Elliot is an artist who strives to use simple materials to address complex concepts. He has a background in photography from International Center of Photography in New York and fine art from San Francisco Art Institute. He is primarily interested in social conceptual work that touches on games, psychology, politics and design.
All Fun and Games" is a collection of table games and play activities that embody social and political ideas. The project looks at the possibility of using 'interactive analogies' as a way of producing meaning through the act of playing and aims to facilitate a guided but individualistic interpretation of the games in the mind of each player. The interpretation is guided through a minimally suggestive aesthetic and semantics while at the same time retaining the possibility for unique interpretation through intentionally ambiguous interaction design. Many forms of interaction that may seem natural and taken for granted should be re-examined because they are now useful in contexts that haven’t been in existence for very long. The primary theme throughout all the work is the concept of relative perspective. Games and play situations are designed to anticipate interactions that become a medium of expression independent of any material aesthetic choices. By building an expression in the form of a device or system, the message produced is a kind of collaboration between participants and the artist. This can be a powerful and appropriate vehicle for understanding which interaction models are important in the networked era and how they work. Mediated interaction has become a way we understand our selves, society, and the world, just as natural as pattern recognition.
