Artwork #2: Appropriate

Score:

Take a dish with all its ingredients and preparations

Find another dish

Experiment in a way to bring the two together in an artful way

Artist’s statement:

I love cooking and I also love experimenting with cooking, testing out different spices with different bases resulting in mixed reactions, sometimes good and sometimes not so good, but every time I experiment with cooking, I end up learning far more than when I just follow a recipe. Each ingredient adds something to a dish, for example, certain spices mixed will give a “tex mex” feel to a dish like cumin, paprika and cayenne mixed with lime, or an Italian feel from Oregano parsley and lemon. Dishes have a unique and deep taste to them, so what if we experimented a little further and combined two of them together. There are many ways to achieve this and none of them wrong, but some would probably taste better than others. I went with trying to combine Carbonara and Ramen, I also made sure to not break even a little bit of pasta in this process since I had already offended Italy by suggesting this. I initially wanted to try and add some bacon bits and a little bit of egg to instant ramen to replace the broth it is normally cooked in. At the end this tasted a bit off and a little greasy, like a hint of bacon in starchy noodles, then a friend informed me that Binging with Babish had made an episode on “Ramen improvements” where he had a “Ramenara” recipe. I of course tried it, and he added on top of the bacon bits some parmesan and some pasta water as well as he cooked the ramen in pork flavored broth. This version tastes much better and combines two storied dishes together in an artful way. I did not expect to eat all of this dish, but I did.

Using and combining two objects to create art is a staple in dada appropriation art, seen in Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel 1913, Man Ray’s gift and Indestructible object and most of all Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q 1919. I was looking at these simple combination of ideas that created art trying to figure out what to make for mine, then I got hungry and went to make dinner while still thinking about it, leading to my idea to combine two dishes into one edible “art” piece.

Game Requirements: A device with the ability to reverse audio

Game Rules: There are two characters in the game, one is going to be the Speaker and the other is going to be the Listener.

1. The Speaker is going to record one clip of their words. In this case, the Listener can’t hear them talking. (put on a headphone)
2. The Speaker needs to Reverse the clip and show it to the Listener.
3. The Listener is going to imitate what they heard and record it.
4. The Listener is going to Reverse their clip again and guess what the Speaker said.

Artist’s Statement:

I was influenced by many later Dada artworks on my Appropriate. As the main point of Dadaism, we need to use existing things as prototypes and make a re-creation on the basis of it. According to some modern works, such as Open Source, by Super Soul, 2012, they chose to use technology as creative conditions to make people get more interesting feedback on this activity. Or Mary Flanagan, Giant Joystick, they have a very shocking understanding of the Appropriate in the Digital Age. I was deeply influenced by the use of technology on existing technologies, and the influence of Open Source on me, so I wanted to create my project focused on sound.

For the recreation of sound, TENET has given me great inspiration. Because when the main character enters the counter-world in TENET, everything around him will operate in the opposite direction, including sound. When the voice is reversed, people cannot understand its meaning. So I want to create games by playing the sound upside down. Like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, players convey information and give feedback to teammates through language. If we create a “meaning” for the reversed voice, will there be a chance for people to understand the reversed voice? So I was thinking that if people were asked to imitate the reversed voice and then reverse it to guess how the original sound was, it would also add difficulty to the game. Because people need to speak according to the reversed voice, which means they need to talk to people in the counter-world, making the game interesting. Players can also increase the fun of the game by increasing penalties for not correctly guessing the original sound and exchanging characters.

For this assignment we were tasked with creating a playable game that involved the use of appropriation. For my game I essentially took Texas hold ‘em style poker and made a single change to the gameplay: the way the cards are held is reversed. The change makes it so that instead of players taking the cards and holding them in a way that stops the other players from seeing them, the cards are held so everyone but the player they belong to knows what they are. I dubbed this version “Reverse Poker”, or simply “Rekop”

