Final Rules:

1. Find a friend who you may share this experience with
2. Find a piece of paper and a chunk of charcoal
3. Draw something that comes to mind with the charcoal
4. Pass the charcoal over to your friend and have them do the same
5. Continue this cycle until the paper accidentally becomes smudged through curiosity or process

Playtest Notes:

In my first playtest my players showed me just how constraining my initial rules were and I decided it was important not to guide players on what to draw but to allow their minds to wander and have their drawing interact naturally. 

In my second playtest (photos below) the players showed me just how difficult it was to smudge a paper using pencil lead, thus I changed the wording from pencil lead to charcoal.

Summary:

Looking at all the different scores on the blogposts I decided I wanted to make a Score that commented on the way a person can wind through life’s events, both expected and unexpected. I also wanted to comment on how each event can change the meaning of another and that chance increases as more events are introduced. To reflect this i needed to create something open and relaxed while adding an element of unpredictablilty.

After looking through the blog posts and reading the Scores by Yoko Ono I decided to mirror the Scores I found abstract yet elegant, which is something I find Yoko Ono does very well. I was also inspired by Dinner Piece (link) which has a very relaxed ruleset allowing it to be a very open ended and laid back game.

However, ideally this piece would be done with paint or by erasing lines to more accurately depict the idea of how life can affect a person. However, due to lack of materials and time to playtest either of these i was unable to change

Welcome to a unique collaborative music relay game! In this project, each participant will create a 16-clicks segment of music. However, there’s a twist: you won’t be able to hear the melodies or rhythms played by the participants before you.

materials: keyboard based on phone, laptop

How it works:asdasd

1. Blind Relay: I was inspired by the telephone game. Each participant will compose and play their own 16 clicks of music, without knowing what the previous person has played. After 8 clicks of metronome played, you can start your composition. When some one is playing, other members need to stand outside classroom.
2. Creativity Unleashed: You can follow any style, rhythm, or mood that inspires you. Let your creativity flow without boundaries!
3. Seamless Integration: After everyone has contributed, all the pieces will be stitched together to form a single, continuous musical piece by a digital audio workstation.
4. Incredible sound: play the sound after mixing, everyone will get a new feeling about their work.

Score

Find A Piece of Papyrus and a Quill with ink

Using the Quill and ink make 25 dots on the paper

Number the dots randomly 1-25

In order connect the dots starting with 1

Ask a Friend If They Like it

If No:

Rip up the Papyrus

If yes:

Wait until their birthday, frame it, wrap it, and gift it to them

Original Score

There is actually very little reason to mention my original score as it had nothing to do with my final score but I thought it was also a good idea. The idea behind it was that very basic instructions would tell you how to play a certain chord on the guitar. The reason I liked this idea so much was because if I wanted to I could continue to make the score go further and further and get harder and harder by introducing new chords and strumming patterns. In short it would have become a very basic instruction guide on how to play the guitar. I scrapped this because no matter how specific and basic I got with the instructions to the score I was somewhat worried that without someone showing you how to play an instrument through a video or in person it can be hard. I figured without some sort of model there was a good chance that in practice the score did not succeed.

Final Score

This score was designed with Yoko Ono in mind. I liked the somewhat sadistic way she had extremely negative outcomes in many of her scores, however some of them were just too depressing for me (I have no desire to have the reader shoot through 100 panes of glass and send a map of each pane once a day to someone who hurt them). So I gave it a dual ending where my score can end positively or negatively. She also gave me the idea to use random objects in my piece which is why I specifically used the papyrus and quill instead of pen and paper, just to make it more fun. However I had two other sources of inspiration. It was my roommate’s birthday over the weekend. While we never do anything big for each other we always get each other small gifts (take them out to dinner, golfing, etc.). This year we did end up going golfing, but I thought that it would be interesting to dedicate this artwork to finding his next birthday gift. This leads me to my second source of inspiration. Connect the dots is a trivial and simplistic way of drawing. It is something that preschool children enjoy because turning a seemingly random pattern of dots into a picture is cool at that age. Last week I saw one of these books at CVS and I thought what if you take a seemingly random series of dots and turn it into something even more sporadic and crazy. Combining this and my minimal desire to go out and buy birthday gifts for people and you get my score. Originally called “Bad Friend” has now been retitled “To Jason.”

As someone passionate about linguistics and education, I am always trying to find new ways to teach linguistics concepts in clever ways that can be understood easily. This idea for a linguistics score / word evolution exercise was inspired by a combination of the classic Broken Telephone Game and Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit that details many instructions for creating works of art, often abstract or even impossible. Unlike Yoko Ono’s work, I wanted to create something that was more tangible.

This score used to be more social justice-motivated, however I found it difficult to articulate my thoughts in alignment with the design choices so I omitted it in this version. In a future iteration of this score, I will try to focus more on the social justice message.

