Jaliyah

The game is called What the Fuck and Who Done It?

Score:

Place body in the noose

Both players tap the body for 30 seconds.

Which ever side the body lays on the line at the time the timer goes off is the loser of the game.

Enjoy!

This game was inspired by Heartfiled and Schlichter’s Prussian Archangel piece from the 1920. I feel that the political commentary that was present in many of the Dada groups that we have studied in class inspired me to create something that was equally disturbing as it is enticing and thought-provoking. As soon as step one was completed in my playtest, the air was removed from the room and one could hear the tension that was boiling.

I also took influence from a popular children’s game called Hangman where one would try to guess the word letter by letter that the other player would choose and after so many tries a man is built on a noose. The game ends when the full body of the man is made.

I find it interesting that suicide is a subject of popular entertainment in a way that is funny or meant as a reversible action. In Hangman, once a person loses, the players can erase the body drawn and try again. This is opposite to the reality of the action that is so widely accepted.

In “What the Fuck and Who Done It?”, I wanted to tackle this idea of using dark, suggestive material to comment on a popular trend that desensitizes young minds to harsh realities. For this appropriation assignment, I decided to use found objects in my house for the first iteration. Combining a lamp with a pencil, I created a “noose” with string and tape tied to the end of the pencil. At the bottom of the piece is a piece of paper with a line. On one side of the line displays the words “What the Fuck?” while the other displays “Who Done It?”. I chose this as the title of my game because it explains in a crude way my reaction to suicide happenings in an honest way. In class, we spoke about how especially in places with political unrest like Germany and Berlin, artists would use their pieces as a form of activism. While I do not consider my piece to be a form of activism, I do think of future iterations that would interact with a more public environment and possibly a larger scale to truly convey the seriousness of the topic at hand.

Upon reading the score, I am sure you have noticed that there is no win condition, only a lose condition. In reality, no one wins and everyone involved loses. Those who play the game and those who watch.

Jila’s Experimental Score (1)

This is the score to my game Rubber Circles. I was inpsired to make this based on found household materials I use for my hair. Rubber bands and bobby pins are what I use for this score but the score does not explicitly state what a rubber circle is or how to hit the targets so that is left up to the interpretation of the players but I provide bobby pins because that is how I would play.

I believe the piece should be played by 1 player after the playtests. Simply because it is intended to be a short game that one could do on their way to something else. The instructions are short and could be displayed in a large setting on a shelf perhaps. It is a found object game truly and does not rely on the use of other materials that would not be in a household or available for reasonable pricing at a convenience store. I believe the simplicity of it was birthed through my need to create a game that was something one could play and not something super difficult to onboard.

During the playtests, I saw that players were more interested in making the score competitive instead of a short one over that just happens. With the solo game tests I’ve seen, the player just plays through the one minute often questioning if that was all they were to do.

It relates to the theme of using simple instructions yet obscure items which I pulled from the readings of Grapefruit by Yoko Ono. I was inspired by the soft writing style presented in some of the Ono scores that I was compelled to use that technique myself when writing my score. In future iterations, I would like to introduce new items to act as rubber circles and bobby pins such as tires and shoes.