PROJECT II:

Porosity Games

Dates: 2006-2007

Videos: Snakes and Ladders, Hide and Seek, Jenga

Artist: Richard Goodwin

Assistants: Maria Capussela,Tia Chim, Louise Hoelzl, Nicole Leuning, Kris Bird

Visualisations: Robert Beson, Tia Chim, Jimmy Gunawan, Gabriele Ulacco

Players: Maria Capussela, Ada Fung, Catherine Hartung, Marion Hertford, Amie Hu, Sarah Jamieson, Karl Logge, Tessa Rappaport, Huong Tang, Nadia Wagner, Richard Wong

Camera: James Rickard

Editor: Samar Kauss

Sound: David Sims

Images:

 

Porosity Games

The Porosity Games refer to three art actions undertaken to interrogate the Porosity research conducted under an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant from 2003-2005. The games interrogate porosity findings as well as continue the lineage of a performative identification of the functional boundaries of public and private space. Goodwin decided early in his research for this project, that the mechanism of these interrogations should take the form of a series of games. Games are extremely refined structures, richly socially encoded and developed to produce results, or temporary solutions to a problem.

Porosity seeks the dissolution of architecture through a type of mapping which dissolves existing boundaries associated with the rights of access. This is primarily a simple manipulation of perception and time, which begs the question: ‘how long is ownership?’ It was Goodwin’s intention to build on a lineage of performative urban interrogation from the Dada-ist deambulation to the Situationist transurbances in order to affect our perceptions of the city, and further affect the actual fabric. To do this Goodwin invented three art actions in the form of common, culturally ingrained games: Snakes and Ladders, Hide and Seek and Jenga. Each game was played at an urban scale as a tool to interrogate both Porosity research and the city itself.

The outcomes of this body of work, test and prove the hypothesis of the original porosity thesis and its associated ‘Porosity Index’. The games also act as independent art projects. Public art is a powerful mechanism of architectural interrogation due to its innately symbiotic relationship with built form. Further, the marginality of public art makes it ideally suited to the task of commenting on or contradicting the main body of the text of a culture.