We started the session with an introduction from @MariaS and @sebquack, the two of them shared 3 projects that relates to Trust in Play
Sebastian works with lot of different people and defines his work as curatorial.
The first project was a music festival in Frankfurt, together with a music organization “Ensemble modern”, contemporary chamber ensemble.
It is a series of project that are play + something else.
The specific example is called Mirror music, 8 chairs facing on pairs on one side 4 professional musician (from the Ensemble modern) on the other 4 audience members, musician will interpret the movement of the audience like is a mirror, and they will play what you are play.
It’s relevant because there is a lot of trust, it’s like remote control of a music setting.
Scary for the musician and scary for the audience, they don’t dare to perform in front of this musician, it build trust between them
It was nice because the instructions was not be a robot but interpret the movement but make the best possible sound out of it, it was also fun to watch.
The second project it was a large scale art project, commissioned from Nuit Blanche, the light festival in center of Paris, and it was an action of public art that can deal with the new traffic situation.
The idea was to replace cars with letters, so we designed this piece with big letters and there was an app and you can change what the letters where saying, every hour there was a question and you can vote and suggest what do you want the piece to say.
They were asking question to the participant like “say something to aliens” and then three suggestion will be voted. It was a real time Hollywood sign for digital times.
In this specific case the two that were almost winning were: “please take trump now” and “Sorry we are full” which is really interesting.
After the voting we were moving physically the letters around with a pellet mover.
Questions:
@Martijn asked “What was the real level of democracy?”
We have guidelines about bad words and racism
@Anthi_ResilientAthen
How many people interacted? Around 2/3000
@MariaS Dow do you communicate?
It was the main piece of the Festival so it was featured everywhere in the festival communication
It’s sad that it was realized with money from people that wanted to have more playful things along the Seine and now is on the a warehouse.
@matteo_uguzzoni In legal term how was that?
We have all the permissions we met with the city officials, lot of debate about flow of people barrier they can move only outside but anyway it was there only for ten days, but the permission wasn’t the issue
The third project is called Playful Commons and it’s about regulation and what you can do in public space in general, the owner want to communicate something to ensure about the space.
Is a collaboration with Gily Karjevsky
The idea is to better communicate public space and rules about that.
We did the launch with the Citizens Information Board, a license that we negotiate in Cork (Ireland) adapt the CC model to space.
It’s a positive description of what you CAN do, not what you CANNOT do, and it’s explicit says that this is ok, and you don’t have to ask.
It was interesting that STAY was the worst and most problematic for them, because it shows their fear ( dodgy people hanging out in the square).
Maria Saridaki (@MariaS) goes second 
The first project the Maria is describing is the Athens Plaython a Festival that took place 2011, 2012 and 2013 and in smaller form (workshops) until 2015.
When she started working in public space, she didn’t know what was trust, the reason to create the festival was political, Greece was in the middle of a very important moment, with also political violence from the authorities.
The first year the Festival was financed have money, the second one not really.
During the festival the idea of trust became central, the limit of trust, ourselvers, authorities, people designing, players and the observers.
This kind of limit was very clear when they started to talk with the authorities.
it was so hard to use “their” public space, discussion and negotiation brought up questions like “who owns the Athenian Public space?”, “why people destroy public space?”, “who knows the rules?”
The second project is called Playthonakia
They wanted to create a methodology so everyone can design their own game in public space.
It was a guerrilla game with a very different approach from the previous one also for them as collective of designers.
The third project and the natural evolution of that was to curate a strategy based on games and playfulness, and again invite independent designers to an Hackathon organized by the Goethe Institut was a matter of trust: they didn’t believed in big organizations, (both pro and amatorial).
So they decided to go for an Open process and they asked what you (designers) need from larger organization and then the space of Goethe became a conformable space for game design.
Even if the project was not specific about public space the majority of the games where about that, about Athens.
It crucial for me that we have a clear thing in mind that we have to create a dialogue between artist, organization and authorities, because it’s where money, ideas and legal ground are, and those are three ingredients that are key for urban games to happens.