Make a move, play the game, take a chance. When we play, we act and this action is essential in our lives, not only within the realm of games and entertainment but as an attitude to life. It is an attitude that keeps us reinventing, re-imagining, recreating anew. In Experimenta Playground, action is what you give, and action is what you get. The exhibition draws together a collection of artworks that encourage playfulness and place the audience in a central role in bringing the exhibition to life.

The light-hearted side of play brings a childlike sense of discovery through action that fills us with wonder and delight. That this sense of discovery is always so closely aligned with childhood is both telling and deceptive. It reveals that discovery and creativity come through an open mind and open eyes, through the desire to understand, to know and to dream. Yet, by relegating this experience to childhood it encourages us to consider this way of interacting with the world as immature, irrational and unsophisticated. Discovery and creativity are anything but!

The advanced world of technology within which we live exists thanks to the dreams and discoveries of many a “grown up” playing throughout the centuries. Whether you consider such discoveries to be beneficial or destructive, they are the results of imaginative creativity and bring continual change in our world. Who hasn’t felt the delight of having a new toy to play with, whether that is a bulldozer in a sandpit, a PlayStation2, an iPod, or a guitar? The artworks in Experimenta Playground reawaken this sense of playful discovery, melding the imaginations of both artist and audience through action and interaction.

Toying with Fantasy
The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, which belongs also to the child, and as such it appears to be inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.
C.G. Jung

Playfulness is often driven by a sense of hope-fuelled fascination that sees the stuff of dreams brought to life through invention, acting-out, or representation. Childhood dreams and adult dreams merge in the works Double Fantasy by Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, Shadow Monsters by Philip Worthington, The Manual Input Station by Tmema, Immersion by Angela Barnett, Andrew Buchanan, Darren Ballingall, Christian
Rubino & Chris Mackellar and Guy Ben-Ner’s Moby Dick. Some of these works encourage us to fantasize about living out our dreams, even if this means recreating them as small-scale realities in a miniature diorama or in a homespun game of make-believe in our kitchen. Others invite us to use our bodies and actions as a source of creation, showing us how our physical movements can affect space and cause unexpected interactions. These works engender in us a sense of innocence and security whilst playing that encourages us to draw upon associations from childhood and reminds us of the ongoing importance of a playful attitude.

When seemingly innocent play is consigned to the childhood era of our lives, it becomes invested with a sense of nostalgia, and we have a yearning for a lost world in which anything was possible. This wistfulness is beautifully captured in Sawatowasi’s Unseen Park, where an animated fairground is brought to life within the remains of a deserted landscape, reminding us that the world of wonder is not lost to us, if only we stop and look closely through the lens of our imagination. Roderick Buchanan’s Traffic humorously plays with nostalgia by animating the kitsch, miniature dioramas of souvenir pens to create short-lived narratives of our travel memories. In Shu Lea Cheang’s Baby Love, love songs are remixed to produce new soundtracks for the pertinent moments in our lives, and nostalgia contains an undercurrent of fear as we sense the futuristic possibility of clichéd and randomly generated emotions.

Offside
What happens when real life invades the computer game, or art infiltrates a sporting match? Can our zones of interaction be kept separate when we’re playing out of bounds?
Competition occurs within a distinct environment, with tightly focussed concentration, intentional and precise moves, all structured by the rules of the game. In Experimenta
Playground, several of the works toy with the games we play, even taking the games out of their comfort zones so they’re still immediately recognisable but conspicuously different. Guillaume Reymond’s Game Over Project, playing on many a computer gamer’s desire to live the game, re-creates the graphics of early computer games using people as pixels. These videos pull ‘real’ life into the computer zone and replace intentional action with pre-programmed behaviour. Eugenio Ampudia’s En Juego (In Play) conflates sport and art by making famous footballers battle it out using a book.
Puzzle 3 by June Bum Park questions the ways in which people can be played as a game, as school students become pieces in a traditional puzzle to parody the social organisation within Korean society.

Fool Around Town
One will only be free when one plays and one’s society will become
a piece of art.
Herbert Marcuse

In the more uncertain terrain of play as mockery (of both self and other), artists who play with our social conventions challenge us to look at our own behaviour in a different light, and recognise the humour in our actions and laugh at our own absurdities. Our familiar worlds become realms for playful reinterpretation. In The Systematic Life, Kuang-Yu Tsui chooses not to break the rules of social convention but to play them out to such an amplified degree that they become ridiculous. Tsui moves through the world of social conformity like a chameleon, showing us that when you recreate yourself, you recreate your actions and your interactions with others, opening up new possibilities and effectively rewriting the rules of engagement.

We fear being trapped within our social identities, restricted by routine and the expectations and pressures from others. The contradiction between the frustration and potential comfort of these entrapments is felt through What’s Yours Is Mine by David Lawrey & Jaki Middleton and Charmed by Priscilla Bracks, Gavin Sade & Matthew Dwyer, where the role of the voyeur takes on different meanings and empowers us in different ways. Outside of interpersonal interactions, when we play with the very physicality of our social spaces we learn to remap our movement through our environment and reshape these spaces for our own, perhaps slightly devious, purposes. Shaun Gladwell, in Guide to Recent Architecture: Fountains, and Daniel Crooks in On Perspective and Motion – Part II, take on the urban landscape and invert the rules of action within the architectural and pedestrian realms. Naoto Fukusawa’s Emergency Exit messes with society’s functionality, manipulating a symbol of safety that is usually only brought to our attention in the case of danger, showing us that playfulness lurks everywhere, if we only look with a playful attitude.

Flirting With Danger
Once we’ve learned the rules of engagement both practically within the physical world and ethically within society, we can experiment with how these rules can be bent and broken. Play can be educational, productive, constructive and fun, but it can also be hazardous and lead us down paths fraught with danger. Sometimes we risk taking the game too seriously, and sometimes the play is serious. One small move can have major repercussions, and a game-play attitude in some areas of life can have disastrous and destructive ramifications.

The very essence of physicality becomes a threatening reality in Peter Fischli and David Weiss’ Der Lauf Der Dinge (The Way Things Go) where a chain reaction of fire, acid and
precariously balanced objects is put into play and allowed to follow its own course of chaos and destruction. Innocuous household objects, imbued with their own intent and purpose, suddenly seem dangerous and remind us that play is risky business. Pushing risk-taking to the extreme, Marina Abramovic, Stelarc, PES, Roman Signer and Kuang-Yu Tsui all put themselves in the line of fire, testing both their endurance and ours. These artists literally play with life and dare us to see just how dangerous the game can be when all the rules have been broken.

Your Move
In Experimenta Playground, the artists and the audience both play. At times, we are playing with the artworks, causing them to spring to life through touch or action, and at others the artworks are playing with us, testing our preconceptions and daring us to confront our expectations head on. Either way, these artworks ask us to shrug off the wet blanket of seriousness and indulge in the adventures and potential misadventures of play. Take this chance to let your imagination go and see where the adventure takes you!