Evasion and Pursuit

This emerged from a body of work I was creating while researching the loose connections between Marco Polo and the history of his early Renaissance text and the children's game which uses the venetian merchant as it's namesake. 

Inspired by Marco Polo as a bridge between the game mechanics of action and reaction and the histories of cross-cultural call and response, the production of this video followed a series of call and response actions between myself and AI models that I trained and tuned with archives of pool sport photography. 

Popularized in the 20th century, “Marco Polo”, is a children’s folk game where one player, with eyes closed, calls out “Marco” and listens for the location of other players who call out “Polo” in response. This game is preceded by a rich history of games rooted from around the world that are based on continuous evasion and pursuit by a central player who momentarily cannot see. The game’s namesake, Marco Polo, was an Italian explorer. Marco Polo probed into landscapes along the Silk Road, sending portrayals of these cultures to the west. These portrayals shaped a trajectory of actions that spawned notions of race and western superiority that irreconcilably influence the world we contend with today. Perhaps the game’s connection to this man is arbitrary. Perhaps the game is inspired by the man who probed into the unknown in service of a culture who could not see; or perhaps the game is inspired by the experiences that ensued of the touched and untouched, seen and unseen, or heard and unheard. Perhaps. 

The history of this name's claim is lost in the disorienting waters of backyard pools on hot summer days; swallowed by a history of continuous evasion and pursuit.