Play in the City 2013

Her collection:

http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=5777

video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvwFuwOdkzE

from wikipedia:

In 1915, at an exhibition at the Tanner Gallery, she met the Dada artist Jean Arp, with whom she was to collaborate on numerous joint projects until her death in 1943. They married in 1922 and she changed her last name to Taeuber-Arp.

...

During this period, she was involved in the Zürich Dada movement, which centered on the Cabaret Voltaire. She took part in Dada-inspired performances as a dancer, choreographer, and puppeteer; and she designed puppets, costumes, and sets for performances at the Cabaret Voltaire as well as for other Swiss and French theaters. At the opening of the Galerie Dada in 1917, she danced to poetry by Hugo Ball wearing a shamanic mask by Marcel Janco. A year later, she was a co-signer of the Zurich Dada Manifesto.

"Play Hard, Play Fair, Nobody Hurt." This is the central philosophy of New Games Movement. One of its founders was Stewart Brand, well known for being the editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. It started in the late 1960s and became popular a decade later. I found the principles of this movement fascinating, because one of them proposed that although play included competition, winning or losing in the end was not important. Also, the movement pursued to replace competitive sports with cooperative games. The game "Slaughter" would be a good example. In this game, people on the winning side were encouraged to change to the losing side, ensuring there were no winners or losers. This is a really interesting idea.

Surrealism and impressionism are my two favorite art movements to date. Whilst on my grad trip to London with my best friend, I saw one of Picasso's Weeping Woman pieces in the flesh (or canvas). Up close, you could feel her sorrow without knowing where her sorrow stems from. I believe this is achieved through the jagged edges and the dichotomy of the black/white portion and the rich color around it. It is both beautiful and emotionally raw. 

Surrealism grew in out of the Dada (or anti-art) movement during World War I. Interestingly, Sigmund Freud helped foster the movement whilst studying patients suffering from shell-shock. André Breton worked with Freud and was fascinated with his dream analysis and the concept of liberating the imagination. In dreams, we unconsciously and randomly mix events, thoughts, voices, etc. that we've seen throughout the day. Our brain tries to make sense of them by making a story out of them. Breton loved this idea, and so did his followers: Juxtaposing things that normally might not have anything to do with each other, and then trying to find a meaning to it. 

Breton and his followers created the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 and the movement took off. It melted into other areas of culture, such as political thought and social theory. While the heyday of surrealism was in the 1930's, the movement is still evolving. 

Like tomahawk mentioned, Flanagan's passage made me remember of a ted talk one of my friend's made back in highschool of the effect of videogames. Personally, I'm not a videogamer neither and I wasn't really a fan of people playing videogames either. My brothers and sister play and never seem to take interest in any physical activity, which really annoyed me. I never grasped why most people loved playing videogames. Medrano, my friend explained, like Flanagan, that videogames are a way for people to escape reality and become people they've always hope to become or wish to become. It's a virtual world created for people to escape the stress and frustration and relax. In the real world, we can't become the top gansters of L.A. and get every cute girl, but in L.A. Noire, we most definitely can. In SIMS, we play another life, no violence, no physical activity, simply participate in another life through a virtual world. Videogames are essential, although most people consider it pointless, they're a way for people to cope with stress and live a virtual different life. 

The Introduction to Flanagan's "Performative Games and Objects" reminded me of this ted talk. Check it out if you've got some spare time!

http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html

"The interstices or gaps between the
tesserae speak their own language in mosaics."

-Terry Tempest Williams, "Finding Beauty in a Broken World"

sorry about the image quality, I've been having a hard time loading my pictures.  I'll bring it to class but until then, a description will have to do.  As we were walking through the city, I became really enamoured of all of the different doors, so I ended up splicing them together into one big mosaic.  I particularly enjoyed the doors that seemed out of place (ie the ones that were in the middle of mosaics), and the disguised doors hidden my their surroundings.

(PS sorry this is so late, the website crashed,, and I didn't get the chance to upload before class this morning)

(Last night when I tried to upload the webpage was unavailable.)

People are a part of mosaic.

The background is seeing the magic garden through the gaps in the mosaic wall in front of my eye.

In the center is my reflection in the pieces of mirror on the mosaic wall.

Other three are pictures of people making mosaic more interesting and dynamic.

My time in the Magic Gardens seemed like a blur, a mesh of everything mixed together. I didn't remember many specific things, just a mass of beauty. So I put all these pictures together, upside down, sideways, every way possible, which was as close as I could get to a visual representation of my thoughts while there. I felt like I was part of the art of the Gardens while I was in them, so it seemed fitting to place a picture of myself reflected back in some of the mirrors front and center.