PlayNotes
Year : 2021
PlayNotes is a wall art resulting from the research project on play and functions as presentation material. The research was based on Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s book Homo Ludens and explores the numerous forms of play in human society and animal activities.
PLAY
is an essential aspect of our life, yet it is difficult to define and explain to others what it means and what it is. This is because the concept of play roots deeply in our evolution and shows up in every phase of human history. Keywords help us understand some of the characteristics which shape the idea of play in a more direct way.
FREEDOM / NON-SERIOUSNESS / IMAGINATIVE / CREATIVITY / IRRATIONAL / PLAY-GROUND …
FUN and PLAYFUL
has become core factors in my life and this project allowed me to explore these interests in a philosophical scale. In a modern world where human life has become too compact and efficient, there is only a tight margin of space for play or playfulness to appear. Take sports as an example, where it has transformed into a governed/systemized work of competition with only a glimpse of play quality to be seen. Play is anterior to culture, and threatening it out of the society is equivalent to deconstructing culture itself.
The Presentation
began with a ten-minute improv skit activity followed by a brief verbal explanation of the research using the wall art.
“As a civilization becomes more complex, more variegated and more overladen, and as the technique of production and social life itself become more finely organized, the old cultural soil is gradually smothered under a rank layer of ideas, systems of thought and knowledge, doctrines, rules and regulations, moralities and conventions which have all lost touch with play. Civilization, we then say, has grown more serious; it assigns only a secondary place to playing . The heroic period is over, and the agonistic phase, too, seems a thing of the past.”
-Johan Huizinga