Democracy in Moment

What is democracy?

In order to answer this question. The Taiwanese performance artist Lan Hugh initiated this interactive game and provoked the participants to act in their own way.

The curator of this performance, who designed and prepared the game with Lan Hugh is Danyang Zhao, a Chinese documentary media artist and intercultural moderator.

Lan Hugh and Danyang Zhao are both migration in Europe and have been active on the stage of contemporary art in Berlin for almost ten years. Having different political experiences from European, the two artists perceive the connection between human nature and democracy, and reflect to their perception constantly during the process of integration in Europe. This is why they picked an objective perspective as outsiders and investigated how democracy works as a social system.

The game is designed to simulate a democratic system. The participants will be divided into three groups randomly after they entered into the performance space. By playing the game, each group has chance to attract or draw group members from other groups: when the time runs up, the group which owns the most members will win.

This is the video document of what happened during the game, how people followed the rules, broke rules, cheated, trusted, and how they were engaged with dialogues and discussions of political topics: globalization and isolationism, basic income, refugees integration and digitalization.

The groups were identified by different colors: orange, blue, and yellow.

The members in orange group acted as anarchists. The rules and the idea of being the winner are less important than enjoying the moment in the game. Open, flexible, and melting cultures are the words to describe them. By joining the other groups, they gained the temporary victory, but at the same time they also lost their identity: the Orange disappeared.

The Blue members followed the rules strictly. They had never cheated. They didn’t have much fun and beers, but they were proud of being themselves as a team and enjoyed discussing the topics with each other. A profound consensus kept them together. At the end, the Blue won the game. However, the winning blue was not the Blue from the beginning any more. It contained the characteristics of the Orange and the Yellow. The interesting part was, by the time the Blue were announced as winner, the original blue members were still discussing all the topics.

The Yellow members had made a great emphasis on the hidden rules of the game and tried to win. They were once the biggest group when the orange members joined them. At the end, one yellow lady made a drama because she has her own political belief and resisted to join in the Blue with the majority. Several blue members started a massive research in order to find her name and force her to join in the Blue.

When the time ran out, the reason why her name could not be found was disclosed: she did not register herself as citizen in the game administration.
The judge of the game decided that she should remain as the last opposite part. The flaw of the administration was tolerated, because without it, the voice of minority cannot be heard. This tolerance make it possible that individuals would be able to go forward and make changes.