Personal Space

For my alternate space project I played giant checkers with a friend of mine. We have an executive board dinner later tonight so a few nights ago we made a bet that the one who loses the most will buy the other ones dinner. As a tribute to our bet I bought plastic plates both red and blue to use as the checker pieces. the plates are round, just as checkers pieces and one can be placed over the other in a hamburger style in order to represent the kings.  The only concern I initially had with using paper plates was that the wind would easily be able to blow them away. Luckily today turned out to be such a calm a peaceful day, weather wise, so that the plates stay where they are suppose to be on the board. Going into the board, the checker board was meant to utilize the space around around so I thought it would work best if I made the pavement into the board. I used tan scotch to create the grid, unfortunately, I only brought one roll so the board didn't end up as big as I would have liked. I figured a huge board would invite more people as well as get in peoples way and cause them to interact.

Checkers can be an intense game. One game took over an hour to play. Although I would like to say that I won I sadly cannot. After half an hour of what seemed to be an endless waltz between our three kings I eventually became frustrated and decided to make a desperate move to take the lead. If he saw the right move then it would guarantee his victory but if not then I do believe I would have won.  Well, I lost and now my wallets going to suffer tonight at dinner.

While playing the endless game of checkers many people stopped to temporarily watch and ask the same repetitve question, "who's winning?." With a game like chess or checkers the only thing that matters is the final move, only then can you really determine who's winning. One particular UCSB staff member stopped and had a decent chat with me in which he revealed that he enjoyed this time of the school year because of the performances that random Art Studio 7A students put on.

I think I could have strengthened my project by making the audience half of the class be my checkers or even chess pieces. I could have given them colored shirt to break them into teams and had the chess piece written down and then proceeded to play the game. Oh, maybe next time, but it was still fun.

Link to Rest of Thursday Class Performances

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY0BW-IcWj8