homo ludens ludensproseminar 187.166, martin pichlmair pi@igw.tuwien.ac.at

»In 1938 […] Dutch historian Johan Huizinga introduced the idea that man is also an Homo Ludens (a "playing man"), a man for whom amusements, humour and leisure played an important role in both culture and society. Philosopher Vilém Flusser went further. For him, we are living in a society which, instead of working, generates information by playing with a technical apparatus, implying a transition from the myth of the creator towards a player. Playing can therefore be regarded as an act of emancipation.« (http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/05/homo-ludens-ludens-play-in-con.php)

Die ›Universidad Laboral‹ nahe Gijon/Spanien.

http://www.laboralcentrodearte.org/gameworld/inicio_001.html

HOMO LUDENS LUDENS, 18 April – 22 September

Curatorial team:

Erich Berger, Chief Curator, LABoral Centro de Arte de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón Laura Baigorri, Independet Curator, Barcelona Daphne Dragona, New Media Arts Curator, Athens

»LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial presents HOMO LUDENS LUDENS, an international exhibition and conference examining play as a principal element of today’ s world, and highlighting its necessity for our contemporary societies. Following the exhibitions GAMEWORLD and PLAYWARE, that reflected respectively on the different playful and social sides of gaming creativity and interactive art, HOMO LUDENS LUDENS now sets the setting that embraces these data and looks into the notion of play in a wider spectrum, presenting how it has evolved in our digital times.

Projects of a different character and orientation reflect play’s various expressions and roles: Play is being reformed and reversed; it embodies social and political acts and issues; it becomes a tool for activism; it mingles the virtual and the real; it revitalizes other disciplines; play can be misused and exploited; while stereotypes are challenged, questions are raised and different understandings are offered.« (http://www.laboralcentrodearte.org/exhibitions/show/64)

Play is being reformed and reversed;

stiff people’s league by Drew Harry, Dietmar Offenhuber, Orkan Telhan 2007

http://www.stiffpeoplesleague.com/

massge me by Hannah Perner-Wilson & Mika Satomi

http://www.massage-me.at/index.php

Play embodies social and political acts and issues; it becomes a tool for activism;

Art of War by John-Paul Bichard 2006

»So I wake up on a Saturday morning to hear heavy machine-gun fire from somewhere nearby. The stills camera decides to give up the ghost, so borrowing a video camera, I set out to find the army has taken over part of Stockholm: tanks, troops, APCs, playing cat and mouse amidst the Saturday afternoon pedestrians, the civilian cars and buses...« http://www.idealmilk.com/project/violencia/artofwar.htm

The White Room (John Paul Bichard, 2004) is a set of photographic prints resulting from an in-game photo shoot that documents a series of constructed disasters. These interiors were set up by the artist using the videogame Max Payne 2, a 'Film Noir' thriller that tells a tale of lost love, deception and betrayal. The shoot took place within the game's developer mode using the GOD and GETALLWEAPONS cheats and BenDMan'S 'bloody mod 1.2'

Evidencia #000 (John Paul Bichard, 2003) is at once; a police forensic space, a video game made real, it is what remains after the level has been completed, marked out by striped tape as if it were a crime scene. This is a space in which everything has been frozen, the player has gone, leaving only the viewer as a voyeur, a witness.

Radical games against the dictatorship of entertainment

http://www.molleindustria.org/

Play mingles the virtual and the real;

levelHead by julian oliver 2007

http://julianoliver.com/levelhead

Software used:VimBlenderosgARTOpenSceneGraphARtoolkitosgCal

Platform:Debian GNU/Linux, Ubuntu 7.04

»levelHead uses a hand-held solid-plastic cube as its only interface. On-screen it appears each face of the cube contains a little room, each of which are logically connected by doors.

In one of these rooms is a character. By tilting the cube the player directs this character from room to room in an effort to find the exit.

Some doors lead nowhere and will send the character back to the room they started in, a trick designed to challenge the player's spatial memory. Which doors belong to which rooms?

There are three cubes (levels) in total, each of which are connected by a single door. Players have the goal of moving the character from room to room, cube to cube in an attempt to find the final exit door of all three cubes. If this door is found the character will appear to leave the cube, walk across the table surface and vanish.. The game then begins again.

Someone once said levelHead may have something to do with a story from Borges.. For a description of the conceptual basis of this project, see below. «

http://julianoliver.com/levelhead

Play revitalizes other disciplines;

toky arcade warriors by axel stockburger 2005

http://stockburger.co.uk/art/index.html

two dogs and ball by william wegman 1972

Play can be misused and exploited

painstation by fur 2001

was auf der painstation gespielt wird ist nichts anderes als pong. wenn man einen fehler macht trifft der ball eines der schmerz induzierenden felder am rand. je nachdem welches werden verschiedene arten von schmerz ausgelöst. die painstation wurde in ganz europa gezeigt - unter anderem auch in der harald schmidt show, beim DEAF2001, im rahmen von graz2003, ...http://www.painstation.de/