Oğulcan Ekiz
Play With Me
Video installation, loop (05:00)
Play With Me is an auto-biographical, five-minute long video work. It consists of three acts. Act One features a stop motion football match based on a game I used to play as a child with my McDonald's Happy Meal toys – a decisive finale between heroes and monsters to determine the destiny of the Earth. Act Two narrates the first time I passed my bedtime through photos from our family album. I passed my bedtime to watch Space Jam on a national broadcaster. It was a school night and getting the permission to stay up required some persuasion on my end and some careful planning on my parents' side. Act Three returns to the current day and features videos of me and my aunt drawing on stones, a hobby she grew an interest in during her retirement. She later taught it to me as well. During the production of Play with Me, some central research themes have emerged. These themes are closely linked to authorship, copying, and distribution of copyrighted works.
The first theme is creativity, childhood, and boredom. When Professor Johanna Gibson invited me to make a video installation for the inaugural forum of Five Leaf Institute for Law and Aesthetics, she caught me in a moment where I was thinking on these notions. Sometime before her invitation, I saw a social media post suggesting that when in doubt, you should return to things you enjoyed as a child. The idea is that your child-self knew what they were doing. Admittedly not the most fitting academic source, this social post intrigued me to think on childhood and creativity. I remembered the late Graham Rawle’s collection of 1950s and ‘60s magazines and toys and how he treated it as his creative arsenal. They are deeply connected to his childhood and are loaded with personal associations(1).
The cue I had was that people often return to their childhood as a source of inspiration. Why does this work well? My initial thinking was that the child knows the best because the child needs to pass the time. They need to spend the day. The child's time is not committed but it still needs to be filled. 24 hours is an awfully long time if you don't have anything to do. So, the child plays. For those of us who were children before mobile phones and Mr. Beast and his many local versions in different countries, we had to invent games to pass the time. I watched a lot of cartoon shows as a child, but the TV would sometimes screen the same episodes in loop. So, I had to invent games. Thus, my first hypothesis is that the child becomes creative out of boredom, in an attempt to pass the time. Well, at least some children do.
The second research theme is the exportation and globalisation of the US culture in the 90s. It was my first attempt to stop motion filmmaking, and I constantly showed the trial shots to my friends to understand what was working and what was failing. During these feedback sessions, one of the things that surprised me was that a friend of mine who grew up in northern Wales in the 90s had the same Happy Meal toys as I did. I also noticed that many of us, who were kids in the 90s, had watched Space Jam. I did watch it again while working on Play with Me. Let me tell you, it is not the masterpiece for a whole generation of the World's kids to watch. But once you combine the marketing power of Warner Bros. and Michael Jordan, you end up with a Global-scale attraction.
For the last three years, I live in Wales and I realise that there are many British tv shows that I either haven't watched as a child or haven't heard of at all. Examples include Thomas the Tank Engine and Captain Pugwash. Likewise, there are many shows and films like Keloğlan series or Süt Kardeşler that only those who grew up in Turkey would know. But when I was an international student in London, I almost never failed to find a fellow 90s kid who didn't know what I was talking about when I mentioned a Nickelodeon cartoon show like Rugrats, Hey Arnold! or a Disney Channel show like Recess. It is not only the established distribution channels but also the merchandising that created a common pool of knowledge amongst 90s kids around the Globe.
The third theme, the least surprising or all, is copying and creativity. As a copyright scholar, my antenna is tuned to find copying, something I rarely bothered myself with when I tried to thrive as a photographer and a videographer in my early twenties. I do realise that I am particularly attentive to the sources of ideas or expressions I appropriate in my current creative practice. In the pre-production phase, there were several obvious avenues where I knew I was going to copy third-party copyright works. The Happy Meal toys are one example. The extract from the Space Jam film is another one. But the most surprising realisation came when I sat down to write the script. I wrote the three acts in one sitting. The three memories naturally followed one another. I link the Space Jam memory to my aunt's stone drawing because she was the one who prepared my bed when I stayed at their house, and because she has found a child-like creativity in an art practice in her retirement. But connecting the football game to Space Jam made me realise, over 25 years later, that I got the idea of the 'grand finale' between heroes and monsters from the Space Jam film. I did love that film as a child. Even though I couldn't finish it in my first attempt, I watched it many times later. This subconscious copying is interesting to me as the football game I reproduced in this film gave me a lot of joy as a child. Discovering its source as an adult is an interesting feeling.
Finally, the last theme that came out of this film is targeted creativity. Producing the film was not shy of lessons for me. I found most of the Happy Meal toys I used to play on eBay. Holding those toys once again at the age of 34 was unexpectedly fun. They were half the size I remember. Or my hands are double the size now. But there were annoying and frustrating moments too. For example, how do I keep the plushie Mickey Mouse toy standing for the video? I never had to worry about it as a child. Mickey could just lay on the carpet when it was Tarzan's time with the ball. As a child, you could give the game up when you are annoyed. You don't owe consistency to anyone. Hence, you could ignore the bits of the game that is not logical. But when you are trying to make a film with a deadline to catch, you need to overcome problems as they come. And they come in multitude. And if you have no budget at all, you tackle them on your own (and with friends who are happy to help). I encountered many problems and gave numerous breaks in frustration. But when I solved a problem - like making Mickey a stall out of wires so it could stand up on its own - I found a different type of joy; the joy of eureka moments! Once the stool made out of wires was installed, I sent a victorious selfie with a standing Mickey to my best friend. Problem solving requires creativity. While my child-self's problem was boredom, problems come in many faces as an adult. Many of them require critical (or creative) thinking.
Play with Me marks the beginning of a new research project that looks into creativity, boredom, childhood, and memory. Fittingly, my host happens to be exactly the scholar one should draw from. Johanna Gibson illustrates that the notion of play is central to authorship, invention, and creativity. To play creatively is as much about self as it is about others and locating yourself amongst others(3). Based on my own experience from childhood, I do believe that creativity is connected to boredom. Not through desperation but in the context of carving yourself a way of life. In this context, Play with Me will lead up to a new exploration into creativity and boredom, which hopefully will shed new light on to copyright-related notions of authorship and self-expression.
