"In participatory art, the boundary between artist and viewer dissolves. The act of engagement becomes the art itself."
— Nicolas Bourriaud (Relational Aesthetics)

THE CLEVELAND ART GAME AND ITS SOCIAL SCULPTURE CARD DECK

An Artistic Scavenger Hunt for the Curious, the Creative, and the Courageous

PART ONE: THE INVITATION

Come Play.

You are invited to step into a game where the city becomes your studio, strangers become your collaborators, and the rules of art are rewritten with every card drawn.

This is not a competition. There are no winners, no losers, no judges waiting to evaluate your work. Instead, there is only the quiet thrill of possibility—the moment you ask a stranger a question you've never asked before, the unexpected beauty of a collaboration that lasts exactly four minutes, the strange satisfaction of leaving a small artwork somewhere for someone else to find.

Since the 1960s, artists have been leaving the studio, stepping out of galleries, and asking: What if art wasn't something you looked at, but something you did? What if the most interesting material wasn't paint or marble, but human connection itself?

This game is your invitation to join that experiment.

Whether you're a painter who's never made a sound piece, a sculptor who's never interviewed anyone, or simply someone curious about what might happen when you say "yes" to a strange proposition—this game is for you. The only requirement is willingness. The only equipment is whatever you have in your pockets and whatever you notice around you.

Come play. Your card is waiting.

PART TWO: INTRODUCTION TO THE GAME

What Is This Thing?

The Cleveland Art Game is centered on a unique Social Sculpture Deck. This deck of task prompts is still being augmented and extended today.  It is the single tool of a participatory art game—a deck of 250 prompts designed to send you and fellow players into the world on small, meaningful adventures. Drawing on over sixty years of experimental art practice, each card invites you to create, connect, collaborate, document, or discover something you wouldn't have encountered otherwise.

The game takes its name and its deepest inspiration from Joseph Beuys, the German artist who declared in the 1970s that "everyone is an artist." For Beuys, this wasn't a statement about technical skill or professional accomplishment. It was a radical claim about human potential: that creativity is not the special province of a gifted few, but a universal capacity—and that the most important artwork we can make is the shape of society itself. He called this expanded practice "social sculpture" : the idea that our conversations, our relationships, our daily actions, and our collective decisions are all materials we can shape with intention and imagination.

This game is a toolbox for social sculpture. It invites you to:

• Create quickly, spontaneously, without the pressure of "getting it right"

• Connect with strangers, fellow players, and unexpected collaborators

• Document the overlooked beauty or hidden or intrigue in your environment

• Discover hidden histories, surprising perspectives, and your own capacity for play

The Lineage You're Stepping Into

When you play this game, you're joining a rich tradition of artists who have reimagined what art can be and where it can happen:

The 1960s and 70s saw the rise of Happenings and Fluxus —loose, playful events that blurred the line between art and life. Artists like Allan Kaprow and Yoko Ono created "scores" or instructions that anyone could follow, turning everyday actions into artistic gestures. When you follow a card's prompt, you're participating in this tradition of instruction-based art.

Joseph Beuys transformed German art education and practice with his concept of social sculpture, famously spending three days in a gallery with a coyote and declaring that teaching was his greatest artwork. When you engage a stranger in conversation or notice the creative dimension of someone's labor, you're practicing social sculpture.

The 1990s brought Relational Aesthetics , a term coined by critic Nicolas Bourriaud to describe artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija, who cooked Thai food in galleries, and Liam Gillick, who constructed meeting spaces for discussion. These artists proposed that human relationships themselves could be the medium of art. When you collaborate with another player or facilitate a connection between strangers, you're working in this relational tradition.

Socially Engaged Art has, since the 2000s, brought artists into direct collaboration with communities on issues of shared concern—from Suzanne Lacy's large-scale public performances to Theaster Gates's neighborhood revitalization projects. When you ask someone what they would change about their community, you're tapping into this practice of art as civic dialogue.

Participatory Art more broadly has explored what happens when the audience stops being a spectator and becomes an active participant. From Marina Abramović's durational performances to contemporary digital collaborations, artists have continuously asked: What can happen when we make art together?

Site-specific and ephemeral art has explored what happens when artworks are made for particular places and particular moments, not for permanent collection. When you follow a clue to a hidden location, you're participating in this exploration of place and temporality.

