How do we collectively care for Finsbury Park?
Which people and which creatures?
What part would you like to play?
We invite you to join us at Furtherfield to explore these questions. Together we will make and play a game with various characters, imagining Finsbury Park in 2025 as the place where a global multispecies revolution begins – and changes the world forever.
How can you get involved?
Originally planned for the Summer of 2020, the first community meetings took place in March, however Covid-19 has paused the development of this project. If you would like to work with the game designers Cade and Ruth, and each other, from Furtherfield Commons and online email Ruth at ruthcatlow [at] gmail.com.
About The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025
At Summer Solstice a visiting delegation of artists, equipped with park blueprints, bylaws, data-sources, historical documents, and policies, will work with local envoys who present testimony from the many human and non-human lives of the park. Together, the two parties will work to mutually devise a treaty to govern the future actions of multispecies park users, turning the park itself into a “love machine”. This culminates in a public ceremonial treaty signing event.
With a bit of luck the game, final treaty, audio recordings, photographs, and resulting artistic responses are now planned for development and exhibition at Furtherfield in the Summer of 2021. Part role play game, part participatory performance, this event will be based at Furtherfield Commons and across Finsbury Park for three days at the Summer Solstice.
The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025: On systems, ecologies as networks, colonialism and seizing rituals of power.
Read the essay
Hear the discussion between Ruth and Cade on the Furtherfield Podcast
Illustration by Sajan Rai.
If you have any questions or would like more information email Ruth at ruthcatlow [at] gmail.com.
This project is supported by CreaTures – Creative Practices for Transformational Futures. CreaTures project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870759. The content presented represents the views of the authors, and the European Commission has no liability in respect of the content.
Join Stacco Troncoso & Ann Marie Utratel (Commons Transition) and Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield) to play Commonspoly – the resource-access game where we win by working as a community.
Commonspoly is a hack and a critique of the game Monopoly. Players aim first to re-municipalize private goods and then turn them into a Commons – you’ll learn why this is the best strategy while playing the game.
Rather than compete against each other, players must overcome their conditioning and ‘rational, self-interest’ to instead maximize cooperative behaviours and create a commons-oriented locality. Who wins? Everyone in the community! Unless the speculators take over…which we must fight at all costs. United we stand!
This event at Design Museum in partnership with Furtherfield forms part of Convivial Tools, a programme of talks, debates and workshops exploring new strategies for a more cooperative society, based on the thinking of the late philosopher Ivan Illich.
Stacco Troncoso is the advocacy coordinator for Commons Transition and the P2P Foundation, and a co-founder of the Guerrilla Translation collective. He is the designer and content editor for CommonsTransition.org, the P2P Foundation blog and the Commons Strategies Group website.
Ann Marie Utratel is part of the Commons Transition team, and is a co-founder of the Guerrilla Translation collective. Her work helps connect a widening network of people involved in forward-thinking communities including the Commons and P2P movement, collaborative economy, open licensing, open culture, open cooperativism, and beyond.
Ruth Catlow, artist, curator, and co-founder and co-director of Furtherfield, is a recovering web-utopian and has worked since the mid-90s with network practices in arts, technology and social change.
Join us for a free 2 day public game-jam event at Southbank Centre. Create online computer platform games for the extraordinary evolution of our species… or for total catastrophe… it’s our choice.
This launches a year of game-building online and at Furtherfield Commons, the community labspace in Finsbury Park, London N4.
@PlayYourPlace & @furtherfield
#webwewantfest
ruth.catlow[at]furtherfield.org
Join us to draw, make and play games for the Web We Want: to defend freedom of access and a life free from surveillance and data exploitation; to distribute knowledge and resources for the benefit of millions of people and their enduring communities.
As part of the Tim Berners Lee campaign for a Magna Carta for the web, we invite you to join us in a public drawing and game building event to work out what is most important for us all in the future of the web.
We will devise tactics and tools. Our drawings – avatars, background settings, obstacles, rewards – will form the building blocks of computer platform games of the Web We Want. Afterwards anyone can join in online from their homes, workplaces, universities and clubs to remix, redistribute and play games, or to build their own from scratch.
In 2015 Furtherfield will continue to develop games with others, hosting game-building workshops, gatherings and public events to build games for the future of the distributed web at Furtherfield Commons, the community labspace in Finsbury Park, London N4.
Play Your Place is an open artwork and game-building game created by artists, programmers, and imaginative citizens to develop a collective vision for a richer, emancipated life for all beings in all places.
People bring their expertise to game-jam events and through two imaginative world-forming activities: drawing and play. They swap their experiences and aspirations; they pinpoint obstacles to a good life, the tools by which these are overcome, and the rewards of success. In the process they create the resources and rules for polemical online platform games that can then be tested, remixed, relished and redistributed in epic play-sessions.
Where once the boundaries between the worlds of atoms and bits were marked by screens and passwords, chips and implants are now on or in our bodies, devices and appliances. The architecture and maintenance of the web, and the infrastructures of the Internet that underpin it are of consequence to us all. We are in the web, we are its users. The web is in us and upon us.
Play Your Place grew from conversations between artists, writers and Southend planners and residents about how people could get involved in planning decisions in their town. This formed the foundation for an artists’ residency for Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield, UK) and Dr Mary Flanagan (Tiltfactor, USA) and author Rachel Lichtenstein (UK) hosted by Metal in 2010. We have since created games about places with residents and visitors to Southend, South Westminster, Classroom N4 and the Alt_Cph ‘14 alternative arts festival in Copenhagen.
