What if social media were a competitive game? Wait, it is already? Okay. What if it were a card game that took you off your devices and into relationship with each other? In this session, we will demo the new deck and rules we are trying out for my project All the Time in the World. The script is a custom-designed deck of cards, made up of descriptions of images and reels you might find or post on Instagram, toggling from meals and selfies to war and other atrocities, to clothing ads, cat memes, and fragments of standup routines. Viewers at the tables can respond to the text with reactions: fire, heart and ‘share’. We'll also play with prompts to create your own verbal post, enact a picture or show how you pose. The cards are the basis for both a new performance and a play-at-home game.
From the Artist
This project emerges from a series of experiments, and a desire to understand how the algorithms work on us. The questions this work brings up feel epically relevant: what does it mean that the stories we tell are atomized, fragmented, and told to each other through increasingly small screens, set to quick clips of music and funneled through algorithms we don’t control? How can galvanizing narratives emerge from this constant barrage of quick takes? Is it any wonder that the shrinking of our frames coincides with the polarization of our politics? What is the tension between scrolling and posting relentlessly, and the diametrically opposed urge to throw our phones in a river? Why does an event seem unreal unless we share it?
Credits
Card Design: Nancy Nowacek, Game Consultant: John Sharp
Card Design: Nancy Nowacek, Game Consultant: John Sharp
Content Warning
Some descriptions of violence
Some descriptions of violence
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