Artwork #1: Score

Score:

1. A few people (more than two but not more than ten) stand in a line
2. The first person whispers a command that can be done right then and there to the next person
3. The next person whispers the command they heard to the person after them, and adds one of their own
4. This continues with people saying with they heard and adding another command until it gets to the last person
5. The last person says what they heard aloud (it could be incorrect, similar to a game of telephone)
6. Last person has two options
   • Either do all the instructions they heard (regardless of if they heard them correctly)
   • Or try something they wanted to try, or start learning something they wanted to learn, because they want to, not because they have to, but never started or got around to doing, within a week.

Artist’s Statement:

Initially, I wanted to do something related to the game of Telephone, as it’s already very chaotic, and is centered on communication and misunderstanding with the message the final person heard being nearly always different from the one the first person said. I was also inspired by Exquisite Corpse, and the idea of a score using different people’s contributions and ideas to create the final product. This was also a difference from the game of Telephone, commands from different people “pile on” to create the final product. Everyone’s expectations and wants are piling onto one person with this score.

With this score, I wanted to relate to misunderstanding and miscommunication, and also misunderstood expectations, and wanting to do something because you think it’s what others want or expect you to do, even when it might not be, which is a really big part of our world. So, it was meant to be a metaphor for this happening in the real world. It was also about others’ wants versus your own, and how people can add new expectations on a person because they misunderstood other expectations of them. It’s also about conformity. On the other hand, the other option for the last person forces them out of their comfort zone, rather than keep them with the possibly comfortable conformity. But it is for them. Something they genuinely want to do, not something they have to do, but have not done yet. Why? Fear, self-consciousness, procrastination? Though the person is trying, or learning, or doing something they genuinely want to do, sometimes doing something for you takes a little push and a little bravery.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jic_1W5Yo3TcHB6fXReBk3sqtKm5_f2o/view?usp=sharing

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

.

Score:

1. Play checkers
2. Pieces can be of any shape, they just have to be somewhat Identical and of the same color
3. Pieces can be stacked on top of each other regardless of whose they are
4. Pieces that are stacks cannot be captured
5. The game ends when there are 7 (Stacked and/or unstacked) pieces left on the board

Preparation:

1. A classic 8×8 chessboard or any 8×8 square grid is used
2. Each player uses 12 pieces
3. All pieces must be of the same color
4. All pieces must be placed at the default positions as used in regular checkers
5. 2 players are needed

Artist’s Statement:

The score for Cheesy Checkers was inspired by Yoko Ono and Ludo which is a derivative of the Indian game Pachisi. As the name implies, most of the rules and mechanics are derived from the standard version of checkers. However, in this case rather than following the standard practice of two players going against each other as opponents with the aim of winning the the game of checkers, players are instead working together in tandem to make a piece of art. Persons who follow the score and participate in the activity are in the end more of an artist as compared to being competitors. I feel like although this takes a slightly different route, we can still seem to explore the intentions of Yoko Ono when she was creating white chess. Although in her case there was a bit more freedom for participators in my case, a few more rigid rules purposefully steer the game in a particular direction. For instance, stating that pieces can be stacked regardless of which player claims them and also the instruction that stacked pieces cannot be captured add a completely new element to the game. This in turn focuses more on the collaborative aspect of this score necessitating the communication between players.

The stacking aspect of the game was gleaned from Ludo. In the case of Ludo stacking ones pieces ensures safety and is used as a defensive measure. In this case not only does it do that but once again it leads to cooperation because of the nature of the other rules.

Pre-game Board

Players proceed to move pieces as thought it were normal checkers

Pieces can be stacked

Game ends when there are 7 pieces left

It is interesting to see how different players interpreted the rules and intended to collaborate with each other. One playtest resulted in a case where one player was still adamantly trying to win, hence keeping track of which pieces were “his” and going about the game as though it were a regular game of checkers. This ultimately failed because his “opponent” forcefully collaborated with him by stacking some of her pieces on top of his stacks.

