Fields of Play - Edition II: Stage I: Rehearsal

PHASE I : REHEARSAL

FIELDS OF PLAY

REHEARSAL FIELDS

Rehearsal Fields are performative and visual interventions in the city of Vienna. They are functioning as heterotopian spaces inside the city, having their own protocols, names and grammartological maps that serve as an invitation into play.

The Rehearsal Fields are the first outcome of the project Fields of Play, which examines play and its relation to space and society.

In the rehearsal interventions, white borders were painted onto the ground with wall paint, enclosing and isolating it, transforming it into a field. the rehearsal fields were placed throughout parks, in between spaces, parking lots, on grass, earth, and asphalt, emulating their precedents, but reacting to the material conditions of the fields.

The project startet with the questions "what happens when we leave or enter the frame of the game?”; What are the spatial and ontological specifications of playing fields, and how are they constituted?

When we zoom into these frames of games, it occurs: You can never reach the frame itself - you are constantly exposed to it and touch it, and you keep touching it, approaching it, and avoiding it - It is always and never reached. The frame is both intrinsic and external: It is the exact outline of its "interior" and the outline of its "outside" all at once.

It is a negative and creates a negative around it at the same time.

The games that adults play are existing mostly totally delimited from “real” life in a spatial and timewise frame. Play is limited to being “mimesis” (play and work), as it is something radically opposing efficiency and function. Therefore, we need this frame of the game because we learned that certain actions are not accepted outside of it.

The magic powers of all kinds of frames and borders, actual and platonic, are of course imagined - when you cross it, nothing really changes. - but at the same time the frame is essential to the constitution of what we could call “the singular” or “freeplay”, to all kinds of epistemological and ontological assumptions, (or in other words: Play means to live inside, to think of the world in any way.)

wheat field

the office

kitchen

toy store

server farm

renaissance park

factory

bed

airport

The Office Installation Performance, 2022 The Office is the first enactment of the Rehearsal Field „The Office“.

It took place in January 2022 and included six participants (Moritz Béla, Jules Ferrer, Alevtina Lyapunova, Hans Nikolaus, Martin Sturz, Valeria Weinrub). The concept for the performance uses the principles of play to form a method of a kind of epistemological practice that questions use and movement inpublic space as well as the relation that adults have toward playing.

The participants were given the coordinates of the installation and a protocol, which ordered them to assume a role which they should transform into when crossing the frame of the game: computer mouse, copy machine, slow passing time, an important phone call, coffee machine, sliding glass door.

Watch the video here: