Experimental Game Design

Artwork #1: Score

Dissolving Chess

by | Sep 27, 2022 | ,

Score:

Set Up Chess

Shake Hands With Your Opponent

The Winner Must Take A Single Piece As A Prize

Play Chess

Chess is a game that is rooted in tradition. it is one of the oldest games people have played and has had thousands of iterations. It is a game with and of many cultures, from the prestigious grandmasters to the lightning-fast players of street chess. it is a game that is so impactful in its simultaneously rigid and fluid structure. Rigid because of the limits of every piece but fluid because of the vase number of combinations, styles, gambits, and win states there are. It is this dual nature that I feel drew someone as creative and forward-thinking as Marcel Duchamp to the game of chess and it is this interest of his that inspired me to create dissolving chess. I found it fascinating that someone who rigorously challenged the conventions of the art world never considered doing the same for the game world.

Yoko Ono’s White Chess is another source of inspiration for this project. Using a chess set and board with only one color illustrates the absurdity of conflict-oriented thinking, showing us that maybe we’re all the same after all. I have elected for a more aggressive approach. I would like to ask the question “what happens when there’s nobody left to fight? Be it a war, a massacre, a disagreement, or climate change, when the fighting is over there is always something lost what happens when we’ve lost too much? when there isn’t a way back? With dissolving chess, the only way to have all the pieces on the board is not to play the game.

 

Several games have taken place and each side is significantly smaller than when it was started. the rules have had to change. in the 5th game after a player had decided to take the Black king the players agreed to make the objective of the game to capture all of the enemy’s pawns first. I expect the rules to continue to change as the pieces dwindle and I plan on continuing to play and have others play until the box is empty.

These are the current winners and their trophies.

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

Artwork #1: Sleep Log

by | Dec 11, 2021 |

Score:

Wake up
Draw a line on a piece of paper
Line length is based on how long you slept
Line straightness is based on how well you slept
Repeat the process every morning on the same piece of paper.

Artist Statement:

I was inspired by Yoko Ono’s Painting by Hammer and Nail and former student Justin Brady’s Dream Paper. In both, of their works, a person repeats an action every day in the morning. I wanted to do something similar, and the idea came to me one morning when I had a terrible night’s sleep that I wanted to make a visual representation of how my sleep went.

The main purpose of the art piece is to ritualistically document your sleep and give the quality/length of your sleep some kind of physical form. The first 2 photos are the month of September-October, and then October-November. The last one (the reason why this is so late) is finals week. The first month is substantially more erratic, as my sleep schedule was really messed up, and I wasn’t sleeping well/going to bed at reasonable hours. The second picture shows a much more reasonable sleep schedule. At the time, I was going to bed around midnight and waking up at like 7-9am. I slept very consistently during that time when I wasn’t sick. The final picture shows finals week (or like this past week since most of my finals were due this week.) As you can see, I only slept 5 out of the 7 days, and the sleep mostly was bad quality and short, except for Wednesday where I took a day off to rest.

 

My life

by | Oct 15, 2021 |

Get a piece of paper

Get some crayons

Use one color to represent the mood of one day

Draw anything thing I like

Make sure draw on the same paper

Draw for a week

In “Grapefruit “, there are many pieces about painting. Yoko Ono tried to paint room, shadows or other things. My inspiration is color. I think people’s lives are colorful, blue is blue, happy is orange, irritable is red. Every day has its own color. Also, there are many songs use color to represent their mood. For example, there is a lyric talk about it in Taylor Swift’s cruel summer, which is “It’s blue, the feeling I’ve got”. School days may be boring, but they are definitely not colorless. From the color in my works, I can see my daily mood. The red part indicates that I must have had a bad day. Every day something affects my mood. I want to document my life in color, to prove that my life is not black and white. In order not to feel like a zombie during a Novel Coronavirus pandemic, it is important to keep track of your feelings. As a student, it’s easy to tell the difference between a school day and a weekend. From Monday to Friday. I feel like “my life sucks,” but then on the weekend it instantly becomes “love & peace.” The result is messy, but it’s also organized. The proportion of each color is about the same, and there will not be a picture of one color. T his is my life, too, and it doesn’t seem organized, but the proportions are just right. Drawing is really an amazing thing, and the colors are the same. People can do anything with drawing and use color to express any emotion they want to express. I think that’s what makes this assignment interesting.

Smoothie Piece – Xavier Meade-Kelly

by | Oct 15, 2021 |

Smoothie Piece

Record everything you eat during a meal

Repeat this for every meal for three days

Gather together the foods on your list

Place all the foods inside a blender and blend.

