Experimental Game Design

Month: September 2022

A Colorful Game of Tennis

by | Sep 27, 2022 |

Score:

Color the ball and play a game of tennis to reveal hidden art

 

Artist’s Statement:

Tennis is an artful sport if one watches it closely, it is either one on one or two on two which is very personal in terms of sports. Some people have noted how it looks like the players are almost dancing as they are waiting for the ball to return to their side, as players are constantly moving their feet during a point. Higher level tournaments took it upon themselves to show where and how most shots hit by the champion of the tournament ended up. This created almost a collage on the court. This reminded me of the Open Score performed by Robert Rauschenberg with Billy Kluver at 9 Evenings, 1966. Turning the court into a canvas in one way or another was done by both the tournament that mapped the shots as well as these two Dada artists however, the dada artist’s idea was more interesting. As a man and woman played a set the sounds of the ball being hit were amplified and sounds were controlled by vibrations in the racquet, on top of that little by little it got darker and darker. This is how the engineer Billy Kluver and the artist Robert Rauschenberg turned the tennis court into their own canvas, and it is what inspired me to use tennis as well.

 

Tennis has many shots, and many types within those shots, meaning that the trajectory of a ball and how it bounces has many different outcomes depending on topspin, if it was sliced or not or if it was hit flat. These are all nuances that tennis has that are not always shown off. I wanted to use the chance to physically portray the differences as well as use a non-conventional tool for art, which is what the dada movement and specifically scores focus on. With these sets of instructions, the outcome will be different every single time but there will be similarities across the board as well. After a tennis ball is covered in paint then it allows to see hidden artwork in a seemingly normal point. My favorite part about this score is that technically, every point in tennis throughout every level of playing, has art like this hidden right beneath the surface.

 

Maestro for a Moment

by | Sep 27, 2022 | ,

Score:

Sit down with an instrument
Pick a song you would like to play with your instrument
Prepare to play an audio recording of your song
Remove yourself from the noise of the outside world such that you hear the instrument as little as possible when played
Prepare to play the instrument correctly as you have done before
Play your song to completion while listening to your recording

Artist Statement:

“Maestro for a Moment” was created with two pieces of inspiration in mind. The first form of inspiration is a passive desire of mine that I’ve had for a while: to learn to play the piano. I call it “passive” because, while I think the idea of being able to play the piano well is a fun one, I actually don’t care enough about it to put in the multiple years of effort it would take to learn it on a professional level. In my mind, it has always been restricted to passing an open piano at a mall, an airport, or even the Curry Student Center, and just thinking, “Wouldn’t it be nice?”

The second inspiration was David Tudor who was known for composing indeterminate pieces, such as Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951) and Music of Changes (1951). An indeterminate music piece is one that introduces some level of chance to the musical score so that creates an indeterminable outcome, one that is unique to each performance of the piece. I thought this was fascinating due to how it changes the fundamental idea of a musical performance. When one thinks of a concert, they typically think of a musician practicing a set of instructions, the musical score, to produce some kind of expected outcome, the song. David Tudor entertained the thought of changing that formula to produce an unexpected outcome rather than an expected one; from instructed input and expected output to instructed input and unexpected output.

With these two things in mind, I constructed this score to evoke a feeling into the person performing it: that they can play an instrument they don’t actually know how to play. I did this through playing with that formula of performance much like the way David Tudor did, except I reversed the changes he made to it. Instead of an instructed input with an unexpected output, this score displays an uninstructed input with an expected output. The uninstructed input is the user’s ability (or lack thereof) to play the instrument “correctly.” What “play[ing] the instrument correctly” really means is to just play the instrument in a way that feels correct to the user. Whether or not that is actually correct doesn’t matter, because by removing their ability to hear the music they are physically playing and replacing it with a recording of the song they actually want to play (the expected output), they feel like they are producing the music with their instrument that they are listening to.