The score is as follows:

1. Gather a bunch of people in a noisy room. Everyone should be facing the same direction, organized in a binary branching tree structure. This means that there is one person at the front center of the room, “Person 1”. Behind Person 1 are 2 people to either side of that person, Person 2 and Person 3. Person 2 and Person 3 should each have 2 people standing behind them to either side, and so on until there are no more people remaining.
2. Give everyone a writing instrument and a surface to write on.
3. Person 1 should secretly write down their hometown. Then, they should write it again, but backwards, in all lowercase, as one word. For example, “San Diego CA” would be “acogeidnas”.
4. Person 1 should try to pronounce this word, quietly, to Person 2 and Person 3. Say the word twice, quietly but clearly.
5. Person 2 and Person 3 should write down what they heard, as best they can.
6. Person 2 and Person 3 should then turn around to each of their 2 people and whisper the word they wrote down to them, twice. The ones who hear the word should then write down what they heard, and repeat the process until everyone has written down something.
7. Lay all the words flat on a surface and review how the words have changed from person to person.

The results of this score are quite intriguing. After running two trial runs in a classroom setting, one can see that consonants get flipped, whole syllables get erased, and complexity gets turned into simplicity. It is quite difficult for one to hear a word that they don’t recognize and try to recall it correctly, since we tend to remember phonological patterns we’re familiar with.

For example, one such trial started with the word “amnotnikpoh” for Hopkinton, MA and it became:

• Adoknicough
• Abdokmipa
• Amnotnikpol
• Adoknikal
• Mnanikal
• Amnonekal

Another trial started with the word “ailognomrenni” for Inner Mongolia and it became:

• Ilocnolerni
• Ilognomeli
• Ilognomerny
• Ilognomobi
• Ailucknomerne
• Aiglagnomali

This was an interesting exercise to see how the word for a place (although encrypted initially) slowly distorts as it passes from person to person, and volume/noise (which was simulated through the noisy room) can also contribute to the phonological changes that arise from this.

The results of this experience are artistic in nature. I compare it to the works produced in the Fluxus era, and as Jacquelynn Baas and others write in their book Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life, “It should not be surprising, then, that people sometimes have a hard time experiencing Fluxus objects as art. They are not “art”; they are more like tools or games” (Baas et al., 2011, p. 8). With a mindset of artistic creation, I hope linguistics and other educators can take this approach to classroom activities because they can encourage learning in a way that is unique and inspiring.

Gift a cube of ice to someone you appreciate

Show your appreciation until the ice melts

Walk away

Intention & Influence

Intention

I remember one night while I was at work, we were making goodie bags for guests at an event that was going to be held. My coworkers complained about having to make them, despised the smell, or didn’t think anything about it except that it’s work. This long process of making 100 goodie bags made me think of the significance of gifts. Why do we give gifts? Does it matter who gives/receives it and what’s in it? Why? If you are told to, is it really a gift? Eventually, I decided that the score would be the essence of what a gift is supposed to mean and feel like, without the actual “gift”. A gift is about the surprise, the genuine feelings behind it, and the meaningfulness of it. With a gift, you are attempting to communicate your appreciation. So, the score ignores what the gift is and focuses on that surprise, that genuine feeling, and how meaningful that gift is that they are just standing there, giving you a melting cube of ice, confessing all their appreciations to you. It’s simple, kind of goofy, and feels like a game, but it’s a warming, no pun intended, way to show someone your genuine appreciation that is filled with surprises, from the ways people interpret “show your appreciation” and how they show affection to how the environment affects them.

Influence

My main inspiration, came from Allan Kaprow’s happening, Fluids. In his happening, he and other people created a structure of ice and then it melts. It was a beautiful piece that to me, demonstrated the passage of time or how even as things get “destroyed” or “messed up”, it can be beautiful. Other inspirations would be the day the class all went outside to play with some simple things Celia, our professor, had laying around as well as the concept of Happenings during the Fluxus movement itself. That day, I just remembered thinking to myself about how everything was too funny, and that I felt like I was back to being a young child. It was the simplicity of things, creating games out of whatever we had, and the bright sky and colors that reminded me of being a kid. Part of this day helped influence my process and end result of the score, with the idea of simplicity, bright, and fun. I also remember reading Happenings in the New York scene. All the movements and words were sudden and random, but were things that you typically see or hear in life. Along with Grapefruit by Yoko Ono, these art pieces made me feel silly, happy, and spontaneous. One score I remember from her book was “Keep laughing: Keep laughing for a week”. It was such a simple and silly score but it instantly made me feel happy and spurred on a want to laugh. It was art that I wasn’t familiar with that seemed so freeing. Usually, when it comes to art pieces, whether it was a drawing or an essay, most of my pieces are a bit solemn and tense. However, these scores and happenings made me want to try something new. Although tears have been spilled from my piece, they weren’t bad tears but tears full of love and emotion—and I love that I was able to achieve that with just a piece of ice and some words.

