Impractical Jokers has always been one of my favorite shows that I have ever watched. From its breathtaking comedy to its tense, and sometimes stressful, moments, it is a must watch show. The basic premise of Impractical Jokers is that there are four lifelong friends who continuously try to embarrass each other. They compete in challenges where either one, two, or all four guys are out in very social settings and must do and say whatever the other guys tell them to do. They could be forced to go up to a stranger and ask them for directions to a made-up place, or they might have to get someone to sign a wacky petition on letting children eat glue sticks. These challenges make up the show, and the comedy is built off of each guy. If the main guy participating does not want to do something, they fail the challenge. The ones who are able to do what they are told succeed at the challenge. At the end of each episode, the man with the most fails is considered the “big loser” and must face a punishment which they CANNOT, under ANY circumstances, say NO. Some punishments include getting a new tattoo chosen by the other guys or shaving your head and eyebrows and then changing your license photo. The show is a great watch, but what they are really doing is playing a game, and I wanted to try and simulate that game in normal life.

Tomfoolery is the game that I created with inspiration from Impractical Jokers, and it involves players taking turns to perform tasks in social spaces with random strangers. First, the number of players can vary, but it works best with 3 or more players. The game includes a deck of cards with tasks written on it. One thing about Impractical Jokers is while the jokes they make on the show aren’t outright harmful, they can border the line between harmless at best and at least antagonistic at worst. I didn’t want to create a game that was antagonistic towards random people, especially in the modern age of content creation where random “influencers” will antagonize or bully innocent people for the sake of “content.” That type of stuff really irks me, and so I wanted to create tasks that were harmless and more fun for the strangers. Some tasks I created were:

• Get a selfie with a stranger
• Crumple a ball of paper and get someone to be the hoop that you throw it into.
• Do 50 consecutive lunges forward
• Get a double high-five AND a double low-five both from a stranger.
• Arm Wrestle a stranger

These tasks do not encourage players to be obnoxious or antagonistic to society but instead aim to get players to interact with society at a friendly level. I live with the philosophy that one smile a day will keep the Grim Reaper away, and so I try to make people laugh, or even smile. daily. You don’t ever know what someone could be going through, and so putting a smile on their face could make all the difference. Regardless, players play in a circle. One player draws a card and then must do what is on that card for a specific number of points. If they refuse to do what is on the card, it becomes fair game for any player to do with an increased point value. If no one wants to do the task, the card is discarded. If a player does a task or the task is discarded, the player counterclockwise to the previous player can now draw a card and the process continues. When a full circle rotation has been completed, a round has passed. Players can play for as many rounds as they want, and the player with the most points by the end of all of the rounds wins.

Tomfoolery has a very simple gameplay loop that makes or breaks depending on the level of comfort players have in social settings. I believe that it can be used to help people ease into being around others and communicating with strangers. I, for one, am someone who has a hard time talking to people I don’t know, but playtesting Tomfoolery helped me get out of that comfort zone. I had a blast playtesting with my friends, and I know others would have a blast playing as well.

Photo Finish works like this:

Objective: find the people/items and take a picture with your phone faster than the other players.

Photo Finish was an game inspired by outside street-interventions turned into a searching game using photos and phones. Similar to a lot of public interventions people will have to intervene in a public place while playing this game in the wild.

How to Play

For 2 or more players and optionally: 1 game master to run generators and verify photos.

Each round, the GM announces a challenge based on the setting
(Should be usually played outside, but can be played anywhere):

Object Hunt: If there are not a lot of people outside

• Go to: randomwordgenerator.com/letter.php
• Find an object in the world that starts with the generated letter.
• Take a picture of it as proof.
• The first person to send or show their photo wins.
• No photos of yourself, your own items, or the other players.
• If everyone’s stuck, the GM may draw a new letter.

People Hunt: if there are

• To randomize the challenge: Google “pick a number from 1 to 50.”
• Match that number to Photo Finish traits list. (Wearing a hat, etc.)
• Find a person who fits that trait and ask politely before taking a photo of or with them.
• The first photo submitted wins.

Scoring
Each round’s winner earns 1 point.
First to reach 5 or 10 points wins overall.

Trial Run

I played as the GM with 3 other players. We started with some (6) rounds of Object Hunt, and then two rounds of People Hunt.

