public play
[TI-15] on museums, public art, and other environments that offer us a new normal
Isamu Noguchi's Playscapes in Atlanta (image source Herman Miller)
I love when people just going about their normal lives suddenly become the focus of attention.
I visited L the other day at work. They had just started their job at the Exploratorium, which describes itself as a "museum of science, technology and arts." It's filled with interactive installations that illustrate how the natural world works, from pendulums and springs to lasers and reflections.
As we wandered around, I saw an old man attempt to blow a huge bubble out of a metal ring and break into a huge smile when it popped in his face. I watched a grandmother, mother, and daughter make funny faces at each other in front of a massive NASA mirror. I saw a teenager walk up to an exhibit, eyes going wide, twirling around the room, taking it all in. They reached out to touch the installation, so captivated by the experience that they tuned out the docent's voice telling them not to touch.
It suddenly became clear to me that the Exploratorium, for all its magical experiences, is about showing people. You would probably still enjoy going to the Exploratorium alone, but it really comes to life when you experience these tiny moments of curiosity together with everyone around you.
Artworks that incorporate audience participation are described as "participatory art." Wikipedia defines it as "an approach to making art which engages public participation in the creative process, letting them become co-authors, editors, and observers of the work."
The Exploratorium probably wouldn't use this term to describe their work, but contemporary artists do think about this actively.
In July, I visited the Tate Modern's solo retrospective of Yoko Ono. I've long admired the conceptual simplicity and emotional impact of her works. Her launch into the art world starts from her time in Fluxus[1], one of the first groups to pioneer "conceptual art." For an idea of what this means, works included Alison Knowles' Make a Salad (chopping a salad to the beat of live music and serving it to the audience), Nam June Paik's Zen for Film (an 8-minute short film of unprocessed film), and Ono's Cut Piece (a performance piece in which audience members are invited to cut pieces of Ono's clothing).
Zen for Film (source) and Cut Piece (source)
In her show at the Tate, the gallery was alive with people's actions, both present and past. Painting to Hammer a Nail provided a hammer and nails and asked you to hammer a piece of your hair into the frame. Wish Tree instructed visitors to write a wish and tie it to trees in the lobby. Bag Piece invited visitors to perform in the space by doing "whatever [they] want" (as the docent answered when we asked what was allowed) after putting on a large black canvas bag[2].
I can't find any documentation of this online now, but the original instructions for this piece say something like enter bag, take all clothes off, put all clothes back on, exit bag. So that's exactly what S and I did after we got in.
It was a really strange feeling, to say the least. From seeing others perform, your brain knows that you can't see into the bag. However, the first thing you notice when you go under, is that you can see out of the bag and watch everyone staring at you performing. So it feels like everyone is watching you strip into your underwear.
This piece probably had the most pronounced effect on me of all the ones in the show. It changed my agency in a significant way—pushing me to act in a way that I would never have dared to act in a similar setting without it, and my mind feels permanently rewired as a result of it.
Broadly, all participatory art tries to engender some kind of public play. The goal is to create an environment where we feel safe enough to play with actions that we might not normally consider.
When applied at a community scale, we see the compounding effects that these practices can have. Mutual aid fridges make it feel normal to redistribute your extra food to people in need. Little Free Libraries create an environment where it's easy to exchange books with neighbors. Every piece of public participatory art gives us the excuse to try on a new normal.
How people use these environments depends a lot on their constraints.
The Portal, a circular real-time video screen connecting Dublin, Ireland and New York City, was shut down for 6 days due to "inappropriate behavior."[3] It relaunched with the installment of 24-hour security in New York as well as blurring the live stream if people approached with phones.
Ideally, we find ways to make communal participatory experiences that don't require this kind of heavy-handed authority yet still encourage "good" behavior.
These participatory sites are effectively games: designing a controlled environment and narrative for players to experience a new range of agency. The key difference is that you can't make anyone play as someone else in real life. We have to meet them where they are and convince them of the desired behavior.
In my practice, which emphasizes participation, I've tried to move beyond the participatory to foster solidarity, inviting visitors to not only shape the work themselves but also create their own works and versions of the technology. I want to create environments that are shaped by the acts of the people who visit them, thereby highlighting our human experience through a specific human's experience. And I want to also provide the infrastructure that empowers visitors to steward and propagate that experience in the future within their own communities.
I think deeply about the spectrum of participation in digital spaces. So many of our digital experiences are devoid of other people's presence. Every day, we scroll past hundreds of people and stories, but they feel more like ghosts than real people. We're missing the texture that comes from live interactions. We need spaces that allow us to express ourselves more richly—digital playgrounds.
Mindy Seu, an author, designer, and artist championing cyberfeminism, has been experimenting with a participatory lecture that plays out on everyone's phone at the same time through Instagram stories. This format hijacks our devices as facilitators for a collective performance and redefines the significance of the everyday action of clicking through social media content.