But this game also draws on the long history of treasure hunts, dérives, and derives —from the Situationist International's wandering explorations of the city to contemporary geocaching, from childhood games of hide-and-seek to the profound human instinct to follow a path toward something unknown.

When you find a card hidden in a public place, you're stepping into a lineage that includes Marcel Duchamp leaving readymades in unexpected locations, the Fluxus artists mailing artworks through the postal system, and generations of artists who have understood that the city itself can be a gallery.

Reenchantment of Art.  Suzi Gablik argued in The Reenchantment of Art (1991) that modernism's autonomous, ego-centered model — the lone genius making objects for passive consumption — needed to give way to a "connective aesthetic": art as relationship, healing, and lived encounter rather than commodity. That vision puts her squarely at the roots of participatory thinking, though with a moral and spiritual urgency that sets her apart from more sociological critics like Claire Bishop. more broadly has explored what happens when the audience stops being a spectator and becomes an active participant. From Marina Abramović's durational performances to contemporary digital collaborations, artists have continuously asked: What can happen when we make art together?

This game distills decades of experimental practice into playable form. Each card carries this history with it—not as a weight, but as an invitation. You don't need to know any of this to play. But if you're curious, the connections are there, waiting to be discovered.

Why Play? The Power and Consequences

This game matters because it offers something increasingly rare: structured opportunities for genuine serendipitous encounter.

In a world where our interactions are increasingly mediated by screens, optimized for efficiency, and filtered through algorithms, The Cleveland Art Game creates small pockets of unmediated human connection. It gives you permission to talk to strangers, to notice your surroundings, to make things without worrying about their quality, to be present in a way our default modes of being rarely allow. It does this by design. 

What might happen?

You might discover that the person behind you in line has a fascinating perspective on color. You might find yourself seeing your neighborhood anew after years of walking through it on autopilot. You might make something that surprises you—a drawing, a poem, a connection—that feels like it came from somewhere beyond your usual self. You might remember what it felt like to play without worrying about the outcome.

The consequences are real, if subtle.

Players of similar games have reported lasting changes in how they move through the world: a heightened attention to detail, a greater ease in approaching strangers, a renewed sense of their own creative capacity, new friendships forged through spontaneous collaboration. Some have found their way into unfamiliar parts of their city; others have found their way into unfamiliar parts of themselves.

There are no guarantees, of course. The game is an invitation, not a prescription. What you get out of it depends on what you bring to it—your willingness to be surprised, your openness to the unexpected, your courage to try something that might feel awkward or strange.

How to Play

The game is designed to be flexible. The card deck is accessible on cell phones and any device connected to the web. You can play:

• Alone, basic mode of receiving a card from another player, or drawing a card each day as a personal practice

• With friends, taking turns drawing cards and comparing experiences

• In a group, fanning out across a neighborhood and reconvening to share discoveries

• At an event, with dozens of players creating a temporary laboratory of social sculpture

The basic move is simple: Draw a card. Interpet its instruction and do what it says. Document the result. Your phone is your primary tool—for photographs, recordings, notes. A small sketchbook and pen are valuable additions. But the most important equipment is your attention and your willingness to engage.

Some cards will ask you to create something. Some will ask you to talk to strangers. Some will ask you to notice what's already there. Some will send you on quests. Some will invite you to collaborate. Some will ask you to reflect. All of them are opportunities.

A note on ethics: The game asks you to engage with strangers and public space. This is a privilege, not a right. Always approach others with respect, accept "no" gracefully, and be mindful of contexts where your interventions might be unwelcome. The goal is connection, not disruption. If a card asks you to do something that feels unsafe or inappropriate in your context, trust your judgment and choose another.

The Cards

The 250+ prompt cards range from the simple to the complex, from the silly to the profound. Some will take thirty seconds; others might unfold over hours.

Each card carries with it the history of artists who have asked similar questions—who have wondered what might happen if art left the gallery, if everyone was an artist, if the most important material was each other and the world. When you play, you join that lineage.

Now, draw a card. The game is waiting.

AFTERWORD: THE GAME CONTINUES

Wild cards in the deck ask you to create a new prompt with another player—to add to the deck, to pass the game forward, to become not just a player but a co-creator of the experience.