The simple act of reversing the way hands are held completely changes the way the game is played. In a conventional game of poker players make decisions based on their confidence in their own hand, and can only theorize as to what other players might have. With the hands reversed, the game is now about weighing the strengths of other people’s hands while trying to figure out how good your own is. In my test games the first few hands felt like shooting in the dark, as without knowing our hands it felt like we lacked vital information needed to make decisions, but as we got more comfortable, viable strategies began to reveal themselves. At one point I was convinced to fold by another player’s confidence in their own hand only to find out my hand was actually much better, and another time I began to play uncharacteristically aggressive because I had figured my hand was statistically the winning since I could see everyone else had complete junk. Effectively the core of the game had changed from convincing others of the strength of your hand to convincing them that their own hand was weak, whether or not it is true. In one memorable instance, one player had three kings —an incredibly strong hand— causing every other player to fold immediately, much to the winner’s bemusement. This led me to discover that unlike in regular poker, where you want your hand to be as strong as possible, in reverse poker the ideal hand is good enough that it beats everyone else’s, but not too good as to discourage other players’ confidence in their hands or to risk using mind games, as the longer the game goes, the bigger the winnings that are up for grabs. I had decided to use the Texas Hold’em variation of poker after comparing it with other variations of the game for two reasons: The first being that I felt that having only two cards in one’s hand would make determining its contents easier for the players, and the second being that Texas Hold’em is very simple and by far the most popular variation of poker which would make it easier for players to pick up my take on it.

The chief inspiration behind my idea was Yoko Ono’s white chess set. This artwork is a game of chess in which every piece and square on the board is painted white. I really enjoy the concept of changing a familiar game so that it adds an extra dimension to it or changes the experience completely. Ono’s change doesn’t render the game unplayable, rather it changes the experience so that players not only have to outmaneuver their opponents, but also remember whose piece is whose. When I was first introduced to this artwork I began to think about how I would have altered the game of chess, and started applying that thinking to other games, eventually coming up with reversed poker. Another inspiration behind my idea are the many different “formats” for playing magic: the gathering, a trading card game. Aside from the standard way to play as prescribed by the official rules, there exist a number of variations that toy with the game’s mechanics, like deck size, life totals, card colors, and creature types. My favorite variation is called commander, which is a format meant for large groups of players that makes massive changes to the standard game. Commander was originally created by fans, and I’ve always enjoyed the fact that actual players have put their own spins on games that they love, which inspired me to put my own spin on things.  

The Poker Chips we used in our games were generously provided by my classmate Jackson, who also created a poker based game.

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Requirements:
A keyboard that is remapped so that the keys are laid out as abcdefg like in the picture below (both keycaps and the actual inputs).
Some typing test website (monkeytype.com for example).

Rules:
Perform a 60-second typing test with the keyboard.
You may restart as many times as you would like.
Try and get the fastest speed you can with this new layout.

Artist’s Statement:
The game is meant to critique how as a society we sometimes implement things without considering why they were done that way just because “it’s always been that way.” We currently don’t know who or why the qwerty layout was invented. A common theory is that it was to slow down typists so that a typewriter wouldn’t get jammed, but there is no supporting evidence for that theory. There are other layouts that have been invented since, such as Colemak or Dvorak, that are more efficient ways of typing on a keyboard. Unfortunately, we don’t pick up these layouts simply because its not worth relearning how to type, and most of us already are accustomed to the qwerty layout.

This game is meant to poke fun at that by asking you to type in a comical layout: the order of the alphabet. It was heavily inspired by Yoko Ono’s White Chess, which is where the idea of taking a game and making it more challenging by messing with the components to drive the message across came from. I think the game ended up being actually very fun to play. It provided a lot of friction but felt very possible and that the next time you attempted the challenge you would do better than the last. The game itself felt fair, even though it was very difficult to get a good time, which ended up making it quite popular among other students. I was also inspired by a video I watched called “How I went from 10 to 130 WPM in 3 months” from YouTuber pinguefy in which he talks about swapping to a different keyboard layout. The initial struggle he showed of learning it and having to retrain the muscle movement in his hands played inspired the keyboard aspect of this piece

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This game can be played with any number of players above three, although one needs to be able to hear everybody speak if the game is to be played in person. Alternatively, this could also be played with an online chat system, which could allow for more players than the soft limit imposed by the aforementioned restriction.

First, pick two people to be competing against each other. One will be the drawer, and the other the saboteur. The rest of the group will be the guesser(s). These roles can be determined any way the group likes.

Then, pick a word or phrase. This word or phrase will be only known to the drawer and the saboteur, not the guesser(s).

Use an online tool that allows multiple people to draw on the same canvas simultaneously. This game will work with any software that allows for this. The best option out there currently and the one used for playtesting is aggie.io.

