Saturday, February 3rd was the inaugural yahtzidency at Sun Spot at Sky Village Swap Meet in Yucca Valley. We played with handmade ceramic cups and dice and a scoresheet designed by hand. I am taking applications for new yahtzidents! If you are interested in becoming playing with me, please see the open call here.
In January I was invited to be join the 2023 Cohort of Artists with the Desert Research Library. A project sprung from the High Desert Test Sites. This library is unique among special library projects I have experienced. The entire collection is curated through artist’s selections. In being invited as an artist, I was invited to curate a selection of reading materials for a library in the desert. Being a super fan of all libraries- so quiet! so full of ideas! so teeming with future potential! so careful in preserving history! I was so excited to contribute my own ideas and archive of thinking and material to the library.
Of course, I went down my own rabbit hole tangent which involved spending A LOT of time researching video games, gaming history and philosophy and interweaving research on desert landscapes as gaming landscape. By mid-March, I had surfaced a short list of games that I believed were worth including in a library whose focus is the desert. I was also prepared with my understandings of video games as a kind of cultural property which we can “read” like a long form novel as justification for inclusion in a library of artist’s researching.
On Sunday, April 28th join The Brooklyn Torch and TimeBanksNYC at NURTUREart Gallery for an afternoon of play exploring cooperative exchange. The Brooklyn Torch Project invites David Morgan, a co-creator of new board game ‘Co-opoly’ made by Toolbox for Education and Social Action (TESA) to demonstrate and support gameplay.
In Co-opoly: The Game of Cooperatives, players collaborate to found and run a democratic business. This is an exciting game of skill and solidarity, where everyone wins – or everybody loses.
Jessie Reilly of TimeBanksNYC will also facilitate a variety collaborative games, including a new twist on surrealist drawing and storytelling exercises which explore themes raised by participant’s relationships to time and money. As part of the Brooklyn Torch Economic Kindling Package, everyone who joins and completes a game with gallery visitors and neighbors, will be rewarded for their play-training session in Brooklyn Torches, North Brooklyn’s local currency. Brooklyn Torches are good for a wide range of local services and goods on our registry and in our Trade Stores.