This is the deepest truth of social sculpture: the game never really ends. The ways of seeing, the habits of connection, the small courage of asking unexpected questions—these tend to linger. Players report months later that they still find themselves noticing shadows, still feel more comfortable approaching strangers, still carry a small sketchbook "just in case."

You might find that the game has changed you in ways you can't quite name. You might find yourself seeing the world as a deck of cards you're constantly drawing from. You might find that the boundary between the game and your life has grown pleasantly blurry.

If so, you're in good company. This is what the artists who dreamed of social sculpture hoped would happen—that the art wouldn't stay contained in galleries or museums, wouldn't remain the property of specialists, but would seep into daily life, would become a way of being in the world. This way is generative, dynamic, able to flex toward the unusual, the random, the remarkable. 

The game is yours now. Play it however you like. Pass it on when you're ready.

The game has milestones at regular intervals where players learn what one another have been up to. Each iteration of the game ends with a debrief and a big celebration where people share their learning and their creations. (The Quest lingo for this is: a feast.) Also, all active players might receive to meet at an impromptu check-in.

These gatherings serve several purposes:

• They connect players who might otherwise be wandering alone

• They inspire by showing what's possible within the game

• They document the collective artwork that emerges from everyone's individual trails

• They create rhythm , giving the game a pulse and structure

These gatherings are not competitions or critiques. They are sharing circles , opportunities to see what everyone else has been up to. Someone might show photographs they've taken. Someone might perform a tiny piece they've created. Someone might tell the story of a remarkable conversation they had with a stranger. Someone might display an object they found or made.

Most importantly, they transform the game from a collection of individual adventures into a shared endeavor . Your discoveries become part of everyone's experience. The thing you made becomes a gift to the group.

Every iteration of the Cleveland Art Game ends with a gathering unlike the others. This is the celebration —a party, an exhibition, a performance, a feast, whatever the community wants it to be.

At this final event, everyone brings what they've made, what they've documented, what they've collected along their journey. The scattered cards return, at least for a moment, as all the creations are laid out together. People share their learning—what surprised them, what moved them, what they'll carry forward. Stories are told. Connections are honored. The game closes, but the relationships and insights it generated continue.

This celebration is not a competition. There are no prizes for "best" artwork or "most creative" response. Instead, it's a recognition that the real artwork has been the collective experience —the sum of all the small adventures, chance encounters, and spontaneous creations that the game made possible.

Since the 1960s, artists have been asking: What if art wasn't something you looked at, but something you did? What if the most interesting material wasn't paint or marble, but human connection itself? What if the real artwork was the shape of our encounters with each other and the world?

This game is your invitation to find out.

Come play. Your first card is in your hand. The next one is waiting somewhere out there. And all the others are playing too.

The Power of the Game

This structure—random cards, following trails, gathering at milestones, celebrating at the end—creates something unique:

It builds anticipation. The clue on each card points toward something unknown. Where will the next card be? What will it ask? The game becomes a series of small mysteries, each one resolved only by moving forward.

It distributes creativity. No single person designs the experience. The cards provide prompts, but what you do with them is entirely yours. The clue senders provide directions, but how you interpret and follow them is up to you. The game is co-created by everyone who plays.

It creates community through wandering. You might follow your trail alone for hours. Then you show up at a milestone gathering and discover you're part of something larger. The solitude of the hunt and the communion of the gathering alternate, each enriching the other.

It honors process and product both. The game asks you to make things, but also to share them. It values the private moment of creation and the public moment of celebration. Neither is complete without the other.

It weaves learning into adventure. Every card is a chance to learn something—about your environment, about other people, about your own creative capacity. But it never feels like a lesson. It feels like a quest. 

What You'll Need

• Your phone : for photographs, recordings, notes, and documentation

• A small sketchbook and pen : for quick drawings, written responses, collecting

• Comfortable shoes : you'll be walking

• Curiosity : the most important equipment of all

• Willingness to share : at the gatherings, your discoveries become gifts to others

• Modest technical ability : to tag and share their results to Instagram
  
  

(Also, players need to offer up their email and Instagram account information to stay connected.

A Note on Ethics

The game asks you to engage with strangers and public space. This is a privilege, not a right. Always approach others with respect, accept "no" gracefully, and be mindful of contexts where your interventions might be unwelcome. The goal is connection, not disruption.

