#  Serious Games: Playful Solutions to Social Problems 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **March 24, 2023** 

 05:00PM - 05:00PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Barker Center, Room 114**  



 

 



 

##  [](/ludics)

##  [LUDICS](/ludics)

##  **SPEAKER:** Jenny Marketou, The New School/Parsons in New York

 In 2021 Jenny Marketou proposed "Serious Games" to the city of Chania in Crete to turn the historic but abandoned Yiali Tzami (Mosque ) into a playground exclusively for young people and local community. "Serious Games" takes us on a poetic journey through new trope to artistic practice that dissolves the established trope of art as a field with no further connections than aesthetics per se, and instead an attempt of transforming play into art with a social impact from the point of view of our contemporary condition. Play is a process one that Jenny Marketou practices by exploring different variations which encourage personal freedom and collaboration between individuals. Play is a techniques of openness and of constant practice, a kind of a cultural manifestation which maintains potential for emancipation and self organization. In his classic essay "Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen" (On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, 1793), Friedrich Schiller argues that play is capable of reconciling aesthetic. Marketou will present a series of playful modifications of play objects in her practice, which according to the ludic as a method, combines free play, games and rules of play, use performance elements in order to understand the role of the artist, the researcher and the designer, and create forms of activism and institutional critique as they are turning the space of the museum, the historic monument, the square , places of conflict into playgrounds. She will discuss how one work morphs into another and how meaning and agency and knowledge emerge from playful engagement, ongoing provocations to a banal binary perception of the world.

###  About the Speaker

 **Jenny Marketou**, born in Athens, Greece, lives and works in New York and Athens. She is a professor of New Media Art and Public Engagement at The New Schoo/Parsons in New York.

 She holds a BFA from the Corcoran School of Art ( Washington, DC) and an MFA from Pratt Art Institute (Brooklyn, New York). In her practice she has developed and designed projects that propose playful solutions to social problems through a variety of media and an open invitation for community engagement

 Her recent institutional solo and group exhibitions were held at New York Harbor, Governors Island, NY(2022), The House of Challenging Orders, Vienna Art Week, Vienna (2022), Folk Fiction, One Minute Space, Athens, Greece (2022), The High Line, New York (2018). Praxis, ARTIUM Contemporary Art Museum of the Basque Country ( 2014). Reina Sofia, Madrid (2012 ), The National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Athens (2010). She participated in: Biennial de Mediterranean 19, San Marino; documenta 14 , Manifesta, European Biennial; Biennial of Seville, Spain; Biennial of Sao Paolo, Brazil; Biennial de Cartagena, Colombia; Thessaloniki Biennial, Greece. Marketou’s work was included in exhibitions at ZKM, Center for Media Arts, Karlsruhe; Museum Tinguely, Basel; Kumu Art Museum, Estonia; Kunsthalle Basel (2014), Queens Museum, New York, The New Museum, New York, among others.

 Her book "Serious Games" was released on July, 2022 and among her works are: "How Assemblies Matter," "Organizing from Below," 2014 , "Paperophanies," 2012, "SmellBytes," 2001, and her essays "Perform Interdependency," 2017, "The School of Everything," 2017.



 

 



 

 See also:- [ Seminar ](/event-type/seminar)
- [ Ludics ](/seminars/ludics)
 
 

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