Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Lessons In Playing: A Current Work Of Art As A Biopolitical Milieu, Tim Stott

Conference Papers

This paper will examine how, when certain current works of art are presented as playgrounds, in which previously unknown persons encounter one another, their play is both complexly organised around play objects and other constraints and governed within what Foucault termed a biopolitical milieu. On the one hand, this development changes the values and qualities that might describe aesthetic play, or the play particular to the encounter with works of art. On the other hand, it tests Foucault’s analysis of how biopolitical techniques of governance “make live” and allow players “to be free to be free.”

In more detail, …

Lessons In Playing: A Current Work Of Art As A Biopolitical Milieu, Tim Stott

Conference papers

This paper will examine how, when certain current works of art are presented as playgrounds, in which previously unknown persons encounter one another, their play is both complexly organised around play objects and other constraints and governed within what Foucault termed a biopolitical milieu. On the one hand, this development changes the values and qualities that might describe aesthetic play, or the play particular to the encounter with works of art. On the other hand, it tests Foucault’s analysis of how biopolitical techniques of governance “make live” and allow players “to be free to be free.”

In more detail, …

Collective As Form, Playground As Medium, Tim Stott

Conference Papers

Playgrounds offer a medium for forms of collective organisation. To a greater or lesser degree withdrawn from consequence, playgrounds might loosen otherwise binding collective forms, and provide both models of and models for present and future collectivities. But when play is becoming pervasive and dispersed throughout contemporary post-industrial societies, no longer knowing its time or place, by what means such modelling of collectivities might be observed and played out? The task of this paper is to examine how some contemporary participatory art works might provide such a means. Not because with such works we play more or play better, but …