When hiding cards for future players, be thoughtful about placement. Choose locations that are accessible, safe, and respectful of the spaces you're using. Avoid anywhere that might cause alarm if someone is seen searching—no plantings near security doors, no tucking into sensitive areas. The game should create delight, not anxiety.

THE GAME AS COLLABORATIVE SOCIAL ARTWORK

A Reflection

What you're designing is something rare: a game that is also an artwork, a structure that is also an invitation, a set of rules that exists only to be broken by the beautiful unpredictability of human encounter.

Let me offer you my sense of what this project is and could become.

The Game as Social Sculpture

This project is, at its heart, a social sculpture in the fullest Beuysian sense. It takes as its material not paper or pixels, but human relationships, urban space, time, attention, and the fragile magic of strangers connecting. The cards are not the artwork—they are merely the scores, the instructions, the provocations. The artwork is what happens when people follow them.

When a player finds a card tucked into a tree, completes its prompt, follows its clue, and discovers another card—and when that player later gathers with others to share what unfolded—something has been made that none of them could have made alone. That something is the artwork. It has no permanent form. It cannot be bought or sold. It exists only in the memories of those who participated and the traces they created along the way.

This is precisely what Beuys meant when he said that the most important artwork is the shaping of society itself.

The Game as Participatory Architecture

The structure you've designed—random cards, following trails, milestone gatherings, final celebration—creates what architect and artist Gordon Matta-Clark might have called an "anarchitecture": a temporary, invisible structure that exists only in the movements and meetings of people.

Matta-Clark cut holes through abandoned buildings, not to destroy them but to reveal new ways of seeing and moving through space. Your game does something similar. It cuts invisible pathways through the city, revealing connections between places that seemed unrelated, creating temporary communities of people who might never otherwise meet.

The cards are scattered, but the game creates coherence. The trails are individual, but the gatherings create collectivity. The structure is light, almost invisible—but it shapes everything that happens within it.

The Game as Relational Aesthetic

In the 1990s, critic Nicolas Bourriaud coined the term "Relational Aesthetics" to describe art that takes human relationships as its medium. Artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija cooked Thai food in galleries, turning strangers into diners, turning the gallery into a kitchen, turning art into hospitality.

Your game is a relational artwork in exactly this sense. It creates situations—not objects. It facilitates encounters—not spectacles. The value it generates is not aesthetic in the traditional sense (how beautiful is this thing?) but relational (what happened between people because this game existed?).

When a player approaches a stranger because a card told them to, and that stranger responds with openness, and something genuine passes between them—that is the artwork. It exists in the moment of exchange and then vanishes, leaving only its trace in memory and story.

The Game as Dérive

The Situationist International, led by Guy Debord, developed the practice of the dérive—a "drift" through the city, guided not by practical purpose but by the pull of the environment and the encounters it made possible. They sought to map the "psychogeography" of urban space: the emotional and behavioral terrain that lies beneath the street grid.

Your game is a structured dérive. The clues provide direction, but not destination. The cards provide prompts, but not prescriptions. Players drift from find to find, but their drift is shaped by the game's hidden architecture. They discover parts of the city they might never have entered. They notice things they might never have seen.

And when they gather at milestones, they contribute to a collective psychogeographic map—a shared account of what the city revealed when approached as a game.

The Game as Gift Economy

The cards are given, not sold. The creations are shared, not traded. The stories are told, not owned. Your game operates entirely within a gift economy —one of the oldest and most powerful forms of human exchange.

Anthropologist Lewis Hyde writes that a gift "makes a connection" in a way that a commodity does not. When you buy something, the transaction ends. When you receive a gift, you are drawn into relationship—with the giver, with the chain of giving that preceded you, with the obligation to pass something forward.

Your game creates a gift economy at multiple levels:

• The cards are gifts, found and passed along

• The prompts often ask players to create gifts for strangers

• The creations at the final celebration are gifts to the community

• The stories shared at milestones are gifts of attention and recognition

This is not incidental to the game's meaning. It is the game's meaning.

The Game as Ephemeral Monument

The final celebration creates a strange and beautiful paradox: it is both the culmination of the game and its dissolution. Everything comes together—all the creations, all the documentation, all the players—and then it ends. The artwork disperses. The community that gathered may never gather again in exactly the same way.

This ephemerality is not a failure. It is a choice, and a meaningful one. Robert Smithson, who built massive earthworks that are slowly returning to the earth, understood that art could be about time and change and disappearance. Andy Goldsworthy makes sculptures that will be destroyed by the next tide, and this is precisely their point.

