Mapping Place With Play Session Number 1, Teen Artist Project, 10-12th grade, 3 hour session, September 10, 2017 TAP Students will explore the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth engaging with the museum as a site for game play and subject of creative mappings. During three sessions in September, students will engage in creatively mapping the social and physical space of the museum. Students are introduced to game theory, the work of the Situationist International, ideas of New Materialism, and spatial theorists and contemporary artists who engage in spatial practices and institutional critique. Students will be introduced to game theory, collaboratively creating game structures to guide their explorations. Students will experiment with creatively mapping and observing the museum’s architectural, social, geographic and cultural landscape. Students are introduced to the walking practices of artists Hamish Fulton, Francis Alÿs, and the Stiutationist International as well as the mapping practices of artists and geographers including Trevor Paglin, Jorge Macchi, Janet Cardiff, Kevin Lynch, and Suzanne Lacy.
Key Concepts: Our relationship to place informs our sense of self and community. Using games to structure exploration welcomes chance and invites creative engagement. Navigating and orienting space, we learn about the museum and the collection by moving through it. Getting lost or wandering without focusing on reaching a destination can help us to observe the world around us. Essential Question:
How do we navigate our world?
How do we construct a sense of place?
What can we learn from places?
How do we map place? How do we map experience?
How do we construct meaning and narrate experiences within place?
Where do we have access to and where can we not go?
How do we communicate navigation and orientation using language and symbols?
Lesson Objectives: The student will be able to make walking protocols using chance or game structures by looking at artists who use walking and mapping to respond to their local environments. The student will be able to engage with their immediate environment using game structures by using ROAM Playing Cards. Students will complete their own playing cards and use game structures to create a collaborative poem or word map after Hamish Fulton. Students will work in teams to notate and complete activities in the Mapping Clipboard.
Specific Art Content: Students will identify walking as a way of knowing using game structures to notice the world around them. Students will observe and creatively map the architecture of the museum, the artwork, and the relationships of meaning in social space. Students will engage with language to describe experiences and observations.
Artists/Artwork: Hamish Fulton, Situationist International, Francis Alÿs, John Cage, Yoko Ono, Jorge Macchi, Julie Libersat Resources & Materials: Mapping Clipboards: Tracing paper map of Museum Journey Log ROAM Playing Cards Worksheet Game Dice Coin Toss Fidget Spinners Large Paper Pencils, Colored Markers (Red, Green, Blue, Black, Yellow) Map pins Templates for: Game Dice Spinner Coin Toss Instruction and Its Sequencing: Students will get an introduction to the unit, spatial theories of Henri Lefevbre and Michel de Certeau, contemporary artists who use walking and mapping, and the artist/instructor’s art practice. Students will engage in a chance based games to set points of interest. In response to an artwork at the Modern by walking artist Hamish Fulton, students will experiment with ways to use language to name, map and describe space. Introduction/Motivation: Present idea of games and getting lost. Give artist talk and previous versions of ROAM. Share artwork of Hamish Fulton, Francis Alÿs, Jorge Macchi, Yoko Ono, and John Cage as well as images of parkour, parades, protests, etc. Guided Practice
Students are guided through the maps available of the museum and provided with a brief history of the building.
Students are introduced to the idea of combining game play with mapping strategies. Using prepared Mapping Clipboards, each student can notate a Mapping Clipboard with maps of the museum printed on tracing paper placed on top of each other to create an overlay of information. Beginning with session one, students will use their Mapping Clipboards to notate the space as they experience it throughout the three sessions. With each session, additional materials can be added so that students’ Mapping Clipboards become a journal and tour guide to their experience. Also included are worksheets and templates for making game components and devices.
Using examples and a short guided walk in the museum lobby, Instructor will demonstrate how we can create simple games for an embodied engagement with space using ROAM Playing Cards, game dice, coin toss, or spinners.
Looking at the work of Hamish Fulton in the mezzanine of the lobby area, students will discuss how we use language in navigation and how we use language to describe experiences within place. How do we name places?
Independent Practice
Working in teams of three, students will use the ROAM Playing Card Worksheet to fill in their own Direction and Capture Prompts to make sets of cards. Students will practice using different units of measurement, and verbs to direct physical engagement and navigation. Similar to Simon Says, students will take turns making direction and capture prompts.
Discussion: How do we communicate navigation instructions? How is navigation language culturally specific? How do prompts work to elicit responses or direct the viewer to engage with their bodies in different ways (walk, skip, jump, roll, hop etc)? How do our responses communicate culturally specific value sets? (for example in response to “Capture something important”)
Students use these sets of cards and follow their own instructions. In each three-player team, team members take turns shuffling and dealing the decks of cards, and the third team player is recording information about each interaction in the Journey Log.
Students can also create their own Direction Prompts using combinations of dice, coin toss, or spinners to structure game play. Responding to the Capture prompts, each student in the team supplies a one word response, or tag, which is notated in the Journey Log. Students teams name each site or interaction point.
Closure
Students return to classroom students work to organize their collected artifacts and interactions. Groups share and present their collections and mappings with each other.
Discussion: Students will be prepared to begin brainstorming ideas and ways that setting up games and directions can structure a walk. What kinds of spaces would be good for what kinds of movement? What kinds of things will we notice in different environments? How did notating maps or entering information in Journey Log change the experience of the game?
Students complete Player Profile: Mapping Home Worksheet. Students enter geographical information for their current residence, birthplace, school, and favorite place or place they feel at home. Students will get a preview of next week’s activity where each students’ geographical information is mapped from the information collected in the Mapping Home Worksheet.
Formative Evaluation Instructor will ask questions to initiate discussion to assess students’ understanding of ideas presented. Student clipboards and worksheets will help Instructor to assess student understanding. Classroom Management Procedures
The general session is broken up into activity chunks with groups breaking out in game play and returning to discuss and regroup. These activity chunks are 20 minutes long which gives students adequate time to experiment and navigate within the museum grounds and then build upon the complexity of game play after each discussion.
Before each session of game play, communicate the area of game play for example lets try this version by the reflective pool. In order to facilitate physical engagement that is appropriate for museum spaces, students will need to have a thorough conversation before game play starts about the kinds of behavior and engagement that would be problematic within the exhibition and public areas.
Students pairings will be important because compatibility is key. It is possible to divide students into groups using game practices.
Summative Assessment and Evaluation: Summative assessment is based on student engagement, participation in activity and reflection during discussion.