney Love etc.), that can colour an impression. From this distance, Palin's heart appears to be a greenish-brown, sludgy shade of toxic.
Abstract Lego Sculpture
The idea for an Abstract Lego Sculpture Workshop in response to artist Rashid Rana’s first UK public solo exhibition at Cornerhouse came to me when I first saw his new body of photo-sculpture works; ordinary, even average domestic objects that had been regressed to the razor edge of visual legibility. The use of block pixels reminded me of Lego, and so the idea was born. We would invite participants to deconstruct and rebuild their own everyday items and in doing so tackle two otherwise brain-hurty artistic concepts for themselves: minimalism, and abstraction. Can we do it? Yes we can!
Plastic Flowers In A Traditional Vase (2007 / detail) Rashid Rana. Image courtesy the artist, Gallery Chemould and Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai
Rashid’s photo sculptures are responding to Minimalist ideals and intentions – reducing, simmering down to a base flavor like a soup stock, an essence, but also mocking this technique by taking a series of flat 2D photographs of the objects themselves and re-creating them as three-dimensional forms. To use food as a metaphor, this is like taking the contents of a tube of tomato puree, the distilled, ultra-flavoured essence of a specific taste, and moulding it back into the shape of a tomato… even re-attaching it to the vine. It’s absurd, but there is skill and a deliberate intention behind the act.
With the expert tutelage of the UK’s only Lego-certified freelance model builder, Ducan Titmarsh of Bright Bricks, we emulated this same process ourselves in our workshop by taking two objects, a Coke can and a stack of Wii cartridge games, and subjecting them to the same treatment. They will no longer look exactly like the originals, but still be recognizable as such. Think Picasso’s jumbled face-portraits, unblinking cyclopic eyes balanced upon triangular noses, or musical compositions that sound like a piano being dropped from a building. And then run over with a steamroller.
This is the bit where, in a traditional magazine layout, there would be a spiky bright yellow explosion accompanied by the subheading Did You Know…? Minimalism describes the practice and movement across multiple disciplines, but especially visual art and music, where the maker sets out to expose the essence or identity of a subject by stripping it back until only the bare bones remain. Abstraction indicates a departure from reality in the depiction of imagery; a courageous and still controversial approach when much of Western art right up until the mid 19th Century had been preoccupied by the illusion of reality and the orthodox logic of perspective.
Books 2 (2010-11 / detail) Rashid Rana. Image courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery, London
A coke can is one of the most recognizable items on the planet. It crosses cultures and continents and despite limited editions or redesigns or a change to the font and calligraphic text, it remains red and white and cylindrical. Cast your mind back to school art classes – were you ever asked to draw a crushed coke can? Without realising it, this might well have been your first exposure to the concept of abstraction – of moving away from a literal, clear representation of an object that still retains those core elements despite being jumbled and obscured. The curl of the letter C, the pillar box tint, a peeled ring pull. You don’t need to see all of it to recognise it for what it is.
Similarly, cast your thoughts back to early computer games, or what we know now to be early if you never actually played them. 8-bit, pixelated characters, Spectrum, Atari, Commodore. A limited number of pixels and no such thing as a graphics engine meant that characters and backgrounds were formed of little coloured blocks. Fast forward to the present and the likes of Mario and Sonic still survive in successful franchises, so the option of creating a stack of Wii games is a nod to their earlier incarnations. A thumbprint of red and white squares to represent a mushroom. Rectangles and triangles represent landscapes, bouncing brick-shaped bombs. We used our imagination in that situation, we can do the same now.
We are making, we are unmaking. We are simplifying, we are complicating. Hence the title of the overall exhibition – Everything Is Happening At Once. Thank you to all our participants, all of who commented upon how much fun it was to combine theoretical concepts with a playful make-it-yourself opportunity. Demands were made for further, weekly Lego workshops to tackle art history (a lone voice requested Duplo – we’ll say no more). For those who wish to continue this journey into modern art via the joyful medium of children’s toys, may I recommend John Cake and Darren Neave, an artist duo who recreate seminal YBA installations using – you guessed it – Lego!
Thanks to Explore More blog for the lovely personal write-up of their experience as a participant.
