informal urban practices

By Helen and Rahul

The surreal, absurd and silly group project will look at what an urban treasure hunt is, in relation to informal urban pracices.

Key words:

• Interactions
• Communication
• Movement/Transitions
• Hunting Treasures
• Seeking/Finding
• Observing
• Public Games
• Social
• Spaces Around
• Stimulating Thought
• Stimulating Senses

Intending to:

The surreal, absurd and silly will be intersecting with urban treasure hunts within the public domain. We will be looking at social interactions, communicating and observing the public in conjuction with stimulating senses of excitment and adventure in a game of an urban treasure hunt. Movement and transition in relation to objectives will lead the player to the next destination.

Working methods, process and mediums:

• Video
• Audio
• Photographs
• Guerrilla Advertising
• Placements
• Maps/Locations Posted
• Site Markings

Over two separate days Amy and I headed down to St Kilda to occupy an area and see if we could engage the people of this beautiful bay side suburb in a simple game of noughts and crosses.

Through this Informal Urban Practice we hoped to gain a greater knowledge of the residents of St Kilda as well as the visitors to the area. We set ourselves up on a wall just inside the arcade that lead to Woolworths on Acland Street on a busy weekend afternoon. Immediately we had people stopping and looking. We encouraged people to join us and in the end played over 20 games of noughts and crosses.

We then went back during the week and set up in exactly the same spot. Acland street was less busy and most people were residents doing their everyday shopping and therefore we found it a lot harder to find people that were willing to play with us as most of them had somewhere to be or something to be doing, as a result we only managed to play around 5 games vs. the 20 that we were able to play the day before.

It was clear in the end that the visitors and residents of St Kilda were a lot more willing to give us their time and enjoy a simple game with us on the weekends as apposed to a weekday. We did however have a lot of fun over the two days.

Laura Black & Amy Carlwell

As a group of 4 we thought about activities that would be inviting for the public to participate in. We thought children’s games would be a way to lure in any attraction from the public. Laura and I thought of two ways to achieve this for our intervention. We thought about setting up a situation where it created an opportunity for the public to interact with. Our intervention was ‘Join the dots’ (an old children’s activity) which involved us printing out images constructed of dots on a page that would be left over several nights, in the streets of Melbourne and filled out by anyone that noticed them. We used Disney characters as the images to make the activity more engaging and these were our findings!

Amy & Laura

Chris, Lucy, Nick, Sarah and Sophie
Music “I think I like u 2″ by Jamaica

People seem to be quite afraid of other people. So, for our public interaction, we removed the need to interact with other people, and left the public to interact with much less intimidating, stationary, objects. We discovered people quite liked leaving their mark on the world.

Majority of the people who engaged with the activity where in groups. We left the posters exposed for 2 hours. People seemed to feel a bit daunted because the posters were in open spaces where everyone could view each other drawing on them. We also found that the same name or characature appeared on 2 of the posters. By chance these people had walked past all the posters.

KA MING,LEE S3202690 INFORMAL URBAN PRACTICE.EXAMPLE from informal.urban on Vimeo.

in the vedio, there are several public games in China, American and Thailand. the number of players in public games are various. in China and America, some public games equiptments are belong to players which are simple and common. e.g. pogs, Chinese Rings, ropes,  etc. time and location of the games are flexible.

Thai boxing is a different case. it needs large spaces, fix location with a large boxing ring. however,  it attract the large number of audiences like the other public games in America and China.

at last,  1 falsh mob is captured in America. the goal of the flash mob is to draw American’s attention or to express their emotion or opinions. url is here.