In many ways, participatory art has more in common with games than with other artistic disciplines

owing to its use of agency as a medium. Game philosopher C. Thi Nguyen notes that games impose a

temporary set of procedures governing goals and abilities which, when voluntarily taken up by players,

causes them to inhabit a new form of agency (2020, p. 1). According to White, agency is also a building

block of participatory theatre. He notes the social importance of using the actions of the audience as both a

counterbalance and response to a field of interactions dominated by the control of the artist (2013, p. 26). In

both Nguyen and White’s estimations, agency occurs when there is a meaningful connection between the

actions of participants and the perceived results of those actions. This connection is facilitated through

procedures set up by the artist/designer.

     Accounts of participatory experiences in art, however, are admittedly mixed, and include many

inescapable criticisms like exploitation of trust, social embarrassment, and reinforcement of hegemonic social paradigms. In light of this, I would like to make some distinctions between participatory art and 

other artforms that may elucidate the ways in which it connects people. Firstly, the genre is not, strictly

speaking, a self-expressive medium, as artists largely create their participatory pieces with community-

minded values that they hope are reflected in a shared experience.

     Secondly, the sharing of authorship with a participating audience creates a range of unpredictable and unrepeatable outcomes which are celebrated as a

hallmark of egalitarian exchange. Through practice-based research, I seek a better understanding of how to address the frequently cited gap in participatory art

practice between the idealized ‘promise of experience’ made by the artist and the actual experience of participation (Alston, 2016, p. 244). This led to my

Master’s thesis, We called it _____:Filling the gaps in participatory art design (Renfro, 2021), which laid out an experimental framework that emphasized

procedural authorship and conscientious design.

     In the course of this research, I began to draw heavily on game design and Game Studies discourses, which are in turn richly grounded in Psychology,

primarily in the areas of flow, intersubjectivity, and personal need satisfaction. I decided to test the transferability of game design principals to participatory art

design in a project titled We called it Earth, which premiered at ArtEZ University of the Arts (Netherlands) in 2021.

     As an artist and artistic researcher, my practice draws on participation, procedure, and agency in order to explore new collective ways of being. I hold the

conviction that participation, when used as a discursive or pedagogical tool, can offer fresh perspectives on urgent societal issues. As Collective Intelligence

Scholar Geoff Mulgan points out, learning to act collectively “is in many ways humanity’s grandest challenge since there’s little prospect of solving the other

grand challenges of climate, health, prosperity, or war without progress in how we think and act together” (2018, p. 6). And while my own practice and research

emphasizes the collective over the connective, I find resonance with the concept of artistic connective practices through a shared concept of co-, or ‘with’ness,

that strives to show how an individual becomes an indispensable component of something larger, and how this can empower democratic and community-

minded, rather than neoliberal or capitalistic, values.

     In Section 2 of this exhibition, I will briefly explore the misconception of participation as a social virtue, in addition to discussing how critical, conscientious,

and iterative procedural design is key for avoiding ethical hurdles. In Section 3, I will discuss the kinds of procedures employed in participatory art and how they

work together to form a ‘magic circle’; an immersive landscape that temporarily shapes the agential choices of participants. As a counterpoint to this text, I

have interpolated a series of graphics and videos that expand on how the aspects discussed, like core values, design principles, and participant feedback,

concretely affected the design of We called it Earth. I will then reflect in Section 4 on three of the participatory experiences offered during the Connective

Symposium at Fontys by revisiting We Called It Earth, a digital platformer-style game[1] designed by myself and programmer Hadi Asghari, The House of

Seasonal Cleaning by Liana Psarologaki and Amanda Hodgkinson, and An Experiment on Agency #7 by Reyhaneh Mirjahani. I will primarily focus on

identifying the procedures of each piece, how they affected the agency of participants, their core values, and the overall experience of participating in them.

Finally, in Section 5, I will share some ideas about the potential benefits of a heightened procedural literacy amongst both artistic practitioners and participants,

and relate this to Falk Hübner’s inaugural document, In Good Company, which introduces the Connective Artistic Practices professorship at Fontys Academy of

the Arts.

I. Introduction