The second day of our Art of Tinkering Workshop focused heavily on Light Play. We love to do this in a workshop setting because it is so driven by aesthetics and really forces participants to engage in a process of art-making. Often tinkering is conflated with the use of technology, and while that is a big part of what makes this work interesting and rich to explore, I think it is important to remind ourselves that there are lots of definitions of technology. After all, at some point woodworking, weaving, and fire were all cutting-edge technologies. Light Play is not only a beautiful reminder that tinkering can be rich with very low tech, but is also a meditative, self-directed, and collaborative art practice that contrasts the more energetic beginning and end of the workshop. You can get a flavor of the activity by watching the video above, and read some of the participants’ thoughts about it below.
“It’s interesting how you feel like you’re going back to being like a kid.” – Angelica
“We both feel quite entitled in this space, we went and got what we needed. For me all the tinkering is to get to that point; a good end game of facilitation is to get your participant to the point where they go get what they need.” – Emilyn
“I really like blue, but I ended up working with green, and it took me a while to be ok with that. But if I had worked with blue I would have wanted to make it really beautiful, so green allowed me to just play and be weird.” – Shirin
Once, again, let us know in the comments if any of these statements resonate with you and your experience with Light Play, or any other thoughts you have about it. And if you want to check out the entire set of photos from the workshop, click here.