Art in the public realm
Contextual studies

Espen Aarseth
Ergodic Action - Cybertext
Labyrinths and Mazes
Players and Participants

Clare Patey, Empathy Museum The Player or the Participant

Play
Bernard Sutton Smith - Play is ambiguous -

Lottie Child Street training manual. TRANSGRESSIVE PLAY

Flow Theory. Mihály
Csíkszentmihályi States
of flow are created when
participants are lost in
the task at hand, totally
absorbed.
Why do we do what we do?
Self Determination Theory,
(SDT) 1970s by Edward L. Deci
and Richard M. Ryan. This theory
looks at why people do things,
what motivates them. The
difference between intrinsic,
motivated internally by a desire to
partake and extrinsic motivation,
undertaking a task for rewards.

FOLK - Everyday -

CONTEXT
Public Art/Public space/Public Realm - Lacy - New Genre Public Art
Ian borden - skateboarding - Space and architecture and the body

Folklorism - modern folk -

Arm Wrestling Podium Johann van der Schijff

Swivel-Olympics

Urban golf
Locative gaming

Piano Stairs

Janine Harrington -
3 x 3 (formerly ABACUS/ Car Park)
Huizinga magic
circle a bounded
space set apart from
normal life. Inside the
magic circle, different
rules apply, and it is a
space where we can
experience things not
normally sanctioned or
allowed in regular
space or life.
Liminal - Boundaries

Suzanne lacy
Between
the door
And the
Street

ImprovEverywhere, the Mp3 experiment Why do we participate - Self determination Theory
Autole
Extern
Rewards

Three sided football, Danish Situationist Asger Jorn

Michael Sailstorfer has buried gold bars in Folkestone

The interface - as artefact - artefact after the fact
7) Laurence Payot People pavilion

david Belt Glassphemy
Games with purpose - gamification - serious - art
with social purpose
Gamification - gaming constructs
and design principles in non
gaming environments
Piano stairs
FUN - can art be fun
Is fun trivial?
MEANINGFUL PLAY - connection of
actions to the activity - responsivness.

Three sided football, Danish Situationist Asger Jorn

Blast theory Can You See Me Now?

‘The Situationists’ made use of games for early participatory artworks and critical dialogues. In the 1950s they organised play events in Paris with the rallying cry ‘Under the
Pavement the Beach’ (2011) hinting at the freedom hidden in the urban environment. A particular influential technique was Dérive, translated as Drift, (Deboard 1971), exploring
the city in a gameful way, through the experience of unstructured wandering. This gameful exploratory structure was a critique of the Spectacle of the city which Debord (1973) saw
as a controlling factor over people. Claire Bishop in ‘Artificial Hells’ questions the success of such strategies through a historical examination of Dérive’s organised by Debord,
this amounts to little more than hanging around in bars on New Year’s Eve, speaking loudly to aggravate the other customers until Debord
becomes ‘dead drunk’; after this, Ivain ‘continues alone for a few hours with a similarly marked success’ (2011).
This Situationists thinking has influenced modern game ideas, such as Pervasive and Location based games, that operate within the public realm and encourage players to wander
their environment to interact with game elements. This public game form as championed by Montola (2005) as an expanded play space, where the demarcation of the game is
difficult to perceive.
‘In spatially, temporally and socially expanded games these changes may also be implicit and unknown to players (even though they touch the formal system of the game); the player
might not know when and where the game is played, or by whom.’ (2005)
Many post war art movements explore Ludic structures, as they move towards creating active audience engagement? For instance Guati a Japanese art movement from the fifties
with an interest in participatory public art. They often exhibited work in parks for the passing public to contribute to. Yoshihara’s Please Draw Freely (1956) is a large free-standing
board and a supply of drawing materials, given to the public around the work, to come and make marks with.

