SHOWING WITHOUT GOING

Rules of the Game

Forced Entertainment

https://www.forcedentertainment.com/projects/rules-of-the-game/

A bizarre document of an obsessive and darkly comical private performance, Rules of the Game charts the progress of an imaginary drinking game to be played in front of the TV news.  A more recent text-only version of Rules of the Game is included in Do It, an online project curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist. You can read the online text only version of this here.

Connections

Past liveness re-conjured

I think that it's interesting that this piece can exist in a live way if you simply read out the rules. The projection or threat of the resulting event is already quite palpable, but that a group of people once actually did do this (apparently true - there are photos) somehow grounds it even more - like the weight and inertia of that drunken evening is carried through into the here and now, simply through reading out the instructions / rules of the so-called 'game' - not least of course because the 24-hour news cycle has not stopped since they originally played it. 

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