Pour it out into a cup.

Take a sip

 

When I began to bounce ideas around for my score, I first looked to existing pieces for reference. Most of my favorite pieces could be executed by a single person, and the ones that really stuck out gave the performer nonsensical or uncomfortable instructions. My biggest inspiration was definitely Yoko Ono’s collection of scores called Grapefruit, which includes a number of works in this vein.

As I began to zero in on my idea, I realized that I wanted to involve food in my piece. Food is a constant in the human experience. Everyone eats food, everyone enjoys food, and everyone appreciates food. Even though food unifies us, it also sets us apart. Some people view food as a means for moral expression, choosing not to eat animal products or food produced by certain companies. Food also marks culture, with every region spawning a number of unique dishes. 

At the end I settled on blending together all the foods eaten for three days into a single smoothie and taking a sip. I thought it would be interesting to combine all the different things I’ve eaten into one substance, and to combine all of the tastes I’d experienced into a single sensation. In a weird way the container I kept the smoothie in mirrored my stomach, as both essentially contain the same things.

On my third day I began to gather together all of the foods on my list. At the end of the day I blended them all together and placed the smoothie into a refrigerator. I presented my score in class by reading out the instructions, and taking a sip in front of everyone. One Idea I had was to plan out all of my meals so that the smoothie would taste good, but I decided to just eat what I normally eat: steak, salads, macaroni, and other foods were all blended together into one bizarre amalgamation. When I finally tasted my creation, I regretted that decision, as it tasted so very bad, so bad that I felt a little sick for a few hours. 

Scott Pignataro: Artwork #1 – Score: Adapt

by | Oct 15, 2021 | ,

Score:

Find a place with a table and chair

Take out your work and place it on your chair;

Then sit on the table.

Start Working.

Struggle.

Adapt.

Artist Statement:

This Score was inspired by a lot of things but many by my roommates. One day I came home and all my roommates were working so diligently at our dining room table. Watching them work made me think about how people often do not think about how important something is in our daily life. I do not often think about how useful a chair and table are but watching my roommate struggle to get any work done while sitting on the table really shows how underappreciated some things are. I was also inspired by the idea of using things in a way they are not intended to be used. When you use something in a way it’s not intended it can have really fun and humorous results. In the case of my score my roommate had a blast making jokes and laughing about the different techniques that could be used to be more efficient. The score that inspired me the most was, Tape Piece III. The score was simple, yet in my opinion very deep. Taking something like an audio tape and using it as a bow for a present or a gift wrapper, as suggested in the score, was really fascinating to me. Most people would never think to use a tape of audio for anything besides listening but Ono had come up with such a unique use for it and I found that really inspirational for my own score.  Seeing how people adapted to the challenge of sitting on a table while having their work on a chair is super interesting. One of my roommates thought it would be easier to work while on his stomach; after switching positions he found, at least for him, it was easier to get work done. I wish I could have had more people try out my score so see different adaptations.

 

 

 

 

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Score: Solve the Puzzle

by | Oct 15, 2021 |

Find 

I walk around school grounds, 

trying to get my standing,

there are loopy roads and roundabouts,

A little shop called wall-e’s?

 

It’s all very confusing this property I’m around,

Seems like there’s an overpass,

In the middle of the property,

Purple hues all around it

 

Kids all around waiting

To be let into this hostel

As a supervisor swipes

And off they go 

 

My intention in creating this score was to create a kind of puzzle in a puzzle effect. You as the reader, are trying to figure out what specific place the score is referring to in a treasure hunt like manner. As a child growing up, I’ve always been a fan of puzzles. Every game I am fond of has some sort of puzzle element involved in it. I even remember being 10 going to restaurants and my parents giving me sudoku puzzles to keep me distracted. I think this lends itself to this score, I love the idea that someone is reading it in passing and thinking about it as they walk around campus.

The piece was inspired by Yoko Ono’s TRUTH/FALSE in Grapefruit. It sounds like the list of things she’s trying the readers to figure out what’s true and false. But the more you read the more you find similar topics, hidden messages. “All fruits are related species of banana, which was the first fruit in existence. The Bible lied about the apple because they felt mentioning the word banana was too undignified.”  It seems like simple commentary but there is some sort of distaste that Yoko was trying to convey! My score didn’t end up being as deep but used the hidden message idea to make a puzzle!

 

Documentation:

Here I have attached an image of the “bridge” hallway connecting both halfs of this building. The purple hues, the loopy roads and then finally the building in question in the score is West Village F