Decision (2021)

Flux game

Ink on paper, acrylic, tape, binder clips, 8.5” x 11” x 60 pages

RQ: Can embracing chance create mindfulness?

Artist Statement

Decision is first and foremost a game, but it is also a poem, an experience, an exercise, a collection of objects, and an offering. The three essential components are the stencil, a roll of tape, and the manuscript:

1. The stencil is the game piece: a blank, unfolded die made of clear acrylic. Dice are one of the oldest chance objects in history and are used to simulate control of an otherwise unnavigable universe, either in games or in cleromancy. They bring an element of randomness to decision making, and thus they create space for trust, hope, anxiety, and peace within that process, a process which may feel routine and mundane to those of us who have lived long enough to expect the unexpected. 

2. Tape (which is a broad term for anything that will bind paper together) is necessary if the participant would like to hold the faces of the dice in place when the stencil is folded into a cube. A roll of clear tape is included in the kit, but any other binding material could be used in its place. It doesn’t have much metaphorical intention other than to allow the participant freedom in how functional they want their dice to be. They may choose to not use the tape and simply write on the faces of the unfolded stencil, seeing and contemplating all answers at once but never knowing the truest answer.

3. The manuscript is an instruction manual for the game. The text in the manual offers numbered lists of categories of things — everyday objects, feelings, experiences, and mundane things that I tend to mull over in my own life, which are actually beautiful when I take a second to look at them more closely — as options to label the faces of dice with. Participants may use these options directly, or take them as inspiration to write their own options. The lists are unfinished, some completely empty, leaving room for them to think about how these “normal” categories manifest idiosyncratically in their own life. In this way, the participant gets complete control over how uncontrolled their experience of “randomness” is, and the game also serves as somewhat of a reflective journaling exercise.

One of the important things I reflected on during this project was Ian Bogost’s definition of play: to take something that wasn’t designed for you or invested in your experience of it and treat it as if it were. This game is designed for no one. I unfolded the die into a stencil and left it blank so that the participant may make their own dice with materials that are available to them. The piece, blank and unfolded, serves as a reminder of possibility: the potential questions you have about the world, the help you may seek, the choices you may make, the future you want to plan, and most importantly, of the fact that these kinds of external things (questions, choices, help, the future) are not always reliable or predictable in reality. The only reliable thing in reality are our own bodies. We should get to know them before knowing anything else.

Still, that doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t seek out answers to unknowns. That is the offering of the game. The participant may choose to make their dice when they know they need it and want it, when they are conscious of the importance of prioritizing the existence of their body over the control of their body. And because the stencil can make an infinite amount of dice, the scale of possibility grows with an infinite number of sets of dice to throw, and grows even more with the resulting faces of the dice in the set thrown. This exemplifies the overwhelming fractal nature of decision making and that the energy used to obsess about the future when there are truly so many paths life could take could instead be channeled into self-love and attention to life’s details.

Earlier in the manuscript is a list of “decisions”, which propose how different sets of dice could be used to make different kinds of decisions. For example, to make art, you roll a color die, a shape die, an emotion die, and a subject die. For something to talk about in therapy, you roll an emotion die, a duration die, and an ugliness die. To gauge success, you roll talents, values, personality traits, and privileges. To have anxiety, you roll all the dice. The participant is free to come up with their own sets as well.

This game is intended to exist as a product and can theoretically be mass-produced and bought. However, the physical manuscript is simply a printed PDF file, so the game can also exist online and be accessible to anyone who is not able to afford the actual kit. At the end of the instruction manual, there is a paper stencil to cut out, included in case the original, solid one is lost or destroyed, or it is not possible for the participant to buy the game with the solid stencil; as well as seven sheets of blank paper for dice-making. Therefore, the only difference between the hypothetical paid and free versions of the game is in their reliabilities; without buying the game, the material of the stencil is not so strong and the tape is excluded, which requires a little more trust and resourcefulness in the choice-making — body-defining — process.

In my initial research I was inspired by the instruction performance pieces created by Yoko Ono and Alison Knowles. These works are based in interactivity, like a lot of my own art, but in a very different way — I use mostly computer code to create interactivity, but their works were interactive in more of an analog sense. I liked the idea of exploring what it means for something to be interactive and participatory, and what the difference is between those two. I also liked the idea of examining how programming, automation and generation could be illustrated tangibly.

That’s how I arrived at my fascination with dice as a chance object and randomness as a strategy for artists in the 20th century. People like Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, John Cage, Hans Arp, and Yoko Ono all applied chance to their artmaking in one way or another and in doing so augmented the viewing of art into a much more intimate, psychological experience. Honestly, I think any type of art, across media, time, and motion, is “experiential” because I think something that is created, designed, or even just defined has an intention of existence behind it, implying it will or must be perceived, and since perception on any level is physiological and thus engaging, it makes the viewing of anything a participation. Whether this participation is covert or overt constitutes whether the artist has created an ethical, considerate relationship between themselves, the art, and the participant. It is my intention with this game, which is undesigned, to create a fundamentally ethical and safe opportunity for the participant to explore their own mind, open their eyes, and slow down.

View the full game here, to be printed out and played if desired.

Annotated Bibliography

Bogost, Ian. “Play Anything.” Talks at Google. Cambridge. 2017.