Process

During the process, I wasn’t sure of anything. When the project was first introduced, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I thought, “I’m not creative enough to come up with something like this”. Grapefruit by Yoko Ono was so intriguing and I didn’t know how I could make something as good. I struggled until the day I made those goodie bags. At first, I was intrigued by the idea that a simple bag and random single items could become one and create something entirely new. Orange cloves, ginger, and a honey bear wouldn’t really make sense on their own, but when you put it in a bag together, tie it up, add a ribbon, and then put it in a mug, it instantly becomes a cute gift to make tea for the holidays. However, I couldn’t fully dissect that idea, nor think of a good score for it. So, then it became about gifts and the idea and reaction behind it. Making scores are… a very difficult process. I went through another week trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I did research and asked the internet about their thoughts on gifts. I asked my coworkers, my family, my friends. Then, even though I was eventually able to get a grasp on the meaning behind gift curation and gift receiving, I didn’t know what exactly about it I wanted to simulate into a score. Did I want to simulate the idea of consumerism behind gifts? That they were trash or a waste of time? Or how gifting was supposed to feel? After an 8 hour shift and failed attempts at creating a score, I thought of Kaprow’s happening, Fluids. This piece was brought up by Celia and my classmate before when we were score pitching, and I don’t know why or how it stood out to me so much, but that was precisely what made me come up with the score that I have now. Ice, or any quick, perishable object would be a perfect example of the “gift”, as the gift is not about the ice cube or the object, but the words and actions that are exchanged from the gifting. That’s how my score came about!

Playtests (Photos/Videos)

For playtests, I had three different tests and it was just to see what it would be like with different sets of people. I wanted this to be able to see the different reactions and what I could’ve missed. The first group was my sister and my mom, the second group was my two roommates who are friends, and the third playtest were my classmates. I definitely got different results which I’m very happy about!

Playtest #1: Sister and Mom

Mom and sister (after crying haha) after the score!

My sister had interpreted “show your appreciation” by telling my mom all the reasons why she appreciated her and the way she shows her love. They got overwhelmed with emotions and my sister cried. It took about 8 minutes for the ice to melt but when I explained my score to them after, they said that it definitely accomplished its job as they both felt the appreciation and genuine love. My sister also pointed out that she had wanted to hug my mom a lot during and after the score.

Playtest #2: Roommates

The recipient and gifter revealing the heart-shaped ice cube.

The recipient and gifter melting the ice together.

Roommate Playtest Video (Click!)

This was such a silly playtest but also so, so cute. The way my roommate interpreted “show your appreciation” was by giving the ice cube to her friend then helping her melt the ice cube. They laughed together a lot and there was physical touch and jokes being said. There wasn’t the talking that my sister and mom exchanged, but my roommates shared a precious, goofy moment as they worked together to melt the ice.

Playtest #3 Classmates

The gifter laughing while performing the score to the recipient!

In this last playtest, she also verbally told her gift recipient her appreciation. I realized how appreciation is conveyed will also depend on the environment! She was most likely embarrassed and thought this was funny, which was not only influenced by the score but also that she was surrounded by a lot of people. So, the appreciation probably didn’t get conveyed as well since there may be some things she probably appreciates about her friend that she didn’t want to share to the whole room as well. He also seemed embarrassed or awkward, but I think that all comes into play when it comes to showing appreciation to someone and giving them a gift. Embarrassment, awkwardness, appreciation, joy.

In the end, I gathered that the score does do what I hoped it would, filling the people playing it out with positive emotions and being able to share a precious moment between two people. What surprised me was the different ways people had interpreted “show your appreciation” and their reactions. Some were laughing, some cried, some were embarrassed! These were all influenced by the way they show their affection and the environment that they are in.

This was such a lovely experiment I had on the affects my score would give and I would love to see other people do it.

By Ruby Harkness

Score

find a friend 

and something to write with

take a walk together

avoid all distractions 

observe your surroundings

find something that interests you 

draw it

your friend will do the same 

repeat this 3 times

create a story

your drawings are performing

Author’s Note

Walking Pictures is a Yoko Ono esc set of instructions meant to promote observation, storytelling, and connections with others. The goal of Walking Pictures is for the user to completely rid themselves of all distractions and focus in on their senses. I feel that in today’s world people overload themselves with distraction, whether it be their phone, outside sources of stress, or even something as harmless as listening to music. Somewhat inspired by the Happenings we enacted in class, this score urges the user to rid themselves of distractions and be completely one with the moment for the duration of the score, which may challenge the user. Being able to draw your surroundings is also a very beneficial skill to have. I believe that visual artists are some of the most in tune with the world and observational people out there, and these skills can be developed through observational drawing, which is what Walking Pictures promotes. Not only is Walking Pictures a commentary on modern day distraction, but also it is a vessel to promote creativity and connecting with others. The entire score is done with a “friend,” who could be whoever the user wants. The storytelling aspect of the score is also a collaborative piece, with two people working together to use their observed drawings and make something more of it. It is a lesson in creativity and human connection. 

The language used in Walking Pictures is heavily inspired by Yoko Ono’s work in Grapefruit. I thought the simplicity and obscurity of the text was very interesting, and wanted to implement that into my own score. I liked the artistic nature of Ono’s writing, and when making a score somewhat focused on art, she was a perfect inspiration. 

Play test Images