• Round 1: H – players found hand and husky
• Round 2: K – players couldn’t find anything starting with K – I then ruled you can make players return if they cant find anything
• Round 3: R – players found ring and recycling bin – I then ruled that you cannot use anything on your body / you own
• Round 4: B – players found bench and bin
• Round 5: L – players found leaves
• Round 6: A – players found art
• Round 7: Find someone… wearing a brand logo on their clothing – players took picture of each other’s shirts – ruled you can’t take pictures of each other
• Round 8: Find someone… wearing a uniform – players found Northeastern workers

Much of the power of intervention art lies in its unexpectedness. When an artist inserts themselves or their art somewhere that they don’t belong, there must be an element of surprise in their work in order to disrupt the situation, which can dictate how impactful the work is. While mass communication through the internet and social media has greatly increased the scale and possibilities of intervention art, it has also made interventions more commonplace and known to the public. While artists can still find new ways to surprise their audience through creative disruptions, the bar for the unexpectedness of intervention art is higher than ever.

I propose the concept of “outerventions” as a strategy that retains the unexpectedness of intervention art. Rather than inserting their work into a situation where they aren’t expected, artists performing an outervention remove themselves or their art from a situation where their presence is expected, subverting the audience’s expectations with a surprise exit. This strategy is particularly well-suited for conveying themes such as loss, abandonment, isolation, and alienation. While some artists have performed works that could be considered outerventions, this form of intervention is less utilized than the typical “additive” format, making this “subtractive” performance more novel to an audience aware of typical intervention art. I came up with three examples of outerventions to display how they can be put in action with various performer group sizes: Classroom Outervention, Prudential Outervention (which can be performed as a game), and Protest Outervention. More information about these outerventions can be found in the linked presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1b6y70QwyS0RQESU1uMkB95zJwJ84RiC2OYfBow8tWmE/edit?usp=sharing 

I wasn’t inspired by any specific art piece, but instead the common threads that I find in a lot of intervention-like viral videos that appear on my social media feed, where creators interrupt situations for laughs. So much of modern life is influenced by an algorithm-driven media ecosystem that incentivizes acts that draw attention to its subject. Because of this, I believe that artists attempting to remove attention from themselves while they already hold the attention of an audience can result in performances with greater potential for staying in that audience’s minds. This creates a sort of paradox where the outervention artist’s grasp of their audience’s attention is at its peak during and after the performance’s end and the subsequent disestablishment of the performer-audience relationship: in other words, outervention art grabs attention when the art is no longer perceptible.

My game involves collecting the songs people listen to when they’re feeling down. I created a questionnaire and placed it in public places (restrooms, etc.) using QR codes for people to fill out. I received responses for about 30 songs, ranging from humorous edits to melancholic tunes to optimistic ones. People listen to songs reflecting various emotions when they’re feeling down.

Concept / Intention
The participatory artgame When You’re Down allows people to share their emotional experiences from sad moments. The project allows people to share their songs for low moments through a basic survey which appears as QR codes in public areas including restrooms and hallways. The collected responses function as both statistical data and individual disclosures which turn individual music listening into a shared display of emotional exposure. The project aims to discover various emotional coping methods which people use to deal with their feelings including melancholic thinking and humorous responses and hopeful attitudes.

Mechanics as Expression
The game exists through the process of participant involvement. The game mechanism requires participants to share their emotions through music instead of competing for points or winning. The submission of each song serves as both a game move and an empathetic expression. The QR code system together with anonymous participation design creates a simple way for people to join without facing social obstacles while preserving personal connection. The resulting playlist demonstrates human emotions through diverse musical expressions because sadness produces different sounds for different people. The playlist contains songs that use ironic editing to hide pain through comedy and other tracks which present authentic emotions that express personal struggles and determination.

Process & Influence
The project developed from my belief that games function as emotional exchange systems beyond their traditional roles as competitive or simulated activities. The Night Journey and dys4ia served as inspiration for my work because they use interactive elements to study personal experiences instead of pursuing external objectives. The project aimed to bring this interactive approach into physical public spaces by uniting digital elements with traditional participation methods. The project spanned multiple weeks during which I distributed printed QR codes containing the question “What do you listen to when you’re down?” throughout campus buildings and public areas. The project received thirty responses which combined to form a musical representation of shared emotional experiences.

Reflection
The experience of When You’re Down exists to be felt throughout different times rather than being played only once. The game transforms play into empathy through musical shared emotional experiences. The project showed me how music functions as an individual healing method which also connects people at a universal level. The participants used two different approaches to handle their sadness by either using humorous songs or listening to peaceful music. The combined responses from participants establish a detailed depiction of emotional strength and diverse emotional responses. The game reaches its conclusion by establishing a musical bond between participants who discover they share a common musical experience through their song exchanges.

Artwork #3

When you need to speak, don’t.

Consult the Assistant.

Speak only what it gives you.

My inspiration comes from the way the emergence of Large Language Models has promoted outsourcing and offloading our thinking to AI tools. They are capable of generating convincing responses, and there is a trend to treat them as real people or friends you could talk to. For this project, I wanted to explore the extent to which AI tools can replace me in interactions with others by embodying the AI and becoming a mere messenger between the AI and the opponent.

