Play the System was an exhibition exploring cybernetics, situationism and the environment, featuring the work of multidisciplinary artist Agnes Little and the composer Louary. Through collaborative working and a shared cybernetic methodology, works of sound and sculpture were commissioned and made using deep listening, walking and mapping practices. Each artist respectively made works based on their sensory and affective mapping,  of routes they had each walked, through Queen’s Park based on the readings of a decibel meter below 50db taken by Little, and subsequently the same recorded route taken by Louary and mapped through field recordings. This formed a co-generative process creating systemic feedback loops based on data both experientially embodied and affectively driven, through digital and organic means.

It was an immersive interdisciplinary exhibition with a participatory dimension that explored themes of embodiment, listening and the affective mapping of one’s surroundings. It also engaged with notions of dwelling and being-at-home-in-the-world and connecting with the environment in new ways through the situationist derive or drift, as a practice of wandering through urban space to experience its emotional and psychological effects. To do so drew upon systems theories, situationist texts, Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, Walking as Embodied Worldmaking, Pauline Oliveros’ writings on Deep Listening and Tim Ingold’s Perception of the Environment.

The intention of the exhibition was to explore counter cartographies of the environment, prompting viewers to creatively engage in new perceptions of the environment and create new systems of meaning, as an affective response to a technologically saturated world where we are the data, and our attention is divided and drawn to devices. The spatial layout of the exhibition was then arranged for people to wander around the exhibition in a non-linear fashion, encountering the works in an order and from a perspective of their intuitive choosing. The exhibition extended this cybernetic methodology to the viewer by their becoming part of the system in their own non-linear wandering through the space, engaging directly with themes of home and dwelling, and generating their own affective and experiential data.