For one of my conference projects, I will continue with this theme of impending student loan debt by making an interactive, higher education monopoly board. I will appropriate a game board, collage it to align with themes of college, it’s national impending debt and demonstrate the idea of “it all being a game.” I picked monopoly because of it’s financial significance, but I’m also playing around with the idea of a “game of life” board.
It’s my game plan to one day have a full sized board, with full sized humans as pieces, or “cogs in the machine,” but for now I will stick to a smaller prototype.
I wish to demonstrate the act of financially getting through these complicated, adult-but-definitely-still-a-kid years: where we must buy our credits, text books, computers; tools that lead us to an inevitable endpoint, graduation, where many of us still really don’t know what to do. For some examples (either for directly on the board, or in card, “chance” form):
– Community college option on board. (Perhaps the player could bypass the whole game and walk away with all of their money in hand…)
– Buy a room off campus.
– Part time job. Be awarded measly amount of money and loose several hours of
homework time.
– Sent to jail– either because you didn’t pay back your loans, or earlier in the board, “drank too much” and sent to infirmary.
Saskia Sassen in her Making Public Inverventions piece, notes that our “current urban condition…. is a fragment of an incomplete puzzle.” These words address the chaos of the higher education infrastructure, the great privilege, and the great expectation to fulfill a career that makes it all worth it. She mentions that, “The possibility of a new type of politics centered in new types of political actors. It is not simply a matter of having or not having power. There are new hybrid bases from which to act.” I take this to mean, that we can all become powerless, but forceful advocates for change. As artists, we can create statements that change an atmosphere. Why not combine art with a message of change?
Why not concentrate our attentions to wealth funding per capita in our nation? Why not start from the very beginning of pre-k, and give the kid in Yonkers an equal chance to succeed as the kid in Bronxville?
But back to the college era, and using appropriation of a monopoly game board design in American culture:
“Both the work of making the public and making the political in urban space become critical at a time of growing velocities, the ascendance of flow over artifacts and permanence, massive structures that are not on a human scale, and branding as the basic mediation between individuals and markets. The work of design produces narratives that add to the value of existing contexts, and at its narrowest, to the utility logic of the economic corporate world. But there is also a kind of public-making work that can produce disruptive narratives, and make legible the local and the silenced.”
I hope to bring more attention to an issue that affects my life directly, using a playable board and the students around me, and globalize it on the internet to erupt into a larger connecting force of change.