While not intended to be so, some participants took to making this into a performative piece instead of a personal one by wanting to record the actual music they created with their instrument to play it back for themselves and others. This doesn’t fall in-line with the feeling I wanted to evoke in this score, so I didn’t want to enforce this instruction. However, because this is supposed to be a personal score, I would encourage anyone wanting to play this score to do whatever they wish with what they create.

Magic-Cube

by | Sep 27, 2022 |

Score:

Play with it and pick a side for me

Artist Statement:

The Rubik’s Cube is just a puzzle for most people, and the same is true for those who create it. The significance of its creation is to let people have fun and exercise their brains in the process of solving a disordered Rubik’s cube by some algorithm. But who stipulated that a thing’s existence must only be according to the intention when it was created? Just like John Cage’s 4’33”, who stipulated that the piano must make a sound to be the meaning of its existence? So I got inspiration from it and wanted to look for the possibilities it can bring us by ignoring the original meaning of Rubik’s cube. As we did in outdoor classes,” just play it, and find what can you do with it“

So I found that the reason why the Rubik’s cube can be solved is that each side of it has the same color, a total of six sides, which together is 54 squares. So why don’t we let these 54 squares have different colors? So I used an auto color generator (https://randomcolorgenerator.net）To obtain 54 different and random colors, and they represent each square. In this way, we have a unique Rubik’s cube. It has no algorithm to follow and no rules. All you need to do is twist it.

We can get different color combinations by rotating, and each side is unique. I selected 25 participants to test my work. The only instruction I gave them was “play with it and pick a side for me” In this way, they will not be limited to the original rules of the Rubik’s cube. They can twist it at will, they can twist it in particular ways, or even solve it. In the process, I even found that some people “trampled” the Rubik’s cube with their eyes closed, which was very interesting, because they knew that there were no rules and nothing could restrict their release of ideas. All I need to do is to collect the faces they have chosen and then put them together. At last, there is a picture that seems to have no rules, but it contains 25 people’s thoughts.

Take Cake

by | Sep 26, 2022 | ,

Score: 

Sit in a circle around a cake and utensils 

Have the oldest in the room take the most appealing piece of cake 

Decide if the person to the left or right of the oldest starts the rotation of taking 

Continue taking cake until there is no more appeal 

Artist Statement: 

I was inspired by the concept of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece(1965) and how she gave audience members a motionless “medium” to dictate. When given the opportunity to cut whatever articles of clothing off of Yoko Ono participants acted based on their personal desires. Some people did not want to cut a piece of her clothing that would leave her exposed, while others intended on taking advantage of her motionless state. The people at the start obviously got more control over what they wanted to cut, leaving those at the end with very few options. 

This concept of “taking and leaving” parts of something based on one’s personal agenda inspired my score Take Cake. Whenever a cake is about to be cut, people are staring at the part of the cake they really want. They rush to the front of the line to get a piece because those at the end are most likely going to get an underwhelming piece. I knew how my friends were when it came to food, so giving them an environment to act on their urges was entertaining. 

When I first brought out the cake, they were all asking for forks, cups, and spoons. They forgot about a knife. This is because my score only referenced utensils with no specifics. The knife was replaced with a cup because of TikToks we’ve seen where people are “cutting cake” using the cup. Just like the audience members in Cut Piece, my friends acted on their own personal desires when given individual control over the cake. My use of the words “appealing” and “take” definitely created a competitive environment even before we started. No one knew what parts of the cake we all were drawn to. That is until my one friend started vocalizing what parts she wanted to take…the strawberries.  

She assumed we all would leave a lot of the strawberries alone and play fair. This was because we decided to make her go last when choosing to rotate to the right of the oldest. We kept saying “there will be strawberries left for you, relax” because we all just wanted to peacefully eat cake without anyone complaining. My one friend, however, wanted to make the game feel more like a competition. While most only took one medium chunk of cake, she kept scooping more into her cup as an act of defiance. With that mindset, we all started to take the pieces that were appealing to others. My goal when creating a score was to provoke my friends into turning a normally structured thing, like eating cake in a group setting, into something competitive once removing the normal formalities. 

The start of everyone fighting IMG_2235