The Game Show 2018

May 25 - June 8, 2018
ABC No Rio in Exile at BulletSpace
Lower East Side, NYC

THE GAME SHOW is the result of a collaborative process in which participating artists met and discussed narrative, gameplay and mechanics over the course of a month. As much a process of horizontal creative collaboration as a final project, The project was a social sculpture that transformed the entire gallery into a large game board.

Inspired by non-competitive games such as Hacky Sack and Hot Lava, cooperative role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, and the surrealist drawing exercise Exquisite Corpse, the exhibiton was a collectively imagined game that took place at Bullet Space gallery in the spring of 2018.

The process began with participants meeting to discuss their ideas of cooperative gaming, and ended with the actualization of a playable game. There was an open call, and participants had to commit to 4 meetings over the course of a month, as well as two intensive weeks in the gallery. The first week in the gallery was a lot of building the game with notes on wall and floor, followed by a test playthough where we invited feedback. We made tweaks to the game and finalized the design and decor, and the final game was playable to the invited public for the last week.

This project was developed in collaboration with ABC No Rio and participants and organizers from a previous project, "Against Competition/Towards Mutual Aid," held at Flux Factory in February 2017.

Participating Artists: Caroline Carlsmith, Mike Estabrook, Christina Freeman, Brian George, Jenny Goldstick, Rachel Haberstroh, Rachel Hillery, Vandana Jain, Ann LePore, Zhi-fang Li, Christopher Lin, Marcia Vaitsman