The patterns created by both participators are also interesting, from 3 play tests no 2 patterns were remotely similar which came as a surprise to me. The potential art created from this game is fascinating and hopefully I can find more intriguing interpretations of my score

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.

Art of Layers

Find 4 People

One person fills a whole piece of paper with drawings using colored pencils

The second fills a piece of paper using paint or makers

The third blindfolds himself and cuts up one of these pieces of art

The final person glues pieces of their choice to the uncut art, making a new piece of art.

Artist Statement

While I think scores can be fun and beautiful, they do have downsides. The main downside of scores is that they are hard to document. The art of scores is often felt in the doing, making it hard to document the feelings and explain scores to other people. My main goal for this project was to have a score that was not only fun to do but resulted in a piece of art you could bring home. A piece of art that would last far past the duration of the score. My biggest inspiration for this score was exquisite corpse. When we played exquisite corpse in class that first day the results it just wowed me. It fascinated me how the vastly different drawings could blend together so seamlessly to make a cohesive and visually impressive product. Like the exquisite corpse, I looked to add some sort of hidden element to my score, hence, the blindfold. I was further inspired by indeterminate music from the likes of John Cage and David Tudor such as Music of Changes. I found this random element that caused the score to sound different every time very alluring, which inspired the choice to have two drawings/paintings. Having the blindfolded person cut one of these drawings/paintings adds that random chance element, so even if they were given the same drawings from a previous run through the score, the resulting piece would almost certainly be different. However, what I dislike about indeterminate music is I find it doesn’t really sound good. There is almost too much random in many of these pieces. I had originally considered also having the blindfolded person glue and place the pieces they cut out onto the first drawing. Not only did I think this would kind of be a nightmare to perform because glue and blindfold don’t exactly seem like the best combo, but I also wanted to reign in the randomness of the score. Listening to Music of Changes is rough because it lacks purpose. It doesn’t feel like it is going anywhere. By allowing another person to place these cut-outs on the uncut paper the random chance element contributes to the piece because there is the intention behind where the 4th person places the cut-out. It allows for the random chance to create new meaning rather than drowning out the purpose behind the piece.

Examples

Person 1:

Person 2:

Person 4:

Final Product:

Score:

• Find a friend
• Take a photo 
• In your mind pick a part of the photo
• Give your friend a hint 
• Have your friend guess the part 

Artist Statement: 

This score is inspired and connected to a multitude of people and movements. This summer I was hiking the English countryside with some friends and I found us taking hundreds of photos of the trees, hiking paths, cows, small villages, ourselves, and everything in between. We were immersed in nature, yet focused on using our cameras more than actually being present. I think many of us have become photo bugs and people who love to collect memories via photography. Research done by psychologist Maryanne Garry studies the strong correlation between taking too many photos and memory loss (as well as it creating false memories). With modern technology, it can be an easy trap to fall into. I find myself taking photos of everything around me, as to try to remember events and places better, but in reality, it ends up doing the opposite. By following the score, the idea of purposeful photography is encouraged. 

This score was also heavily inspired by elements of Yoko Ono’s book Grapefruit. “Painting to be stepped on” captures the footsteps of avant-garde musicians and artists in her Chamber Street loft. What I loved about the score and piece was the focus on forgettable or undervalued elements of everyday life. No one would think to capture or pay attention to the footsteps of strangers, yet document them, but I think emphasizing the things we don’t pay a lot of energy or attention to can make us more thoughtful and present with our surroundings. In the case of my own documentation of the instantiation of the score, I wanted to highlight our surroundings specifically when taking thoughtless and/or thoughtful photos. In the conduction of my score, I found not only the guesser learning more about their surroundings, but also the person who took the photo. Both parties shared a mutual increased perception of their surroundings they wouldn’t otherwise experience.

Played the score out on a public beach on the cape. The hint was something striped (the chair on the far left)

A friend took this photo at Snell Library and in playing the score, they found their roommate in the background

Score:

Play with your pet on some cardboard or preferred destructible material.

Let them have fun and damage said material!

Use any markings as dot/line guides to follow for painting.

Paint.

Display.