I watched this lecture in place of reading Bogost's book, Play Anything. Bogost, an author, game designer, and philosopher, deeply dives into what it means to “play” and suggests that we can frame our lives around play in order to gain mindfulness. He posits that when we are children, the adult world of routine, understanding, and control is not designed for us, so we find fun in the mundane, a playful sort of wisdom, in order to cope. We lose this wisdom as we age and gain expectations. However, when we are adults, the world also seems to not be designed for us, as our routines and learned expectations cause us to perceive so much that we don’t expect, and as a result we ignore little nuances that don’t line up with our realities. He believes that true mindfulness is found in the attention to these nuances, and we need to release control and routine and invite disorder, or randomness, in order to do that. Playing is taking whatever is not designed for you or invested in your experience and treating it as if it were. This inspired me to start paying closer attention to the little things I ignore in my day to day life, to try to find beauty in them. That is essentially the intention of this project as well. I offer lists of choices, including poetic nuances, as examples to inspire a similar reframing in my participants. They are not necessarily obligated to play with my own offerings though, or even obligated to play at all. In fact, I think the cognition of possibly completing the game is enough to be considered play.

Feingold, Ken. “OU: Interactivity as Divination as Vending Machine.” Leonardo, vol. 28, no. 5, 1995, pp. 399–402., https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.2307/1576224.

I came across this incredible article when I was looking for information about why, psychologically, people might seek out divination, as dice are historically used as a divination instrument. Briefly, Feingold supposes that it stems from our need for conflict resolution, a fear of death, and a desperation to have control over our own lives. However, he continues into a philosophical discussion about what it means for something to be interactive, and how we have an innate narcissistic desire to be recognized, appreciated, and validated in works that call for our participation. These conversations are very relevant to my own art practice, with my interest in analog interactivity, as well as this project being framed as a "game." It informed my intention to design my project as an offering rather than an obligation.

Jensen, Jonas IB F. H. “The Aesthetics of Chance.” Self, 2011.

This document seems to be a personal essay by a Norwegian artist. I don't believe it was formally published anywhere, it simply exists on the artist's website. While I'm uncertain of the reliability of this source, as there are no references at the end and there are a lot of errors (probably as a result of translating from Norwegian to English), it is a comprehensive and interesting overview of various 20th century chance-focused artists (Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, John Cage, George Brecht, Hans Arp, etc) that explains how different applications of chance operations, automation and randomness can create metaphor in art, and how the artists have a common motivation to distance their bodies and minds from their artmaking processes in order to become more mindful and self-aware. The work created from these techniques may become a reflection of one's subconscious thoughts, allowing previously censored ideas or artmaking methods to present themselves. It illustrates how releasing control over decision-making can aid in our search for mindfulness, and that art as experimentation can be more useful than just aesthetically and conceptually.

Lostritto, Carl. “The Value of Randomness in Art and Design.” Fast Company, Fast Company, 19 Oct. 2015, https://www.fastcompany.com/3052333/the-value-of-randomness-in-art-and-design.

Carl Lostritto is a professor of computational design at RISD and the founder and operator of the RISD/Brown creative code organization RISD Code Studio. In this article he discusses the affordances that randomness offers to art and design, especially when it comes to creative coding and computational design. He first explains how a random number generated by a computer is not truly random, and then rationalizes why an artist or designer (computational or not) might use randomness in their practices. In his words, "randomness can serve as weak rationale for the arbitrary... can fill in the unimportant blanks... can satisfy the need for surprise... [and] can be used to emphasize the algorithm over the results." While he was talking about art, I realized that these rationales also reflect our everyday decision-making processes. Similarly to Ian Bogost's discussion about play as a framework for mindfulness, making an effort to be less fixated on the future and allowing randomness into your life can wash away expectations and routines that have built up over time and obscure the excitement of newness from the comparison of new experiences to old ones. It allows us to be more present, working with the results that are presented to us, instead of curating life from a third person perspective, or trying to perfect the algorithm.

Taylor, Richard. “Fractal Patterns in Nature and Art Are Aesthetically Pleasing and Stress-Reducing.” The Conversation, 30 Mar. 2017, https://theconversation.com/fractal-patterns-in-nature-and-art-are-aesthetically-pleasing-and-stress-reducing-73255.

The Conversation is an online media outlet for academic professionals and researchers to publish news articles on subjects in their fields. This article discusses a study from 1999 that shows how fractal patterns found in art, nature, and mathematics are aesthetically pleasing to process psychologically, an effect the researchers defined as "fractal fluency". Fractals are a visual expression of repetition and routine, but their structures are also used to describe the chaotic nature of decision making, especially the symbol of trees. The author discusses fractals and algorithmic art using Jackson Pollock's work, who iteratively improved on his art-making process in order to make his fractals more complicated, and thus harder to find symbols in and less pleasing to experience. This is interesting because it illustrates how the human entitlement to routine and ease is based in our biology, making it especially hard to become aware of and mindfully question.

Various. “Dice.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 10 Sept. 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dice#cite_note-37.

I found that the Wikipedia article on dice gives the most comprehensive history about the use of dice both as a gaming and a fortune telling object. In both cases, randomness is used to simulate control. I find that this makes them a paradoxical interactive object. User interactivity implies control, right? With dice, there is control in our responsibility to initiate the roll action, and in the laws of physics to create a theoretically calculable trajectory for the dice, but we are incapable of making this calculation in real time, resulting in a lack of control over the outcome of the roll. This conflict is translatable to everyday life. We have a responsibility to make decisions in order to evolve, and it is possible to plan the future, but inevitably there will be obstacles that you will not expect, so obsessively fixating on it is a waste of energy.