Crisis of Playfulness?

My one true goal is to be playful.

It is hard and illusive to manifest. Everything about contemporary life seems to want to quash it. And for what?

Context blares everywhere with all kinds of conflicting rules of the so-called game. e.g., cultural norms, current social contracts, political correctness, absolute and contrived ignorance, lineages of historical truth framing who we have or have not been, cliche, advertisements spawning want for insideousness, inherited wealth/poverty community/parenting/education geography/culture/access, truthiness, new facts, old ideas, claimed power, false power, actual power, simple personal finances, complex global financial levers, personal well-being, brain chemistry, life experience, equivocal language confusing everyone about what is or is not shared understanding, different channels, guilt/shame, narrative, domination (being dominated and dominating, let’s face it Everyone is Both), learned ethics, perceived ethics, utopian ethics, governmental administration of justice, etc.. Or put another way the all-encompassing amorphous plural definition for all explanation of any possible behavior: the cleverly simple and useless “human nature” that seemingly binds us more than it frees us.

I believe play is the antidote for many of our problems. The problem is play doesn’t solve problems; most people today are full-on instrumentalists addressing their daily life (personally with feeding families, working, paying bills, struggling with health and place in this world, or collectively with established infrastructure, inherited laws and class structure: the-insideous+beautiful-ways-things-are) and are impatient with non-directional play. Play merely helps us see. When we play, we embody a transient truthfulness of being in this world. If you can play it, it is possible. It doesn’t make it ethical; it doesn’t make it right: Play simply displays what it discovers in playing for everyone in on the game. It is transparent and shared learning. As we play together, our shared perception expands. What humanity is currently exploring (?playing?) scares me deeply. I’m not sure I would say we were actually playing. Yes, we are exploring certain lineages of thinking and manifesting, but it doesn’t feel playful in the way that I mean. It feels like a cruel game with rules driving a particular outcome, extremely effectively benefiting a minority.

Many years ago I read Homo Ludens - man the player by Johan Huizinga (1872-1945). According to wiki, Huizinga -in his time- was concerned that technical and mechanical organization was replacing organic and spontaneous living. In his book, he talks about virtue —not as some holy version of self— as the unique manifestation of an individual in the world. When we have the event of 2 virtues ‘competing’, they challenge each others with their point-of-view. And best, the ‘winner’ is not an individual, it is the outcome of those 2 challenging virtues- resulting in both minds evolving in the activity of engaging the other. They both win. Their different virtues, in playing together, invented a winning idea. It isn’t the person who actually said the winning idea that wins the conversation - they both won the answer that resulted from their play-off. They both walk away wiser.

I recently made an artwork that was very playful and also really problematic. So problematic, I have not yet had the courage to make a webpage for it. After I installed it, I was relieved I still had courage to talk with people publically about it. Which is not to say I was intent on declaring my problematic set up was ‘good’. I was trying to get us to talk about a deeply disturbing phenomenon of the living: colonizing, anywhere, anytime. To live, here, on earth. I was trying to play with the living gerund in us all. With what it means to exist, to take, even just enough to subsist. To fully understand it was still a taking, modest in the potential total takings, but a taking, none the less, that implicitly denied another from taking what we each take. I can’t seem to place the work on the internet in perpetuity and mark myself and my whole future lifetime for one serious attempt at liberating play —at trying to get a conversation going about the impact of our daily life— about the very real costs of our very real living effect on others. And I wonder, if all this 21st c documenting, all this concretizing of self-in-a-particular-context-in-time-and-space, is not paralyzing us all from playing. concretizing our self as a non-evolving self. Or being afraid to try other selves out as other selves in the act of playing, bc in playing, you can make gross mistakes. This artwork for example —by the estimation of some very respected colleagues— is a mistake. I haven’t declared it a mistake yet. But I feel honored to be given the space to play it out, if only for my own cognition (this is a buried thank you to my friends and colleagues as I try to think outloud within our context).

My friend and colleague K, sent me a brief article about Chris Marker’s 1988 AI program entitled “Dialector”. “Dialector functions like a chatbot: users ‘talk’ to it by typing on a keyboard and the program responds with text, sounds or 8-bit images of cats or owls ” as defined by Paul Chan in the 24May24 Frieze piece.

Looking at a few examples in Chan’s piece - you see how the prompts playfully move the dialogue forward. Like a more complex ‘mad lib’ where one simply places a verb into an unknown context, the dialector moves the conversational sentences forward into new territory, prompting its user to enter new attempts at meaning making. That is, unlike the AI I see being developed today (advertising itself as ‘generative’ when it actually just compiles the lowest common denominator of the most canonical and/or common data sets on the internet) commanding authority of voice and position in search engines, Chris Marker’s pieces actually prompts the human to engage differently. To think differently, and perhaps as a result be/become differently. This playful AI, helps US generate new thought in ourselves.

Chan continues to describe it’s maker:

“‘Chris Marker’ is just one of a handful of pseudonyms he went by – none of which can claim to be any more or less real than the name given to him at birth in 1921. This persistent depersonalization and need for anonymity has been interpreted variously as evidence of his media savvy, a habitual form of political protection he picked up during World War II, a personality quirk and so on. To these theories, I wish to add one more: that he didn’t endorse the sanctity of life as a single self.

Marker didn’t pursue life; he pursued lives. And it was in those pursuits that he further dissolved boundaries which distinguished selves from everything else by the sheer attention and discernment he paid to whatever enlivened and interested him, until he was nothing but who he cared about, what he cared for and all those moments he cared enough to record. If life and work evolve like this, the self broadens into an array of selves that find their development and forward momentum in all that emerges from – and survives by – the singular attention and care they give to what enlivens them into lives worth having. Here, death becomes less meaningful, since it is simply not as decisive. What ‘ends’ when living is pursued this way?”

To me, play IS freedom.

It has the capacity to free me from old ideas and enter new ones. Play can be liberating.

But in 2024, in the United States, Freedom feels about as far away from play as one can get. Free to play the game as constructed, rather than free to actively co-construct the game meaningfully for each other.

How do we not be played by the system, but rather be a meaningful player in our time.

My self is telling my ________ (insert noun) not to __________(insert verb) this ________ (insert noun). But then I wouldn’t be _________(insert gerund) with you.