By Sophie Uldry

Artist’s Statement:

The Playful Cat Collab is a game of creating art with your cat, primarily motivated by my love for… well, cats… but with the obligatory emotional cat-lady reason out of the way, my artwork was heavily inspired by the Fluxus movement and some of John Cage’s philosophies. Specifically, my artwork takes inspiration from the Fluxus’ use of chance and randomness, John Cage’s ideas of unintentionality, and his desire to make anyone an artist. Anyone who takes part in following my score would have become an artist by the end, and they would do so using the randomness generated by their cat’s destruction of a particular material. This follows Cage’s belief in balancing the constraints (of following your cat’s lead in this case) and freedom of what you do with said constraints, as well as his belief that the player of this game would become the artist (Pearce, C. “Games As Art”).

The game itself is simple, play with your cats and use whatever leftover chaos your cat has created as a guide for your painting. My goal for players who follow this score is to bond with your cat, let loose and follow your cat’s lead, have fun experiencing your cat doing what they do best (chaos), and be proud of something that you created. In addition to the obvious random guide generation caused by the involved cat, since the rules are so simple it’s overall a highly variable game. You could use cardboard, tissue paper, paper, fabric, paint, markers, crayons, charcoal, etc. as your project materials, which will guarantee an entirely different result each time you repeat this process with your cat. Below are a couple pictures on both the process of completing this game, and the results for each iteration. Note the differences in both projects, though following the same instructions, caused by the difference in cat interactions and materials.

Coaxing my cat to my desired material with catnip

Cat interacting with the chosen material

The cat’s finished product, now it’s my turn

Fully painted a finished product

Cats creating the painting guides on tissue paper

Scanned tissue paper and reprinted in B&W such that it is easier to follow guidelines

This is a score inspired by character generator and ‘Grapefruit’ by Ono Yoko.

There are several character generator online that you can use to generate the character. All you need to do just put in the basic information of the character, such as name, gender, and social class. Then, the system will give you the character with their detailed background. It likes the system gives you the story that you did not know before. Some authors and game designers use character generator to create the character when they lack the inspiration.

Moreover, in ‘Grapefruit’ by Ono Yoko, the author indicates the method of ‘omnibus film’, and the process is:

1. Give a print of the same film to many directors.
2. Ask each one to re-edit the print without leaving out any of the material in such a way that it will be unnoticed that the print was re-edited.
3. Show all the versions together omnibus style.

Which means, the participants are going to ‘edit’ the story randomly, and see what they got at the end. Therefore, the idea of letting the participants to make the story without letting each other knows in the process came to me.

This score is called Story Generator.

Prepare:

1. A dice
2. need 6 people in a group
3. Set the basic information of story by pulling cards: character’s pronounce, characteristic, favorite food, something hate; the journey day’s weather, the most important people to the character. (each person pulls one card)

Rules:

Each side of the dice represents its corresponding requirement.

Each player roll the dice once at the whole play round. If you get repeated number as the previous player, you roll it again.

After rolling the dice, each player should some short sentences for their own requirement. The players are not allowed to discuss the story line until everyone finished their paragraph.

Dice:

If you got 1- Please write down the destination that the character wants to reach and the reason to go to this destination.

It could be a castle, a dream island, or even their friend’s house…wherever you want it to be.

If you got 2-Please write down 2-3 difficulties that the character encountered during the journey and describe it.

It does not matter whether the character has overcome it or not, it’s up to you.

If you got 3-Please write down 1-2 tools that you think could help the character to overcome the difficulties. (you don’t know what the difficulties are) It could be also be a weapon. Whatever you want.

If you got 4-Please write down a lucky thing that the character encounters during the journey.

If you got 5-Please write down a very interesting thing that the character encounters during the journey. Just use your imagination.

If you got 6-You are the one to who decides the end of the story. Whether the character reaches the destination or not? If yes, what does the character see at the end? If not, why?

After finish writing, let’s do discussion:

• Each player read the paragraph and try to connect each them together.
• See what happened in the story.
• Is it a sad story or happy story?

*It’s very fun to make non-sense story!

