Documentation November
- realitypsi
- Jun 14, 2020
- 3 min read
Documentation November
05.11.2019 iArts Graduation Project | Clara Seifert
I have decided (or maybe more figured out) that my observations regarding the nature of creative works composed by multiple 'artists' with different levels of involvement - especially those that include what might be more traditionally seen as the audience of said work - accumulate towards a treatise thematising the very nature of (interactive) art and the interface to the medium game. With my experiments, and in my Position Paper, I want to establish a spectrum containing different *shades* of art and game: including interactive and playful art, artistic games, and more categories that would need to be discovered, examined and defined.
To achieve this, I need to lay out my own set of rules - something I very much enjoy doing and acknowledge as being necessary in various contexts, but which I tend to shy away from due to its abstract and philosophical-linguistic constitution. These rules need to answer questions such as the following:
What is art?
What is a game?
When is something artistic?
What level of interactivity allows for an audience to stay such?
What amount of audience is needed for a certain kind of art or game?
What purpose does art fulfill?
What purpose do games fulfill?
Personally, I think this is the most accurate and authentic of all the newer iterations of my Graduation Project. It combines both my more theoretical work from last year and the more forward experimenting I am doing at the moment. Plus, as my sister put it very insightfully: it acts as a stepping stone between my time at iArts and the more essential interest of mine that has been sifting out during the artistic practice over the course of the past three years, which is Game and Interaction Design. Even though right now it doesn't seem like it is what I will mainly be doing immediately after iArts, I am still more than happy to be able to utilize my skills learned both individually and through iArts in a way that builds a bridge between different ideas in my mind and enables me to 'do iArts', but my way, instead of you and I forcing concepts onto each others institutional brains.
Research Questions
What level of interactivity makes an artwork a game?
At what level of involvement does a consumer become a co-creator?
How does interaction change the immersiveness of a story?
How does the story change with the input of different consumers?
How do individual perception and individual input differ in storytelling?
How do the characters of a story and the character of its creator/consumer correlate?
How does a story change when the creator has a different target audience in mind?
How is a story perceived by different audiences?
How does an interactive story change when played by different audiences?
So. What will I actually present on my CPE?
(I am kind of losing the format I used in the last two papers, because I spent way too much time on it, and there’s not really any point in it besides aesthetics and maybe a bit of its readability, but you’ll just have to deal with that. Sorry :-)
I will show game experiments I have created and tested that meddle in the grey area in which artist and player (or creator and consumer) are not strictly separated from each other.
These include games that are about story and therefore have the players get creative as well (with the original artist only providing mechanics and creative stimulation).
One game will be more traditional (as in, not a storytelling game), but will allow the players to make up their own rules, thereby becoming game designers themselves. In this, the story is designed by the ‘artist’, but the mechanics can vary.
Another one will also cover the concept of game as a medium to help someone converse with themselves. This one is arguably the most vague one, and the hardest to define as either a game or even art, which makes it easier to blur the lines between creator and consumer as well. It plays with the idea that a game can bring different versions of ourselves to the surface, and lets us communicate with them (in)directly.
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