For example Suzzane lacey and her concept of new genre public art, which she puts forward in her book ‘Mapping the terrain’ (1996) with a new
form of public work against the monumentalism of previous public art and looked at a social way of making temporary public artworks, outside of
the gallery and how to work collaboratively. It further developed notions of how a community contributes to the creation of such artwork.
The Happenings’ of the fifties and sixties (Cain 2016). Organisations such as the Artists placement group, in the 60s, wanted to open up the process
of making to the public through the embedding of artists in workplaces through residences. Participatory practice can be seen in the light of public
artwork, which is a way for art to acquire a presence outside of the gallery. Participatory work fulfils this aspiration for work in the public realm, as it
often happens beyond the white box, and also contains the actual public within its realisation.
Stevens has noted this use of games and play, to effect standardised public space in his work the Ludic City, (2007). He examines how the public
interact playfully with the built environment around them, often in ad hoc ways, Ian Borden in his work on skateboard culture, in relation to city
architecture and how borders interact with urban environments and turn them into a playful environment. His work on how skateboarders interact
with street furniture in an urban environment shows how rules can create alternative scenarios for public space and how people interact in that space
leading to public gamefulness.

This new choreography, is concerned with ordering and organising people or documenting the way people or crowds move, there is a focus on situated
dance, so ‘Dance as Place’, and ‘Place Ballet ' (Seamon 1980). Therefore dance in the public sphere, commenting on, or emerging from everyday
routine. An interest in the flow of people through the world. Referencing Lefebvre (2004) and his rhythm analysis informs the choreography of time
and place as constructing the everyday, a concern with repeating patterns, both individual, and groups and how it relates to space.
‘Rhythm for Lefebrve is something inseparable from understanding of time, in particualr repetition, it is found in the workings of our town and cities in
urban life and movement through space’ (Elden 2004)

I see this form of re-affordance through the interface as operating using a game mechanic such as ‘Bestow’ which endows game component an added power, such as the coins used
in the Pokemon and Magic the gathering card games. This re-affordance of street furniture is informed by the work of Ian Borden who writes of skateboards and how they usurp the
initial affordance of a piece of street furniture like a hand rail up a public set of stairs. Its original intent was to help people walking up and down the staircase, to give added balance.
Skateboarders turn the handrail into a vertigo inducing dangerous trick, as they ride their skateboard across the rail, moving at speed.
“Public Domain” and “Ban This,” the videos Peralta produced and directed in 1988-89, show skaters in the streets of Los Angeles and Santa
Barbara, jumping over cars, riding on to the walls of buildings, over hydrants and planters, onto benches, flying over steps, and sliding down
the free-standing handrails in front of a Bank.’ (Borden 2001)
But is the skateboard an interface here? The skateboard allows this change of the object, and how the rider relates through the board, means it relies on the skills of the rider for the
affordance to occur, so the environmental offering is the rail, but it can only manifest by the affordance capabilities of the rider, it is not an affordance open to all but is based on
partipant skill. Here with the maypole crown, unlike the skateboard, It is specific to the undertaking, and with The Bestow mechanic expressed by Re-affordance, it hopes to open up
this world of possibility to all, so more like the magic Crayon effect, as is it adapts a familiar object to become something other, almost fantastical, and in this way the fiction of the
activity depends on a real-world object to occur and its conversion into an experience. And further, it relies on the character or spirit of those in the endeavour, to act out in public
space through the interface, seduced by the possibility of engaging and changing an object the participant is familiar with, into a fantastical object, if only momentarily. Borden in
later writing addresses graffiti artists.
‘just as graffiti artists write in out-of-the-way (not always visible) sites. In part this is to prevent social conflict, and is an attempt to write anew, not to change
meaning but to insert a meaning where there was none.’ (2001)

Disjunction Spencer Tunick sea of hull

While both works, mine and Walker and Bromewitch’s, wrapped objects, an aesthetic used by artists such as Christo and Jeanne Claude who covers public
buildings and objects, (2018) The Workers Maypole was a static non-interactive work,

In opposition the everyday can be seen as a controlling and deadening, a banal totalitarian force over individuals lives. Lefebvre writes this has to be
affected and changed.
‘It is a question of describing, comparing and discovering what might be identical or analogous in Tehran, in Paris, in Timbuktu or in Moscow? it is
a question of discovering what must and can change in people’s lives…’ (2007)
A way of responding to this perceived oppression is short intense experiences, Lefebvre writes of moments, (1991) an example would be festivals
that change the power relations between the people and the city around. Theorist Decerteau uses tactics in response to this everyday oppression,
which he terms strategies, (2010). So, the scope of quitodian space is wide, but at the core, is how we live, day to day and it is this space in which
the research sits.

Public

Sphere

Situationists

Suzzane Lacy

Transform/Support

Pervasive

Affordances

The Magic Circle