The saying “a photograph is worth 1000 words” is a cliche but it speaks an underlying truth. Two of my favorite photographers are Nan Goldin and David Sorrenti. They took candid pictures of people, couples being intimate, drugs, and their whole surroundings. They were able to create beauty in a single snapshot of their life which tells its own story. The essay, “Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life” exemplifies what Goldin and Sorrenti did. “ … If we bypass “art” and take nature itself as a model or point of departure we may be able to devise a different kind of art by first putting together a molecule out of the sensory stuff of ordinary life. (Kaprow 10)”. Like Kaprow states, Nan Goldin and Davide Sorrenti turned their whole life, into an art pieces.
For my project, I want to explore the seductiveness of a photograph. I take inspiration from the apps Pokemon Go and BeReal. At its peak, Pokemon Go had everyone go outside to play around. It connected everyone which made it become a bonding game with other people. The app BeReal allows its user to take a picture of the current moment at a random time of the day. I wanted to create a game based on these two apps and explore this quote, “… these participatory events blurred the line between what was life and what was art, what was an everyday movement and what was a performance. Kaprow said, ‘The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps as indistinct as possible. (Beavin).”
For my game, I want to blur the lines between art and life. The rules of my game are simple: create a discord group chat with friends with how many people in total. Each participant takes picture of something interesting in their current moment (could be a picture of friends, going out to see an art exhibit, etc). The duration of the game can last anywhere from a day to a week. Whoever has the most interesting photos in the group chat wins the game.
The point of my game is to get people out and experience the beauty of their current moment. Japanese artist Mieko Shiomi defines this goal perfectly. He defined Fluxus as a way ” to view and feel the world with innovated perception.121 In this sense, we can all be Fluxus artists, as Maciunas urged. Fluxus’s goal is to teach us to experience the world for ourselves, ” in the same way” (Maciunas’s words) that we experience art (Baas 8)”. Everyone in their own right can be an artist. Each picture is a snapshot of the current world that is ever-changing. Shiomi teaches us that we can all be innovative artists if we can just sit back and enjoy the world. With my game, as the end product, once everyone turns in their photo, you can sit back and embrace all we have been through
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