Playground! is a sculpture-based studio at the intersection where practice & play and Art & Games meet and merge in theory, craft, and experience. Play transcends and transmutes medium and forms, revisioning and realizing something familiar and new. Play asks us to delineate and define the rules that bound our ideas of the possible—and then explore and explode those boundaries as players and makers of Art. Art, Play, & Politics have a long history as handmaidens in the exploration and advancement of aesthetics and culture… from: the fine craftsmanship of ancient wood & ceramic Senet Boards of Dynastic Egypt; the Socialist Utopianism of H.G. Wells and his Little Wars; the Situationist International experiments seeking to reclaim everyday life from “Specular” Capitalism; Guy Debord and his Game of War; San Francisco’s Diggers play-based social experimentations; the play interventions of the New Games Movement; Artists like Porpetine working in emergent digital formats; the vibrant scene of experimental analog tabletop games, like Alice is Missing and the Quiet Year, and more.This course is a multi-disciplinary, multi-medium studio/seminar—a Playground—exploring & encouraging play within the student’s sculpture practice. Students will engage with myriad mediums and materials, expand their relationship to their own work, to broader culture, and artistic tradition. Throughout the semester we will discuss, play, and make—to infuse new perspectives that play with form, intent, audience, and politics.This course will be taught by Dr. Zachary Walter, the founding Chair of CCA’s Game Arts & Design program and offered only this semester. Student works will be featured in a series of “Playgrounds” in experiential formats and culminate in a final end of semester event of Art/Play.

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