Unexplained, part II
I invented a game in 1992, and tried it out with a few friends. They didn't get it. We're talking about creative people, people who should be good at working with concepts, particuarly aesthetic concepts. But I guess they weren't using their minds in the way I do.
Here's the game. Get a bunch of photographs. They can be of anything, but they need to comprise a range from abstract to concrete, and it's better if they are not familiar to the players. My original set had no close-ups of people. The point is to give players a moment of uncertainty while they decid what the photo is about.
Once the photos have been assembled, put them on backing paper, or boards. This backing should be a lot bigger than the photograph, so that players have a big card to handle as part of the tactile experience. These cards should then be put in a nice box, face up, and lifted out one at a time.
The order of the cards is not important, but I occasionally changed the order so that a different sequence of images might prompt different kinds of response.
A player takes a card from the stack and has a few seconds to say what experiential quality is evoked by the photo. Most of my photos were of landscapes: buildings, canals, woodlands, skylines. Some distant, but most close-up. I was interested in seeing what qualities of feeling people gave to
each scene. It's a game of phenomenological interpretation.
Like I said above, most of them didn't get it. But now I can kind of play that game again. I don't have the original set. I think it's in a barn in Red Hook. So the pictures here and at Flickr will have to suffice.
Back to eTwine
Here's the game. Get a bunch of photographs. They can be of anything, but they need to comprise a range from abstract to concrete, and it's better if they are not familiar to the players. My original set had no close-ups of people. The point is to give players a moment of uncertainty while they decid what the photo is about.
Once the photos have been assembled, put them on backing paper, or boards. This backing should be a lot bigger than the photograph, so that players have a big card to handle as part of the tactile experience. These cards should then be put in a nice box, face up, and lifted out one at a time.
The order of the cards is not important, but I occasionally changed the order so that a different sequence of images might prompt different kinds of response.
A player takes a card from the stack and has a few seconds to say what experiential quality is evoked by the photo. Most of my photos were of landscapes: buildings, canals, woodlands, skylines. Some distant, but most close-up. I was interested in seeing what qualities of feeling people gave to
each scene. It's a game of phenomenological interpretation.
Like I said above, most of them didn't get it. But now I can kind of play that game again. I don't have the original set. I think it's in a barn in Red Hook. So the pictures here and at Flickr will have to suffice.
Back to eTwine
posted by d3 @ 1:08 PM
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