VJYourself!, a work by playmodes studio, features a magic mirror that plays back snapshots of visitors' movements in a mosaic-like collage. I experienced a small version of the work in Portland last month and was blown away by how it invited strangers to dance together in front of a mirror, figuring out new ways to combine compositions together.
The key, I think, in all of these experiences that makes them feel good is that there's a balance between players feeling ownership in their actions while nudging them to notice or do something they otherwise wouldn't. Something encourages the player to go from a lurker to an active participant. And hopefully, they leave with a greater sense of agency that they can then impart onto their broader community.
There's an art to creating an environment that makes people comfortable co-creating a space. I’m still trying to crack it, but I’m excited that there’s so much inspiration to learn from.
What have you noticed in the participatory art you've encountered? Are there everyday practices that we can do that promote these kinds of spaces? What's one of your favorite public play encounters?
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I'm finding myself drawn more and more to creating interactive art with technology and code. Whenever I'm looking for a new project, I definitely think a lot about the concepts you talk about on this blog.
The weekend before last, a friend and I participated in the same hackathon where we made the "Dreamages" project that I showed you before. I believe you may also enjoy this one. It touches on several concepts in this post, such as encouraging participants to adopt a frame of mind not normally experienced with most visual art (spirituality.)
I will preface what I'm about to say in the next paragraph with "It was a hackathon project so it's nowhere near as refined as we wanted it as it was made in about 36 hours tops."
It also directly uses your concept of a NFC coin to allow the "art installation" to follow the participant home, as it were. I don't think I can put links directly into this comment (and with good reason.) so if you search "the shrine tadhack" on youtube, you should be able to find it quickly. If not, let me know. Enjoy my overly dramatic acting (I'm the hooded one.)
A description of what we were going for, rather than what we managed to accomplish in the short amount of time given is here:
github com/PockyBum522/pockybum522-hackathons/tree/main/2024-10-TadHackGlobal
(I'll attempt to sanitize the link enough to get it into this comment. We'll see if it works.)
In concept, we wanted to incorporate a few key points:
(I'll refer to 'the person experiencing the art' as 'the parishioner' for a lot of these.)
- The person experiencing the art should have interesting visualizations projected into the art that were awe-inspiring. (Something else you've posted about.)
- This experience should attempt to give them a feeling of awe and/or spirituality, though as we call it "The Shrine at the Temple of Computing" no mention of religion is made beyond that, allowing for a religiously agnostic experience. (I'm an atheist, for example.)
- A ritual is then involved, where the person experiencing the art is then asked to offer their coin and say a prayer. (Although we don't refer to it as a prayer, because of my previous point.)
- Each coin has a NFC tag pre-programmed with a URL in it. The altar in The Shrine has a NFC reader under it that can tell what URL is on the coin. When the parishioner speaks when prompted, the code saves the URL so that it can later upload what they said to that specific URL.
- The code then asks chatGPT what the three most emotionally charged words were in the "prayer" that they said, and in a finished version of the project, it would likely show those three with a somewhat ethereal visual effect as well as change the projected lighting to match the mood of what they said.
- The parishioner would then be asked to take their coin, and after having experienced The Shrine, someone (in a real installation, a docent) would explain to them that they shouldn't do it right now, but later, when they feel the time is right, they should tap the coin to the back of their phone.
- As stated before, the code saves the URL on the coin. When the parishioner finished speaking their prayer and the code finished sentiment analysis, etc, the code uploads a webpage generated to contain their spoken words, as well as visual effects on that page that match the overall sentiment of what they said, and likely something interesting done with the three most emotionally charged words we got.
(Side note, as I don't like throwing the term AI around anywhere near as much as the VCs do, we wouldn't mention that it uses chatGPT in an actual installation. You'd simply see the three words show up, and if you thought really hard about it, you might notice there's visual effects based on the sentiment of your words.)
- The objective is to try and give the parishioner a new frame of mind for the experience as if they were someone performing an actual religious ritual in a temple of technology. Ideally, the visual effects, the fact that their own words are used in the experience, and the ritual of offering the coin and then being about to reflect on your words later using it would give the viewer a feeling of having a spiritual experience. Even if it doesn't accomplish that, though, giving them a new frame of mind as a parishioner in a theoretical temple of technology or computing is enough for us as the creator of said art.
We're going to work to refine it and put more time into it. There were several ideas we just didn't have time to implement to make the experience more streamlined and 'magical' and if you're interested I'll happily let you know when we have an update to show.
TL;DR: Thank you for everything you post. It has been wonderfully inspiring.
I was quite taken with the trampolines in Copenhagen next to the canal. People who were once walking expressionless are suddenly jumping up and down with a huge smile!