We did the score in class, and there were 6 participants joined. Let’s see what story we got:

Once upon a time, there is a person named ‘the character’, which prounce as ‘he/him’. His is a optimistic person, and his favortie food is sushi. The most important person to him in his life is his good friends, and he hates monsters. One day, that was a cloudy day, he decided to go to the Mountain of tiredness. But there is the tiredness debuff at the mountain, which is need to sleep 15 hours a day. He brount an umbrella and chainsaw with him for the journey. However, he met many difficulties during the journey. He was chased by rabbid dogs, and he got lost on the way to the moutain. Also, he slipped on a wet path and injured his leg. Fortunately, he wasn’t seriously hurt, and he discovered an uneaten cake ready to eat. Delicious! After that, when he was approaching the mountain, Lady Gaga was there and performed for him, and she also signed an autograph for him. How nice she is! Finally, he reaches the Mountain of tiredness and found a freshly-baked pie to eat. He could finally get a good night’ sleep.

Work Citation

@character-generator.org.uk. (n.d.). Character generator. Character Generator. Retrieved September 26, 2022, from https://www.character-generator.org.uk/

Yoko, O., & Lennon, J. (n.d.). Grapefruit: A Book of Instruction and Drawings.

Score:

Float a pretty parachute with some friends and a chair,
String them along in public with no shame but much care.

Artist’s Statement: 

Beach Scene: A Performance and a Piece. This score was inspired by Allan Kaprow’s Happenings. When reading about his 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1968), I was intrigued by the idea of blurring mundane life activities and art. In Kaprow’s piece, audience members had to switch seats to move on to the next set of Happenings that were occurring in trios. The Happenings were not linked, intriguing but also of familiar actions, engaging the audience in a way unlike anything else at the time. In class, when we went out into Centennial Commons and staged our own Happening, I loved watching the class create goals for themselves and then try to enact them with the varied paraphernalia around. I was a part of a Happening where we tried to get a parachute to fly using string and help from a chair. In doing so, we created a performance for the other students on the quad and even got a stranger to take a picture of us with a drone. The barrier between us as artists and our audience was broken in a beautiful way that moved me. The audience couldn’t tell if it was a performance or if we were just playing for fun, blurring the line between daily activities and art, much like Kaprow did.

I wanted to capture this experience in a score, but I didn’t want all who partook in enacting the score to end up with the exact same result. John Cage demonstrated how introducing elements of randomness in an art piece allows for unexpected yet interesting results that I believed would foster a sense of ownership and uniqueness to the Happenings players would create using my score. It also allows for the score to be “replayed” and a different result to arise. As such, I drew inspiration from Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit in structuring a score that was simple and left much room for interpretation so that the art created was truly unique every time.

The title includes “Beach Scene” so as to get artists to think about the beach and potentially performing it there, although the actual location of the performance isn’t too important. Beaches do, however, have lots of wind and water, both of which can be used for the ‘floating’ exercise mentioned in the score. I implored players to ‘float’ (up to their interpretation) a ‘pretty parachute’ (also up to their interpretation) with friends a a chair. The number of friends is left unknown as is how the chair is used. In getting players to reach a goal that is somewhat confusing or non-sensical, they have to be creative and end up making something unique. The phrase “String them along in public with no shame but much care.” not only rhymes with the line above to encourage non-literal thinking, but also uses string as a verb, alluding to our use of string in the original Happening. I also instruct that the Happening be enacted in public with no shame so that players don’t try to hide. This inadvertently include their audience in the performance and introduces an element of randomness. It’s likely that someone outside of the original group of friends will interact with the Happening or at least watch and comment from afar. Lastly, I implore the players to float the parachute with much care, hoping that they take the time to consider the affordances of the parachute and the way they are framed during the performance.

When I playtested this score in class, the results were wonderful. The playtesters ‘strung along’ a passerby who they recognized and got them to sit in a chair that they then engulfed with the parachute. They then tried to get the parachute to float in the wind before running underneath it and trying not to get trapped. The performers made a game, one that was interesting to watch and blurred the line between art and daily play. As such, I think the score was a success!