Play Your Place exists as a digital artwork prototype and is published as a FOSS game platform to Github under a GNU Affero General Public License. The game is developed by Soda with Ruth Catlow and Mary Flanagan, using HTML5 to enable accessible, cross platform in browser creation and play without plugins etc.
Planned future developments will enable: a simple entry level mode – especially for use with mobile devices – with guided level creation to introduce players to game creation and an advanced functionality mode for experienced users including a scripting tool; located big and open data integration linking data, games and comments, integrating into mapping apps and having located data effect gameplay; optimized physics enabling climbing, carrying, pushing, throwing etc.
In the second part of classic videogames that have inspired contemporary artists, we take a closer look at a game that the Cubists probably would have worshiped. Tetris was created in 1984 and then released officially in 1985 by the Russian programmer Alexey Pajitnov. In Tetris you have to move and rotate seven different combinations of blocks as they fall into a well. The blocks are called tetrominos and are made of four squares. The goal is to fit the different geometric shapes so that as little empty space as possible remains in the bottom of the well. Tetris is a puzzle game for people who like compact living, and who see it as a sport to pack economically to the holiday.
In contemporary art you can find three main approaches how artists have used Tetris. The Swedish artist Michael Johansson is a good example of the first approach. He has used the basic idea of Tetris to stack objects with different colors and shape. Johansson works with site-specific installations, in which he collects and stacks objects from the near surroundings in perfect symmetry with no spaces. The installations are called Tetris, which is fitting since they are strongly reminiscent of the game.
“For me creating works by stacking and organizing ordinary objects is very much about putting things we all recognize from a certain situation into a new context, and by this altering their meaning. And I think for me the most fascinating thing with the Tetris-effect is the fusion of two different worlds, that something you recognize from the world of the videogame merges into the real life as well, and makes you step out from your daily routine and look at things in a different way.” says Johansson in an interview at Gamescenes.org
Like many other classical videogames, Tetris has been used a lot in public spaces as in graffiti, mosaics and posters on facades and in subways etc. In Sydney, Australia, artists Ella Barclay, Adrianne Tasker, Ben Backhouse and Kelly Robson in 2008 at an exhibition at Gaffa Gallery created an installation where they placed giant illuminated Tetris Blocks in a narrow alley. It looked exactly as if the blocks had fallen from the sky, but the alley had been too narrow so the blocks were stuck halfway down.
The second approach is to move Tetris out from the exhibition room into public spaces and sometimes also create interactive and social art. The artist group Blinkenlights, who are known for transforming large skyscrapers into interactive screens, on various occasions making it possible for the passing public by to play Pong or Tetris on a skyscraper using a mobile phone. In 2002 they made the installation Arcade, which turned one of the skyscrapers in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris to a giant screen showing various animations, where a passersby could also play arcade games like Tetris.
The artist group Lummo (Carles Gutierrez, Javier Lloret, Mar Canet & JordiPuig) created in Madrid in early 2010, a Tetris game in which four people have to cooperate to play it. The first step for the participations was to create the Tetris blocks and after that they had to work together to place on right position in the well which was projected on a wall. In Both cases, Blinkenlights and Lummo are creating public meeting places with social interaction where the videogame is used as an interface.
The third approach is changing the game itself and creates new versions of the game which discuss the game idea. The artist group version [url=http://www.tetris1d.org/]1d Tetris[/url], is a one-dimensional Tetris where the blocks consist of four vertical squares falling into a well that is just one block wide. Since the blocks always fill the well the players do not have to do anything to score points. The basic idea of the falling blocks still remains in the game, but in a one-dimensional world there is no longer any difficulty, the game is reduced to a very monotonous and predictable puzzle game.
In First Person Tetris the artist David Kraftsow combines the perspective from the popular first person shooter genre (used in war and action games) with the ordinary puzzle game. In Kraftsows variant you see the game from a first person perspective so when you spin the blocks, it is not the individual blocks that are spinning around but instead the whole screen. Just by using a new perspective in the game has Kraftsow created a whole new experience of Tetris. Mauro Ceolin, who has spent many years focusing on the modern emblems on the Internet. In works such as RGBTetris and RGBInvaders he replaces the game’s graphics with contemporary icons and logos. In RGBTetris the blocks that fall down the well are exchanged with logos from Camel, McDonalds, Nike and Mercedes.
The most interesting and most independent among the playable Tetris versions that I have found are made by the Swedish artist Ida Roden. In Composition Grid she has combined her interest in drawing with Tetris. The player can play a game and in the same time create a unique drawing by rotating and changing one of the 216 different creatures that Roden has created, with the Tetris blocks as model. The player can then choose to print out their own game plan with the artist’s signature, and in that way have a unique work of art in there possession.
Tetris, this two-dimensional version of Rubik’s Cube, seems to create a lot of room for artistic experimentation. It just needs some simple changes, or new perspectives, to create a new and interesting interpretations of the game.
Videogame appropriation in contemporary art: Pong. Part 1 by Mathias Jansson.
Some of these new Tetris games can be found at these addresses:
www.rgbproject.com/RGBtetris/RGBtetris.swf
www.tetris1d.org
www.firstpersontetris.com
www.idaroden.com/composition.html
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