Co-Creating Art (Making Peace) for The Missing Peace

Late last year, as The Missing Peace (TMPP) was being prepared for exhibition in San Francisco, I began working on an adaptation of my Pervasive Interactive Technologies so that I could run a location-based mobile phone “game” in conjunction with TMPP and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. My idea was to have mobile phone users begin this new game at home and complete the game at YBCA, where they would visit the exhibition. Please join us at Making Peace after you read this article!

I had met Joel Barraquiel Tan, the Director of Community Engagement for YBCA, about two years ago, so he already knew about my technologies and games – one of which is played at Yerba Buena Gardens, right outside his front door. In one quick conversation, however, we took a huge jump forward…

The jump was that we decided to co-author an experience that could be “played ” out anywhere (not just at YBCA), which would solicit and include input from anyone, and would accumulate and display its “output” in a community co-created online mosaic that could also be displayed at YBCA as a piece of art. Joel took the lead on the conceptual development, which he based on ideas he was developing for the Big Ideas program at YBCA, and I put on my programming hat and built some new online capabilities so that we could make our artistic ideas real.

In the first video clip (below), Joel and I discuss the community engagement program at YBCA.

The game is called Making Peace, and it’s integrated with the Community Engagement program at YBCA. It has evolved quite a bit over the couple of months it has been in place. I asked Joel to give us his view on how the Making Peace experience was created.

What’s the Big Idea Day, February 9th, 2008, was an opportunity for the community to come to the Room for Big Ideas and participate in several related projects. Creating small rice-paper flags, having their photo taken by Derick Ion, an artist in the Making Peace/Big Ideas program, and having their photos added to the Making Peace mosaic.