Lottie child
Lottie Child is a London based artist who works with local communities, often through gallery outreach programmes and has a practise I feel is rooted in the creation of the Magic Circle in urban environments through game mechanics. A main feature of her art is a participatory system of production with gameful elements that she terms ‘Street Training’, The Peckham Platform describes Street Training as ‘urban survival skills for the twenty first century’ (2017) Child herself refers to it as a martial art and in publicity and documentation she uses a recognisably chinese font and color scheme (2007). Child divides the street training into two streams, the path of joy and the path of safety. In an interview for Resonance Fm (2010) she talks about going on a 24 hour walk around Camberwell asking people about the two paths, but people only really able to describe how to be safe, and it was then that she began to think about how to be joyful in the environment, alongside this she had been researching how children play in urban areas, working with street furniture and took inspiration from this. The street training involves groups in urban locations designing improvisational games with elements of the direct environment, often with Child in attendance, working alongside the group. Though her presence in some works in the central aesthetic as she can work alone engaging people she finds in the activity, or leading an invited group. Child also distributes the ideas as a stand alone concept, she has aspirations for the ideas to be articulated by others around the globe, and to enable this has set out her ethos for creation in a website called ‘Street Training’ (2007) which is a call to arms for her ideas to be articulated by groups independently. Child’s work has an echo of the Situationist Derive or drift (2002) of moving through an urban location and seeing it anew. Many of the game challenges are simple, such as jumping up and down steps you normally would walk up and down, first with two feet, then hopping on one.
Examining Child’s work through existing game lenses such as Cailois categorisations (1961) Child’s practice exhibits a number of the required aspects such as Illinx or vertigo, game structures that cause disturbance of the senses. Child’s game constructs involve spinning, jumping and climbing often on street furniture. Another Cailois category is mimicry, or role play. Lottie’s participants often copy the lead of one of them, or are asked to assume poses or shapes by a leader of the group, sometime related to animals, Child (2010) talks of a game she devised from a project with children where people make different animal sounds and you have to find a certain animal with your eyes closed. This idea emerged from a tunnel that she passed through that aided the acoustics. In this way she demonstrates how the built environment feeds the ideas, and how the ideas respond to the environment but tries to adapt them through creative responses. Though Street Training is often communal which I discuss later, some constructs can contain Callio’s element of Agon or competition, as in a work in Liverpool Street Station called Floor Diving, (2009) where individuals compete by rushing in a group across the station to build momentum and then flinging themselves flat on the polished floors to see who can slide the furthest. Cailois (1961) devised a scale to measure gamefulness with Padia, open play at one end and ludic, play with rules at the other end. In Child’s work an open play idea is debated by the group, with rules steadily arising through discussion and testing, to add gameful structure.
Mcgonigal in her dissertation ‘This Might be a game’ (2006) examines affordance in game design, a feature in click adventure games, where objects in the game afford some kind of interaction when found and activated through a click of the mouse, they have a usage amongst other dormant game objects. In one street training experience in Manchester commissioned by Cube (2009), Child and her participants take traffic cones and use them as megaphones, the objects afford them an opportunity to amplify their voices, the cones move from dormant to active, this is also true for a lamp post they might choose to spin around, or a puddle they may activate to draw in with their feet. There is an equivalence I feel between affordance in public spaces through the activation of found objects and the situationist slogan of ‘Beach beneath our feet’ that there is a game waiting to be discovered beneath the paving stones.
Child’s work fulfills many of the criteria for the creation of a magic circle as put forward by Huizinga (2011) and then developed by Callios (1996) and then fully realised by Salen and Zimmerman,(2004) it offers a degree of safety, it has a start and end point, it attempts to remove the participants from the burdens of the everyday, entry to the circle is voluntary, and there is a contract amongst the participants to abide by the rules of the game as set out. Salen and Zimmerman in Rules of Play (2004) sees Suits (1978) concept of the Lusory effect as an important component of the circle and game structures in general, this is that a task is made more difficult by the imposition of voluntarily obstacles that players agrea to abide by. Child’s work takes the effect to heart In Loughborough in 2008 where the player/participants instead of riding an escalator in the normal way, they take it upon themselves to lay upon the handrails, and try to ride it up precariously holding on.
The circle in Child’s work isn’t physically marked in the landscape, though in some of her games she uses chalk to mark out hopskotch areas on the pavement to play. The reach of the Circle fluctuates, expands and contracts, it can dissipate around the edges allowing people into the game as part of it’s consequences. A street training event in Manchester saw Lottie and her participants attempt to make a large bridge structure wobble by synchronising their jumping moves, extending the circle to encompass the bridge and those walking upon it. The general people on the bridge are drawn in, but not fully part of the game, but feel the consequences of the players actions. The bridge wobble game is a good example of DeKovin’s (1978) ‘Well played game’, where gameplay need not be competitive and can be a social glue that bring large groups of people together to achieve communal tasks. Child and the participants are joint designers, they bring the gamified element and impose it on the objects in the city. The Circle in Child’s work does allow in people she meets to play the game, there is a core group that facilitates but sometime their activities, such as hopscotch drawn on the ground, draw in passers-bye for a few minutes to engage with them, before leaving the circle. Child’s work uses what Claire Bishop (2012) has called delegated performance, with the participants and their actions being the material of the work. Often Child’s games are in a busy urban location, amongst the general public who form an onlooking spontaneous audience, and some of the game structures require the group to act individually with the rest of the group watching on and awaiting their turn, or watching the person leading the activity so they know when to join in. Here the Magic Circle in the realm of participatory arts and against the urban environment becomes an aesthetic. The otherworldliness that the circle lays upon the actions of the participants is at odds with the mundane surrounding environment where the activity happens and creates a disjunctive aesthetic, the joy of the participants and their excitable games incongruously churning against the indistinguishable locations. Here the artful use of the Magic Circle breaks Huizinga and Callilos original tenant that the circle should not create anything of worth, that the actions within should have no industrious end. Though it is ephemeral, through the documentation and recording of the circle art game activity there emerges the creation of Child’s artwork.