My initial idea was to let an AI “assistant” rewrite everything a user writes to “better express themselves” and “foster community harmony”. However, this cannot be done effectively due to the limitations of existing platforms, and creating a platform I own would also weaken the statement. In the first iteration, I tried letting an AI take over my social media account and interact with others in my name. I noticed that while it is using my account, it’s not really representing my identity. Taking the feedback into account, I decided to bring the concept to real life and truly embody it.

For my second iteration, whenever someone talks to me or I need to say something, I ask an AI (e.g., ChatGPT) for what to say. I noticed that while simple greetings are just delayed by the act of typing the prompt, most conversations that involve more information make no sense because the AI doesn’t know the context in which they take place. It would often ask for clarification, offer different options, and tend to end the response with “would you like me to…”. Because of this, most people quickly realized what I was doing and were either annoyed or played along. Some of my friends began doing the same, and in the end, it became an existential discussion between the two AIs, with my friend and me completely disconnected and uninvolved. Weirdly, despite being unable to maintain any meaningful conversation, I felt a sense of comfort that I did not have to think about my responses or their potential consequences.

Through this project, I saw a scary future that could become true. If an AI that can see through your eyes through a camera feed, listen through your ears through a microphone, or use BCI to fully capture all of your senses, and has a database of every single piece of information about you, understands the way you talk to different people and the way you think, it can very well replace you in your own life. What is left of your identity and autonomy, and if the AI can make the same decisions as you through a deterministic algorithm, is there free will? While I always felt it would be nice to have an AI clone whenever I’m going on a trip by myself, it is very uncanny to know that the AI achieves the level of “humanness” solely through computation and math. I also realized how I myself am guilty of the very thing I’ve critiqued through this project. I use AI for inspiration in many things, such as my personal projects and coursework, and researching with natural language is often too easy to avoid. While I initially planned to start my final presentation by asking the AI to prepare a presentation and slideshow, I realized how natural it felt to use AI-generated content as a starting point. The argument for accepting and embracing new technologies like this, which supposedly make our lives more convenient, is often convoluted, but the progress is inevitable.

The form of this piece aligns with Fluxus scores such as Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit. It is also, in a way, similar to Exquisite Corpose in how the AI doesn’t know the context of the conversation and can only produce responses based on what the other person said. Although it is done deliberately, having the AI “intercept” the conversation and processing it feels similar to Men In Grey intercepting public network communications. You can easily consult the AI for various problems, share personal stories or struggles, or treat it like a friend, but it is never truly there to understand, just as god isn’t truly on the phone in Talk to God Now by Lynn Walsh. Nam June Paik’s Good Morning, Mr Orwell is also relevant: in 1984, language is simplified and used as a tool of surveillance and control. Paik expresses the creative and cross-cultural communication that digital tools such as mass media can bring, but such communication is today at risk due to the impact of AI on how we communicate.

Idea：

Social Anxiety Simulator is an interactive artgame that explores the emotional and psychological experience of social anxiety.
Rather than focusing on winning or completing objectives, the game’s purpose is to make players feel the tension, discomfort, and self-consciousness that people with social anxiety often experience in daily interactions. The project aims to transform internal emotional struggles — like overthinking, avoidance, and fear of judgment — into playable mechanics.

Implementation steps：

1.Create the online questionnaire (using Survey Mars).

2. Title it “Rountine quetsion” to make it appear formal and legitimate.

3. Include typical demographic questions first (gender, age, major) followed by increasingly personal ones.

4. End with a disturbing message (“We now know when you’re most vulnerable”) and a final reveal (“Don’t be alarmed, it’s just a joke”).

5. Send the link to friends and classmates, asking them to share it further with others and strengthens authenticity.

6. Post the link on reddit, discord serve with a short message”This is part of a small social experiment about online honesty. Please answer truthfully.”

Feedback:

1. Interesting
2. I actually answered everything truthfully, even the weird ones. I guess I just wanted to see where it was going. 
3. I didn’t really feel much. It was kinda weird
4. This was not funny
5. I guessed everything.
6.  I kinda love it though, creepy but funny.
7. Bro, I was chill until that last message. 
8. uhh

Artist Statement:

In contemporary digital life, people constantly reveal private information through small, habitual actions，clicking “agree,” typing an email, answering a question, without questioning who is watching or why. I wanted to explore this blind trust and the false sense of safety that surrounds it. So my project takes the form of a fake online questionnaire titled “Rountine Quetsion.” For this project, I went through several different ideas before deciding that a fake online survey would be the most suitable and efficient approach.In the end, I designed it to look like a real social experiment, and the feedback I received ranged from laughter to discomfort. Some found it funny, others called it disturbing or “not funny at all.” Many admitted they answered everything truthfully, even the strange questions. Simply because it looked legitimate.

