Andrew

Artwork #4: Experience – Understudied

The inspiration for this experience piece came from playing the game Overcooked by Ghost Town Games Ltd., which roughly simulates the stresses of being an overworked cook in a complex kitchen environment. The stress one experiences from playing this game can be very closely related to that which we all experience over the course of our college experience, which is exactly what I was going for in my parody game Understudied. Just as Takako Saito would take the game of chess and modify it to convey a completely different message, I wanted to modify overcooked so that it would accurately simulate the stress of trying to complete many tasks at once in a small amount of time.

Understudied can be played by 4-5 players with one player being the moderator, and the rest either working together or against one another to complete tasks. The goal of the game is to complete ten assignments back to back with the least amount of grade deductions possible.

Rules as the Moderator:

  • Begin by allowing the players 30 seconds to prepare and complete tasks before the first assignment is released.
  • Release the first assignment by rolling 2 dice (for vs) or 4 dice (for co-op) and announcing whichever corresponding tasks are rolled from the assignment creation box (marked in blue).
  • Upon releasing the first assignment start a timer for a minute (each assignment is due after a minute), releasing the next assignment 15 seconds before the current assignment is due.
  • When assignment timers run out, check that the players have either recorded their completed assignments (for vs) or are all present on the school tile space (for co-op). If they have not completed all tasks or all players are not on the school tile, a half a letter grade must be deducted from their current grade.
  • If a player crosses the red boundary at any time during the game, their piece should be moved to the “timeout box”. You must roll a d6 and assign this player a timeout time corresponding to a border event (marked in red).

Rules as a Player:

  • Start at any tile on the board. *You should optimally position yourself in front of an assignment so that you can get started on it immediately when time starts*
  • To begin tasks all you must do is use the arrow keys to move your piece to a tile adjacent to whichever task you would like to complete. Once adjacent to a task, begin a timer associated with that task. While this timer is running, you may move around freely and/or start another task if you would like.
  • When a task timer ends, you must return to a tile adjacent to that task to complete it.
  • *For Co-Op Only* When assignment is due, you and all of your teammates must be on the school tile in order for any of your tasks to be counted.
  • You must not cross the red boundary lines at any time unless you are willing to accept a small time penalty.

Game Board for CO-OP and VS:

Short Video of CO-OP Gameplay:

Gameplay Video

Link to Parodied Game:

Overcooked!

Artwork #3: Intervene (Public Artwork)

Project Description and Setup:

For my intervention, I left a prompt on a canvas in a public space, which allowed for people to interrupt their daily routine to draw whatever they would like.

  1. Find a public space to display a whiteboard or surface to draw on
  2. Write a prompt which invites people to draw or create whatever they please
  3. Return to the board in 24hrs to see what has been created

At first, my idea was to sit on the centennial common with a whiteboard and ask people to come and draw whatever they’d like to. This idea posed a few problems though. Firstly, I had discovered that allowing people to draw without others observing produced much more creative and interesting results than if there had been others around. Secondly, I do not own a whiteboard large enough to get peoples attention without asking them if they would like to participate. Since this is an intervention piece, I did not want to have as much of a role in the users’ experience as I would have had if I were to camp out on centennial. Therefore I modified my original idea so that I could use a larger canvas in a less public and crowded space. Thus, I chose to setup my intervention in a study room in my dorm building (West Village F). This allowed for participants to take a break from studying to draw whatever was on their mind. The results from this were unique to say the least.

Canvas before:

Canvas 24 hours later:

Upon first observing the changes, I noticed that there were not nearly as many drawings as i’d hoped there would be. All though this was saddening, I was still able to appreciate kirby, a volleyball, bubble tea, and a very awful drawing of spongebob dubbed “spong”.

The results were pretty indicative of the current mental state of those residing in my building. Although stressed by workload around midterms and nearing finals, students were still able to have fun in expressing themselves and displaying their work to others.

Artwork #2: Musical Card Game

Instructions for this game (each player will go one at a time) :

  1. Shuffle your hand of 13 cards
  2. Draw the first three cards from the top to form a chord
    • If card is between 1-Q, the card’s note must be played in this chord
    • If the card is a King, you may select any note you would like to add to the chord
    • If the card is an Ace, you may replace the drawn chord with any chord you would like
      • Drawing an Ace immediately negates previously or future drawn cards for this chord
  3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 three times until you have your chord “progression”
  4. The player now has two minutes to create anything with the progression they have drawn
  5. All players will come together at the end of these two minutes to perform their composition to one another
  6. The players then decide on a winner

This musical game was greatly inspired by Takako Saito and her modifications to the game of chess. Pieces like her “Sound Chess” game got me to think about how I could manipulate traditional games into something that stimulates the senses. Similarly to that piece, I thought it would be a great challenge to incorporate something musical to a traditional game of cards. After having difficulty pairing instrumentation to an already existing game of cards, I decided it would be best to create a new one. I came up with this idea after sitting at my keyboard for a while and being stumped on where to start in terms of making a song. It then came to me that I could make a game where the deck of cards started the song for me. With this new random way of putting chords together, it is much easier to overcome writer’s block in a fun way.

Roommate playing this game:

Classmates playing this game:

Everyday Music Artwork

My music piece:

Score Instructions:

  1. Make music with everyday objects or events
  2. Record them
  3. Put them all together at the end of the day
  4. Listen to your day

Conclusion after a few trials:

When I first thought of my score, I believed I would be able to create a somewhat musical sounding piece using random objects or noises. Inspired by John Cage and his avant garde style of music, the idea was to be able to listen to how your day went or what you did. Instead it turned into a jumbled mess of random noises that are rather painful to listen to. Although the piece resulted in a jumbled mess, this jumbled mess somehow perfectly encapsulated a rather mundane day. From a relatively boring task like washing dishes, to my alarm clock blaring, this recording captures parts of my day that otherwise would’ve been easily forgotten if not for this art piece. I will continue to document more of these scores in the next few days so that I can compare my new scores to this iteration (they will also most likely end up as a jumbled mess).

“Instruments” in my recording:

  1. Typing on my keyboard
  2. Washing dishes
  3. Tapping pencil on my notebook
  4. Opening and closing fridge
  5. Alarm clock
  6. Coins spinning
  7. Roommate beatboxing
  8. Eggs on skillet