Many of the games are about climbing and suspension,, there are aspects of dark play, of dares, of activities at the brink of the circle, elements of play that have consequences such as ‘spin the bottle’. The game contract of the circle allow this dangerous explorative gameplay. A game seeing how many people can you get in a phone box, or the aforementioned activity of sliding along the floors of a train station borders on the anti social, with the Magic Circle diffusing the transgressive behaviour by encapsulating the activity in the idea that it is only a game, a challenge. In an interview (2010) she discusses her privileged position, for Child her gameplay might get her an art residency, but if she were a kid on the streets she might get an asbo as many games include tresspass. She talks of the invisible boundaries policing activities, and that dissipate and buckle against the new Magic Circle boundary her games lay down. The numbers of people involved in the project, while not many, does give it the chance to overpower certain architectural elements. She talks of critical gaming, and for me in this research the transformative power of the circle, as without the game structure it would cause problems with officialdom, but the game allows them to continue often without restrictions. She describes the street training work as software within the hardware of the city. One of the street training workshops was with young people and the police, to show the the difference between soical games on the streets and anti social behaviour and to bring a sense of joy, here the gameplay is meaningful, with an aspiration to change behaviour, fitting McGonigal’s (2011) ideas of the positive effect of games to alter the social space and change how people interact, to fix reality. Alison Rooke (2014) records the conversation that the police have during the experience, and how they express a new way of looking at the young people and their activities after engaging with them in the game. In this way the magic circle, the contract between players, is also a contract between those who police the city or can disturb the game, sometimes they have to be included in the contract of the game in order for the game to occur in the urban location.
Child talks of the threshold in her work, and this can be seen as the threshold of the Magic Circle. There is the idea of the liminal in connection to the Circle, in that it is a rite of passage and in the game you are within a social ritual, this is further cemented in some of her works by providing participants with T-shirts to mark them as participants who have learnt thought the experience. It is here also that Child’s work fits in with elements of Gamification, the hoodies a form of reward, but also that there is something to learn, and it is often adults learning game structures form your people in her works, being led from the adult world into some kind of child like game play and here we see it come back to the Magic Circle that is often visualised as a chalk outline in a playground.
The ideas of Steven’s Ludic City (2007) are fully formed in her work, that play can bring alive a city and it’s architecture, and we can know it through play. David Knight writing on her work, records a a street training session she did with architects and planners, and a group of young people she had been working with to show them the city anew and hopefully affect the way they build and plan the urban environment. She began by asking the question how do you find joy on the streets?
Bibliography
Furtherfiled. 2010. London: resonanceFm2.
, Peckham Platfom Artists [March, 2017].
ALISON ROOKE, 2014-last update, Alison Rooke BA, PHD lecturer and researcher at Goldsmiths praises Street Training. Available: http://streettraining.org/content/alison-rooke-ba-phd-lecturer-and-researcher-goldsmiths-praises-street-training2017%5D.
BISHOP, C., 2012. Artificial hells. 1. publ. edn. London [u.a.]: Verso.
CAILLOIS, R., 1961. Man, play, and games. New York: Free Pr.
CHILD LOTTIE, 2007-last update, Street Training. Available: http://streettraining.org/index.html2017%5D.
DE KOVEN, B., 1978. The well-played game. 1. ed. edn. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press.
FOLLOWS CHRIS, 2009-last update, This is a demonstration of the floor diving technique, from the Street Training Manual. Available: https://process.arts.ac.uk/content/demonstration-floor-diving-technique-street-training-manual2017%5D.
HUIZINGA, J., 2011. Homo ludens. 22. Aufl. edn. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt.
KAUSHAL and VIKRAM, 2009-last update, Street Training Manual with Lottie Child and CUBE. Available: http://www.art.mmu.ac.uk/profile/vkaushal/image/123492017%5D.
MCGONIGAL, J., 2011. Reality is broken. 1. publ. in Great Britain edn. London: Cape.
MCGONIGAL, J.E., 2006. This might be a game: Ubiquitous play and performance at the turn of the twenty-first century, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.
PLANT, S., 2002. The Most Radical Gesture. 1 edn. GB: Routledge Ltd.
SALEN, K. and ZIMMERMAN, E., 2004. Rules of play. Cambridge, Mass. [u.a.]: MIT Press.
STEVENS, Q., 2007. The Ludic city. 1. publ. edn. London [u.a.]: Routledge.
SUITS, B.H. and NEWFELD, F., 1978. The grasshopper.
YOU AND I FILMS, 2010-last update, Lottie Child. Available: https://vimeo.com/10119118 [Mar 11, 2017].
research 