Brainstorming with Eveline from PLAY+ART we came up with an idea for a community art project. Idea is to activate a community, get people to interact and work together, transfer skills and create beauty while having fun. [Note: this kind of text just flows right out of my keyboard at the moment].

The idea was sparked off by the large knits I made before plus the beautiful community embroidery made by Studio Vrugt.  This time I’d not go solo but work with a group of people, producing  knitted panels or tubes to form hide-away or tent-like constructions. Material to be used is old t-shirts cut up into yarn – check here for more info about this. If we can make gathering old T-shirts a group effort I’d be able to construct pieces that are quite large.

Next step will be to get my hands on a lot of old T-shirts so I can try things out. Also to make a couple of scale models we can use to pitch the idea to people.

Got an e-mail from Eveline Wawou this week - she represents artists that make art objects that can be played with. Ball in my court!

Check www.playart.nl to see her site: nice & clean. I’m going to visit her the week after next to talk about co-operation; I’m posting to show her pics from play-objects I’ve made so she can get an idea. Apart from the objects, most play- stuff I’ve made (games, play rooms) is discussed on this blog under the ‘experiment’ heading.

Looking forward to talking with her.

These are pics from the street game I did in Utrecht  at the Ganzenmarkt, the square behind the town hall. Very fittingly we made a game called ‘Ganzenbord’ in Dutch. Don’t know the english name, but the original is a traditional board game. The idea for the outdoor version was to surprise passers-by into becoming players.

We drew an artistic game – multiple outcomes, free format, no rules  -  and passers-by did play!  Some people complained about the fact that there were no rules. Some just made up rules of their own.

Have updated my ‘books‘ page just now – done a lot of reading in the past few months. Some good,  some great, some boring.

One of the books I can really recommend is Gaming – essays on algorithmic culture by Alexander Galloway. Exellent essays, learned a lot. Galloway  deals with the video game as a cultural form that demands a new interpretative framework.  Then he develops this framework, using examples from film critique for instance.  He links the philosophers I have been wrestling with to the world of philosophy, and so makes  me cover new ground.

A quote from page 100: “Flexibility is one of the core political principles of informatic control, described both by Deleuze in hes theorization of  ’the control society’ and bu computer scientists like Crocker’.

Another quote, page 4: “.. there has emerged in recent years a whole new medium, computers and in particular video games, whose foundation is not in looking and reading butr in the instigation of material change through action. And the most curious part of the upheaval is, to borrow what Critical Art Ensemble said once about hackers, that the most important cultural workers today are children.”

This is what Jaarbeursplein looked like ‘the day after’. No crayons in sight – I wonder what happened to them –  but a lot of people seem to have had fun!

It was fellow-student Chrysoula that took the picture. She sent me this  e-mail:

Hello,
well there was no sight of the crayons, they were all gone. What I found really nice and I took some pictures for you is the fact that they have apparently used the crayons to write or to draw in the pavement. I ll send a couple of them now [unforunately they are on quite heavy and I ll bring the rest with a memory stick for you but if you are not planning to be at school next week, let me know and I ll send them all by emails]

I am sorry I am not much of a photographer but I hope they are usefull

take care
Chrysoula

Today I mentioned the Jaarbeursplein action to someone in the class I was teaching, and he actually remembered them from last week. “Mystery solved” was his first comment. “What on earth did you do that for? ” Which made for a nice discussion about art and its many guises.