Card Game - Perastar

About This Exhibit

At its core, the Card Game project explores the space between art object, game, and designed system. The finished cards are simultaneously illustrations, physical artifacts, components of gameplay, and expressions of an underlying language and cultural schema. Their development was an iterative process in which aesthetics and mechanics cyclically influenced one another, allowing new games and new possibilities to emerge from the same foundational theory and set of visual elements.

The games developed from the cards are also part of the artistic process rather than simply their intended application. Different games—including Cosmic Ladder, Spiral Shell, Big Bang, Best Palace, and Path—served as experiments for discovering what the cards can do and how their underlying relationships can be manipulated.

The project also explores how relationships between people and cultural expressions can emerge through gameplay. The early studies, prototypes, printing plates, substrate experiments, and finished cards presented here document that evolution from an initial visual idea into a functioning, adaptable game system.