Materials:
prompt deck (provided, but you could make your own)
paper
pens, pencils, markers, etc.
(not required, but desired: table, chairs, good weather, time)
Note:
at any point, a player may elect not to answer or ask a prompt:
they can choose another prompt,
come up with a prompt of their own,
or contribute to the game in another way.
pregame
each player must
read the gameplay & guidelines (which are these),
ask questions if they have them (& receive answers),
give themselves time to think about whether or not they want to play,
& ask themselves & the other player if they consent to play the game.
Consent is voluntary, verbal affirmation & agreement to interact within an explicitly stated set of parameters.
In this case, these parameters include, but are not limited to, those written in the gameplay:
at any point either player can ask to update the parameters.
(Signatures, handshakes, pinky promises, etc. can help to ensure consent is not only established but embodied.)
postgame
each player must
check in with themselves & the other player to see how they feel,
& what they want/need for the game to be complete.
If neither player is drawn to it,
coin flip, rock-paper-scissors, arm wrestle, etc.
to see who keeps the picture.
^ ^ gameplay ^ ^
^^ prompt deck ^^
Further reading:
Patriarchy’s epistemological project is to make it unintelligible to imagine a world without it. That’s really every oppressive system’s project: “self-supersession,”[i] normalization,[ii] subtlety. Since coming to Cape Town, I’ve found that, when I fully exist within my present context, phenomenologically (as something fundamentally born of and into the world), I sense tensions between the present patriarchal situation and the future my feminist consciousness solicits. Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests that experiencing this tension – something is off, contradictory, not-quite-right – is proof of my freedom.[iii] Further, he writes, “the only way I can fail to be free is if I attempt to transcend my natural and social situation by refusing to take it up at first, rather than meeting up with the natural and human world through it.”[iv]
I’d rather bring it up, but I’m not sure how to. At a witching hour in the spring, my friend Trinity told me that her artistic process begins with a message, which then determines the medium: the “what,” then the “how.” My message is all questions; questions are best asked. Adriana Cavarero writes of the symphonic embodiment of communication through speech: “One regards the uniqueness of a voice that is for the ear; the other resounds in the musicality of language itself. Both have a physical, corporeal substance.”[v]
It's not just about bringing it up: it’s also about this “meeting up with.” Intimacy enters, here, along with authenticity and openness. In conversation with Re/Search Publications, bell hooks speaks to the domination latent in the concept of “privacy.”[vi] Privacy means attending to my-self, rather than to the world. Privacy means ownership, means owned. Privacy means walls. To think against this is oh-so-radical they deemed it unsafe. But bell hooks asks anyway, “why shouldn’t we have intimacy in the world outside as well?”[vii]
Works cited:
[i] Of settler colonialism, Augustine SJ Park writes “the teleology of self-supersession is predicated on the ‘“logic of elimination” [running] its course until it actually extinguishes the settler colonial relation.’ In other words, successful elimination allows the settler colony to reach the telos of a polity in which there [is] ‘no Indian problem’” (“Settler Colonialism, Decolonization andRadicalizing Transitional Justice,” International Journal of Transitional Justice, 14, 2 (2020): p. 264, doi:10.1093/ijtj/ijaa006).
[ii] Gary Gutting and Johanna Oksala, “Michel Foucault,”The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (2021), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/foucault/.
[iii] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landers (New York:Routledge, 2014), 480.
[iv] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 485
[v] Adriana Cavarero, “The Reciprocal Communication of Voices,” in More Than One Voice: Towards a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, trans. Paul A. Kotman (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 2005), Apple Books, 424.
[vi] bell hooks, “Moving into and Beyond Feminism: Just for the Joy of It, in Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (NewYork: Routledge, 1994), 224.
[vii] Ibid.
Impossible without
the team at A4 Arts, the Stanford Bing Overseas Program, & Caroline
("how to play" intro song is Tennessee Waltz by Naomi Akimoto & outro song is Play with Fire by Barbara & Ernie