When everybody is ready to begin, the drawer starts drawing the word or phrase to the best of their ability. The guessers will attempt to guess the word or phrase from the drawing. The saboteur’s goal is to thwart the drawer and guessers by drawing on the canvas as well. The saboteur is not allowed to just cover up the drawing. The refereeing of this rule is up to the group. One way to discourage this behavior is to have the drawer’s drawing on top of the saboteur’s drawing. This is not foolproof as the saboteur can still effectively cover up drawings if they use the same color as the drawer (assuming the drawer only uses one color), so the refereeing is necessary. Additionally, if it is at all possible to view what one person draws separately from another, the guessers must abstain from that information. In aggie.io, this takes the form of layers. Each participant can only draw on one layer, so if one were to look at the layer previews, one can see what the drawer is drawing without the interference from the saboteur. This can be resolved by obstructing the guesser’s view of the layer previews.

Some tips for the saboteur:

• Use the same color and stroke thickness as the drawer to make your red herrings indistinguishable from the actual drawing
• Add elements that make the drawing appear to depict something else
• Add arrows pointing to unimportant areas of the drawing if you are especially devious

Some tips for the drawer:

• Use different colors relevant to the word/phrase
• You can restart the drawing in a blank space (if there’s any left) if what you’re currently working on in unsalvageable

Some tips for the guesser(s):

• Differences in color and brush stroke can tip you off that different people are drawing different parts
• Usually, the stuff closer to the center tends to be the drawer’s and the stuff surrounding it are the saboteur’s

The round ends when the guessers have correctly guessed the word or phrase or when the group collectively agrees to give up. If it took more than one minute to guess, the saboteur wins. If it took less than a minute to guess, the drawer wins. This time length can be adjusted if the group wishes but play testing has found that a minute is a good threshold for our group. For example, if the words or phrases being picked are consistently very difficult to draw, the group may want to extend that time, or shorten it if the words or phrases are easy to draw.

A new round can have the same people in the same roles, but we found it more fun to rotate the roles around so that everybody gets a chance to try every role.

Here are some of art created from play testing:

Husky

Eiffel Tower

Cash

Artist’s statement:

I knew I wanted to do a game where multiple people draw on the same canvas because of the child-like nature of it. I was also inspired by Yoko Ono’s scores that resulted in artwork being created, such as Painting to Hammer a Nail, and John Cage’s procedural pieces that were slightly different every performance. I liked the idea of creating art by following rules or instructions. In this game, art is constantly being created every round, and it is all done without the main focus being the creation of art, but rather defeating your opponent. I think this creates art that could be more spontaneous or organic. I also think shifting the focus away from the creation of art can help those hesitant about art be more free from their preconceptions about themselves. I was also intrigued with the idea of two parties clashing in a competition where one is declared winner. I enjoy competitive video games in my free time, and I wanted to include that competitive feeling into this game. I think I was successful, even though the game is very casual in its presentation. I feel like it strikes a good middle ground where some groups can get very into winning and losing and other groups can be more focused on the drawings instead. As for what I appropriated, I’ve appropriated drawing software to play this game, as well as other drawing games where people guess what others are drawing such as skribbl.io, garticphone.com, or the drawing version of charades.

For my appropriation. I chose to create a game I will tentatively call. Visual MadLibs. The core concept of the game is to take a sentence, and have a player create a collage preexisting images on the internet. They then pass on this image to the next player to change in a way according to the next part of the sentence. This goes on for however many players there are until the final product loops back around to the person who had made the original image. An example of the transformation of an image can be seen here. My main inspirations for this project were one, they eyeball collage we looked at in class, and two, the fact that Mrs.Pierce’s suggestion that my previous score would have been a good fit for this assignment as well. With that in mind, I warped the idea to become more “gamey” and unravel into a more ridiculous image the players you obtain.

For my Appropriation project, I was inspired by pieces such as Yoko Ono’s White Chess, Takako Saiko’s many chess variants, and Super Soul’s Open Source. What drew me to these pieces was they way that they took an established game and made one relatively minor adjustment that completely changed how said game was played and experienced. I decided that I wanted to use poker as my starting point, as it was something I knew well enough and enjoyed, and I also thought it would just be an interesting game to appropriate. My first idea was a version of poker where the rules for scoring hands were unnecessarily convoluted and nonsensical. I liked this idea, but after thinking about it, I realized that this would really just be like a new style of poker rather than a “unique” game built off of an appropriation of poker. I toyed with the idea of scoring being so nonsensical that players would have the opportunity to maybe lie about what is or isn’t a scoring rule and convince their opponents that their hand actually is the best, but I couldn’t figure out a way of doing this that I liked or that wouldn’t be negated by just playing a few times and becoming acquainted with the real rules. I realized that my want to make this game and call it “I Hardly Know ‘er” was really all I had in favor of it, so I went back to the drawing board.

