THREE GAME PROPOSALS FROM THE SURREALIST GROUP IN SZCZECIN
to the
LONDON INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF SURREALISM
18th – 31st August 2008


1. ALIEN WORD POEM

Find a foreign word.

Write a poem in your language of choice, essentially based on permutations of the letters in the chosen word.


2. GUESS PORTRAIT

This is how this game was performed during the festival:

1. MAKE A HINT

- If you want others to make a portrait of you, you should first of all send a HINT (words, picture, sound etc) in electronic form, maximum 1 MB, with your name as only information. The hint should not be descriptive of you, but rather something you choose. Hints received will then be displayed online for players to use as the basis of their portraits. Only the name of the sender will be displayed together with the item sent.

2. MAKE A PORTRAIT BASED ON THE HINTS OF OTHERS.

Making an imaginary portrait of another surrealist is done in this way:
The participants will make a portrait of one or all of the ones that have posted a HINT to us.
One requirement is that the participants making the portraits HAVE NEVER MET THE PERSON(s) (making the hints) BEFORE.
- The portrait itself can be made in any form, and should be sent to us. Portraits received will then be published online on a URL that is only being made available to Festival participants and not be made known to the wider public.

The contributions below are displayed with the permission of the participants.

- - - HINTS that arrived: - - -


Johannes Bergmark:
Merl:
David Nadeau:
Parry Harnden:
Nano:
dr. temi rose: my role models, the women i adore are all essentially child cartoon type images - mrs. piggle-wiggle (who might not be famous where you are but you can google her i'm sure) - mary poppins (who i imagine is known everywhere, NOT movie version, far too sweet, but original book version) - betty boop and wonderwoman

two from books and two from comics... the native americans believe we are made of four directions, our essence comes from 4 directions. in the western mystical tradition, we have four elements; these are mine: betty boop, mrs. piggle-wiggle, mary poppins and wonder woman.

- - - Contributed portraits: - - -


NOTE: Because of our initially unclear description of the rules, some sent us contributions that were made without the reference to a hint. We then revised the description to become more clear. However, the "misunderstood" contributions are enjoyable results in their own right and we chose to not be so fuzzy as to not include them. We've had to cut some of the contributions in quality in order to fit the web format. Here are all the results that we got during the festival:

Lautréamont by Rik Lina:
here is an imaginairy portrait of this mysterious Latin-American from El Otro Cielo of Julio Cortázar.
With greetings to Johannes Bergmark of Szczecin. Abrazos - RIK
John Andersson by Paul Cowdell:
Actually there was an element of objective chance involved: I drew it last night, and Merl showed me the Funbo Horror film this morning.
Gale Ahrens by Merl:
Johannes Bergmark by Merl:
"On the afternoon of Saturday 23rd August, I started to sketch out my Guess Portrait of Johannes, based on the sound file he gave as his hint:

I didn’t have time to finish the sketch, as I had to go out to meet Nikos Stabakis (of the Athens Surrealist Group) and a couple of friends from SLAG. It was Nikos’s last night in London and we wanted to take him out for a farewell drink. We hadn’t pre-arranged a place to meet though, so on the way there I suggested (by sms message) that we go to the bar in the Royal Festival Hall. I chose the RFH for no very good reason except that it was convenient and would probably be fairly quiet. I hadn’t actually been there for several months and had no idea what performances or other events might be going on in the building. So I was as surprised as anyone to walk into the foyer and discover a large display by “The Lost and Found Orchestra” of found objects turned into musical instruments, including all of the shapes and objects I had just sketched in the top half of my portrait of Johannes:"

David Nadeau by Merl:
Johannes Bergmark by Paul Cowdell:
"... The other Guess Portraits I was talking about last week, one of you and one of Eric Bragg. Both were played on my previous understanding of the game, but if it's any consolation, I would have come up with the same portrait of you after hearing your hint."
Nano by Parry Harnden:
David Nadeau by Parry Harnden:
Johannes Bergmark by Parry Harnden:
Merl by Parry Harnden:
Temi Rose by Parry Harnden:
Merl by Johannes Bergmark:
David Nadeau by Johannes Bergmark:
Parry Harnden by Johannes Bergmark:
Merl by Nano:
David Nadeau by Nano:
Parry Harnden by Nano:
Temi Rose by Nano:
Eric Bragg by Paul Cowdell:
Temi Rose by Johannes Bergmark:


3. STARLING SONGS

Language sound imitation game. Participants need to know at least two languages (one each). Write a short sentence in one language. Next person writes a sentence in another language that sounds as close as possible to the above sentence. Next sentence is written in another language with the same method. The only rule is that, if you return to an already used language, you can't revert back to a word that you have used before (on the same place in the sentence). Afterwards, you can translate all the sentences into one language (e.g. English) to track the changes in meaning.

To the contents.

This page was new January 31st, 2009.