At the end of the survey, I added a small joke，then I put a message revealing that the project was an experiment about privacy and trust. My intention was not to scare anyone, hoping to remind those who participated in my experiment that the internet can easily leak other people’s privacy. This piece operates as a tactical critique of how surveillance and consent work in digital culture. The player becomes both the performer and the subject of the experiment. Through this process, I realized how powerful simple digital interactions can be in revealing people’s blind trust in familiar formats and how art can use that trust to provoke awareness.

Fort Artwork #3, I wanted to take a different approach compared to the previous games that I had made. Since this project was assigned during midterms season and the keyword was “intervention,” I thought it would be a great idea to have the campus work together on a collaborative Spotify playlist. The idea behind it was to create something positive and community-based that could help lift people’s moods. To match the theme of intervention, I decided to set the playlist’s genre to “Good Vibes,” leaving that entirely up to everyone’s interpretation. Regardless of age or language, I wanted to see what kinds of songs would show up and how people defined what “good vibes” meant to them.

After completing the design, I printed multiple copies of the flyer and began posting them around campus. Most of them were displayed on bulletin boards in main hallways and near common areas, but I also taped a few inside bathroom stalls, ensuring that more people would see them. The poster featured a QR code that directly linked to the collaborative Spotify playlist. Within the first few days, people started scanning and adding songs. There were a lot more than I was expecting. The playlist quickly evolved into a diverse mix of genres and languages. There were familiar pop, indie, and a few older classics. It was interesting to see how everyone’s idea of “good vibes” differed. Some leaned toward calm, relaxing songs, while others picked energetic or more nostalgic ones.

Good Vibes Playlist

My original Idea was to set up a big sign in the middle of campus that people could scan, but I figured flyers would be better since I could put them in more sports. The first version of the flyer had a yellow and pink color scheme with an almost Hawaiian sunset vibe, but it looked too bright and didn’t really fit what I was going for. I ended up changing it to a darker, clearer design that better matched the mood. Before putting the flyers up, I asked a few friends to add some songs first so it wouldn’t look empty. That way, when people scanned the QR code, they’d see songs already there and feel more comfortable adding their own.

These are some of the locations where I’ve put up these flyers.

Link to documentation: A Moment of Warmth – Google Slides

During midterms, the mood on campus shifts. People move quickly, talk less, and carry stress like invisible weight. That was the atmosphere when my friends and I decided to host something small in Kretzmann Hall: a table with hot chocolate, snacks, sticky notes, pens, and soft background music. At the center of it all was a simple prompt: “Share some encouragement for the next person who needs this.” Setting it up became more of an adventure than I expected. We went to CDCS to ask if we could use their hot-water machine for making hot chocolate, and after filling it, we carried steaming containers back and forth to Kretzmann Hall to keep everything warm. We borrowed a table from Curry Student Center and arranged the items carefully at first from left to right, until we realized most students approached from the opposite direction, so we rearranged the setup for a more natural flow. Even the wind played a part, knocking the board over and inviting people to help us hold it in place, which became a conversation starter in itself.

Once people began to stop, something meaningful unfolded. Students gathered not just for the hot chocolate but for connection. They talked about midterms, family, culture, religion, the weather, and how they were handling change. Some spoke about their research, others about their sleep schedules, some about uncertainty. People read the encouragement notes left by strangers and added their own responses. Friends brought more friends, and gradually the table became a small hub of warmth in the middle of a stressful day. By the end of the event, we had collected forty-five handwritten encouragement notes, each different in tone, some funny, some deeply thoughtful, and some gentle. I left with a new LinkedIn connection! This experience reminded me of what Celia Pearce, Tracy Fullerton, Janine Fron, and Jacquelyn Ford Morie describe in “Sustainable Play: Toward a New Games Movement for the Digital Age.” They discuss the importance of forms of play that restore us rather than exhaust us, play that is cooperative and open-ended, rooted in human connection rather than competition or productivity. Contemporary culture often treats play as something childish on one end or something to be won on the other. In contrast, they argue for a type of play that is gentle, communal, and sustaining. In many ways, our hot chocolate setup unintentionally reflected this idea. There was no goal to achieve or performance to measure. People were simply invited to share, to pause, and to be present. The table became a temporary gathering space where new interactions happened naturally.

I realized that I needed this as much as anyone else. At first, I did not want to host the event because I felt overwhelmed and wanted to study. However, the act of slowing down and connecting gave me something that studying could not. It reminded me that encouragement does not have to be elaborate or complex. Sometimes it is a warm drink offered to someone. Sometimes it is a short sentence written on a sticky note. Sometimes it is standing with others and realizing you are not alone. As the reading suggests, sustainable play creates experiences that replenish rather than drain us, and that is exactly what this moment became: a shared pause, a gentle sense of community, and a soft space in the middle of a hard week.