One iteration I devised replaced cards with pairs of dice, with a d12 signifying the value and a d4 signifying its suit. The idea behind this was to make it so every “card” was entirely random rather than being drawn from a fixed set of 52 cards. I did have an opportunity to test this one out in class, and it was fun and seemed like it worked well, but ultimately is not what I would consider the “final design” for the project. Looking back at the pieces I was inspired by, I realized that the aspect I was really drawn to was the way that these games changed what information was given to its players and/or how it was given to them. My final iteration is one I called Omnipoker. It plays mostly like a standard game of Texas Hold ’em, except each player is able to see the hands of all of the other players, but not their own. It leads to a unique situation where players  have far more information at their disposal than usual, but are now missing possibly the most crucial part of the puzzle. This leads to a scenario where players need to determine their moves based on the information they know as well as what others know and they don’t. Not only did the game play surprisingly well, I also liked how, like many interpretations of Dadaism being “anti-art”, it ended up becoming a sort of “anti-poker”.

Dice Poker

Omnipoker

Xuanshuo Zhang

Appropriation game

Note: for convenience’s sake, the coordinates of a face are represented by numbers as below

1             2             3

4             5             6

7             8             9

Rules: Two players are needed for the game. The players play rock, paper, scissors to decide who goes first. The game runs similar to tic tac toe. The first player can choose to put their piece any place on the cube. Then, the cube rotates depends on where the player places the piece. If it is a corner of a face (1,3,7,9), the corresponding column of the cube gets rotated up if it is on top and down if it is at bottom (up 1,4,7 for 1), and then the row where the piece lands on gets rotated left if it is on the left side and right if it is on the right side (left 1,2,3 for 1). If it is placed on one of the blocks connecting to the center piece, that row or column gets rotated depends on to what position that block is to the middle piece (left for 4, top for 2, etc.). A face is won if before or after the rotation there are 3 connecting pieces on any face. The color of the face is decided by the center piece. For example, if player 1 gets 3 in a row with pieces on position 3, 6, and 9, and the center piece of the face is yellow, player 1 won the yellow face. Rotating a 3 in a row with the center piece would not win another face because the center piece is the same. If a 3 in a row that does not include the center piece is rotated, it would not score the player another face until the 3 in a row is disconnected at least once. After the rotation and checking for scoring, the other player takes their turn. They can only play a piece on the face that the first player’s piece lands on after the rotation(s). If it lands on a face that is won by any player, instead of having to play on that face, the player can choose to play on any face instead. The first player to win 3 faces wins the game. If there is a tie, the player who scored the first face wins. If both players scored the first and second face respectively during the same turn (after rotation(s)), the player that made the last movement wins.

Artist statement: I decided to do my appropriation game as a game combining tic tac toe and a rubrics cube. I really like ultimate tic tac toe (3 x 3 tic tac toe games in a 9 x 9 board, each move in a certain tic tac toe game determines where the next move will go) as a game, and I think it features some key aspects like strategy that is massively different from the original game. I came up with the idea because I wanted to make a strategy game featuring the base mechanics of tic tac toe. I really liked the idea of white chess, which is to make a game that is already complicated into something that is playable, but extremely difficult to play. For my appropriation project I wanted to make tic tac toe, a game that is known for being extremely simple, predictable, and unwinnable if both players use the optimal strategy, into something that is complicated, playable but extremely complicated. I decided to use a rubrics cube, because putting the 2D game into a 3D space would make it more complicated, and the rotational mechanics would make the game much more complicated and would potentially cause more confusion because pieces move, and one player’s move can potentially set themselves back and score their opponent a face. However, the game becomes really difficult to run, and there are quite a few issues to make the game balanced (in terms of people trying to score 3 in a row with the same 3 blocks). I decided to use stickers so that the pieces can be tracked easier as well, and they are easily removable and not expensive so the game can be run repetitively without destroying the cube. After a few play tests, I added some specific rules so that the game would not cause nearly as much confusion and much more playable. I think I reached my goal in a way that my game is runnable and playable, but is extremely complicated both to play and to win.