APD W5 PLAY AND FORCE

https://youtu.be/5t3Q7Lrk4cU

On this week’s response to Play and Force, I was initially intrigued by rules and human force/power. After thinking on possible responses for a while, I resorted to create a visualization on the effect of different kinds of talks, such as normal speech, honest compliments, flatteries, boring talk and hurtful words/talk/comments. I created a 2d animation of a round, ball-like object that morphs and moves differently to visualize how the different speeches affects our feelings.

Method

I chose 5 different kinds of speech with one of them being neutral as the point of difference. For the neutral speech, for example a simple hello, non-emotional facts, simple greetings, I visualize the ball to simply hover in the space, showing that there is almost no effect. The honest compliment, I visualize the ball to be energetic, swirling and fluttering in the space, and changed colour to bright orange to show happiness. For flatteries, I depict the ball to be bouncy but not bouncing to show slight happiness but not as happy as the previous one. The base is still grounded, showing that the ball does not get too far with the flatteries, as they are often have shallow meaning and intention. With boring talk, I depict the ball to ooze and fall apart, as a reflection of my personal feeling when I’m in a boring talk: wanting to simply melt away avoiding the talk. Finally for hurtful speech, I decided to tightly twist the ball, showing discomfort and restricted, un-ideal form, just like how we feel uncomfortable and hurting when getting hurtful words pointed at us.

My choice of medium being 2d animation is because it allows me to do this visualization in a quick, practical and effective way.

Context

This week’s response is leaning towards playing solely to play, or paida (Caillois, 1961). I was simply being playful in seeing how I can visualize the effects of speech towards out feelings in an unconventional or abstracted way. This also reflects my creativity and the way I imagine and realize a visualization, which is a part of play as mentioned by Sutton-Smith (2001) in the rhetoric of play as the imaginary, how it is carried out by the supportive reaction towards creativity and innovation.

Reflection

Reflecting on my response, it would probably be better if I add the speech itself into the animation, for example words that suit into the categories are integrated together to create an interaction with the object. That way, I would be able to communicate the idea of speech clearer. Additionally, I could use more colour to really depict the mood/feeling created from the types of speech. Another thing is for the hateful speech, maybe choosing a more violent treatment to the ball would really show the detrimental effect of hate speech instead of going with a more ambiguous twist.

Reference

Caillois R (1961) Man, play, and games. Free Press of Glencoe.

Sutton-Smith B (1997) The Ambiguity of Play, Cambridge, Mass. ; London, Harvard University Press. https://login.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/login?url=https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rmit/detail.action?docID=3300549.