MyLaws Mad Libs
MyLaws Mad Libs is a collaborative story-writing project. Using the format of the word game Mad Libs, we have created a version using the Bylaws of TfL. Through the game the players make the legal language absurd. Printed on postcards, these Mad Libs have been distributed to Tube riders, who are encouraged to play the game and then mail their completed stories to the TfL Lost Property Office, from where we hope to re-collect them. It is an intervention into the space between the law and its practice, allowing Tube users to regain ownership over the language that attempts to isolate and control them.
A Mad Lib is a children's game in which key words are removed from a short story. Players blindly insert their own words (the more imaginative, the better) into the story, dramatically changing its original character, making it absurd, non-sensical, and often, very funny. It is a symbolic performance of the human will to irrationality, imagination, and play within the strict system of language.
The TfL Byelaws, which few people have read, have permeated the space of the London Underground in the form of fragmented prohibitions, informal codes and habits. They contribute to the culture of constant self-policing and anxious docility that pervades the network.
Since the ByeLaws are not posted in the stations, this intervention makes the language that governs our actions visible and material within the space of the Tube. A Mad Lib is system we didn't create and we don't own, but which we are taking some control over, if only through language.
We hope our Mad Libs will question to what extent users feel control, agency, or ownership over the space of the Tube. We have addressed our Mad Lib forms to the TfL Lost Property Office. It is important to us that after inviting Tube users to make absurd TfL's neatly formulated laws, the products are returned to TfL, so that they have a chance to respond. Hopefully the Baker Street Office will find them funny, and they will recognise the stories as their ByeLaws, which have been reclaimed by the users. We have not asked permission to use their ByeLaws (or their font, for that matter). We are curious if they will attempt to challenge our transgression of their ownership, our use of their property.
We will have to travel to the Lost Property Office to reclaim the forms. What interactions will this produce, and what does our act of reclaiming a work that has traveled so far out of our control mean?
A Mad Lib is a children's game in which key words are removed from a short story. Players blindly insert their own words (the more imaginative, the better) into the story, dramatically changing its original character, making it absurd, non-sensical, and often, very funny. It is a symbolic performance of the human will to irrationality, imagination, and play within the strict system of language.
The TfL Byelaws, which few people have read, have permeated the space of the London Underground in the form of fragmented prohibitions, informal codes and habits. They contribute to the culture of constant self-policing and anxious docility that pervades the network.
Since the ByeLaws are not posted in the stations, this intervention makes the language that governs our actions visible and material within the space of the Tube. A Mad Lib is system we didn't create and we don't own, but which we are taking some control over, if only through language.
We hope our Mad Libs will question to what extent users feel control, agency, or ownership over the space of the Tube. We have addressed our Mad Lib forms to the TfL Lost Property Office. It is important to us that after inviting Tube users to make absurd TfL's neatly formulated laws, the products are returned to TfL, so that they have a chance to respond. Hopefully the Baker Street Office will find them funny, and they will recognise the stories as their ByeLaws, which have been reclaimed by the users. We have not asked permission to use their ByeLaws (or their font, for that matter). We are curious if they will attempt to challenge our transgression of their ownership, our use of their property.
We will have to travel to the Lost Property Office to reclaim the forms. What interactions will this produce, and what does our act of reclaiming a work that has traveled so far out of our control mean?