Artwork #1: Score

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!

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.

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.