Fluxhibition

Fluxhibition

Flux Museum in a Box, New Mexico

YOU&ME have contributed to Fluxmuseum’s collection, an international initiative of 21st century Fluxus artists. Fluxhibition#4 focuses on games and includes objects, boxes, instructions, performances, scores, tricks and puzzles, amusements and diversions.

 

"Games as Art: The Aesthetics of Play",  by Celia Pearce

(Excerpt from Flux#4 catalogue essay)

"Arsenal games" by you&me is a very contemporary take on a classic Fluxus conceit: The creation of scores and rules that players must enact to complete the work. While it uses traditional Fluxus concepts and approaches, it also connects to the contemporary outdoor games movement, in which real physical space is appropriated as game space. I recently attended the Come Out and Play Festival in Brooklyn, New York, where a number of different contemporary street games were being played concurrently in the same or overlapping space. I could not help but see shades of Fluxus in this enterprise, and was asked to do a radio interview for the festival to talk about the correlations. In earlier years, when it was hosted in Manhattan, some of Come Out and Play’s festival events took place on the very same streets as the original Fluxus experiments.

YOU&ME's artwork is innovative in that its essential premise is this same type of violation of the Magic Circle that game scholars reify as enclosing all game activities. By creating a single game board where multiple games are occurring, fighting for dominance, and basing it in a real space, the game makes a statement not only about games but also about power and dominance and space. Indeed we are all engaged in different games simultaneously, sometimes with the same people. Similarly, Velvet Strike, an anti-war graffiti patch for the counter-terrorism first-person shooter mod Counter- Strike, appropriated a game by creating another game to play within, and indeed against, its core gameplay premise.

[Exhibition Images and catalogue essay text courtesy of Cecil Touchon and FluxMuseum]