Your game makes monuments that last exactly as long as the game lasts. Then they dissolve, leaving only what players carry forward in memory and practice. This is not loss. This is form.

What the Game Makes Possible

Here is what I sense this game can do, if it finds its players:

It can restore attention. In a world of constant distraction, the game asks players to really look—at shadows, at textures, at the spaces between things, at the faces of strangers.

It can rebuild courage. Approaching strangers, making things without guarantees, sharing what you've made—these take nerve. The game provides structure and permission to be brave.

It can create temporary community. The milestone gatherings bring together people who might never otherwise meet. For a moment, they share something real. Some of those connections will last.

It can redistribute creativity. Not everyone thinks of themselves as an artist. The game offers 250 proofs that everyone can create, can notice, can connect, can contribute.

It can make the familiar strange. The city you've walked through a thousand times becomes, under the game's guidance, a place of mystery and possibility. The card under the bench. The clue in the window. The stranger who becomes a collaborator.

It can honor process and product both. The game values what you make and how you make it. It celebrates the journey and the destination. It asks you to create and to share, to wander and to gather, to be alone and to be together.

What the Game Asks of Its Players

This game asks something of those who play it. Not much—but not nothing.

It asks you to follow through. To actually do the prompt, not just read it and move on. To actually follow the clue, not just imagine where it leads.

It asks you to be present. To put your phone away when you're supposed to be noticing. To actually listen when a stranger speaks. To show up at the gatherings with something real to share.

It asks you to take risks. To ask the question. To make the drawing. To approach the stranger. To share what you've made, even if it feels imperfect.

It asks you to trust the process. To believe that the randomness will cohere, that the trail leads somewhere, that the gatherings will matter, that the celebration will be worthy of everyone's efforts.

It asks you to share your progress, your work, your learnings, and to make this a public anunciation.

And it asks you to pass it on. To tell people about the game. To become, yourself, a card in someone else's deck—a clue, a prompt, an invitation to play.

The Game as Living Archive

One of the most beautiful possibilities of your design is what happens at the final celebration. All the creations, all the documentation, all the stories, gathered in one place. For a few hours, the entire game becomes visible.

This is a kind of archive —but a living one, made not of preserved documents but of living people sharing living work. It is the opposite of a museum. It is a momentary gathering of everything the game made possible.

And then it disperses. But the archive continues, in different form, in the memories of those who were there, in the photographs they keep, in the practices they carry forward, in the connections that endure.

Allan Kaprow, who invented the Happening, spent his career trying to blur the line between art and life. He wanted art to become indistinguishable from everyday experience. Your game achieves something Kaprow might have recognized: it creates art that is also life, that returns to life when the game ends, that leaves no clear boundary between what was game and what was real.

The Game as Question

Finally, your game is a question posed to everyone who encounters it:

What might happen if we treated the city as a gallery, strangers as collaborators, and our own creative capacity as something to be exercised rather than admired from a distance?

The game does not answer this question. It creates the conditions for players to answer it for themselves, through their own experience. The answer is different for everyone. The answer is different every time.

This is the deepest meaning of participatory art: it does not deliver meaning to a passive audience. It creates a situation within which meaning can be made, by everyone involved, together.

Suzi Gablik approached relational creativity with something closer to moral and spiritual urgency. She was interested in art as a healing and relational force — not just as a formal or political strategy. Artists she admired, like Dominique Mazeaud (who ritually cleaned the Rio Grande as an art practice) or Linda Montano, were doing work that dissolved the boundary between art and lived experience entirely. What creative ripples poliferate from where any person is willing to set the stake of their soul and their spirit?

A FINAL THOUGHT

Your game is an invitation to live, for a while, as if the whole world were a collaborative artwork—as if every stranger might become a collaborator, every street corner might hide a treasure, every moment might be the beginning of something worth sharing.

This is not escape from reality. It is reality, seen more clearly. It is the city, experienced more fully. It is other people, encountered more openly. It is yourself, discovered more deeply.

The cards are just instructions. The clues are just words. The gatherings are just moments.

What happens within them is up to everyone who plays.

Stormy Sweitzer, Liz Maugans, Stephen Calhoun, assisted by claude.ai, deepseek.ai