Leon Ransmeier showed up at Governor’s Island in 2012 with pieces like this ::

Leon Ransmeier’s objects guide interaction – they seem to say that there’s a right way and a wrong way to use them. The piggy bank above, for instance, has a single hole and no plug. The only way to access your money once this bubble-looking thing’s full, is to shatter it.

Of course, I’m pulling all of these pictures and thoughts from the article in Metropolis entitled “Tangible Actions,” but they line up with some of the strategies I use in narrative conflict escalation and… well… my Dungeons and Dragons campaigns.

For example, I once made a DnD campaign that included a tree house city that could be accessed in two ways – one of them worked almost like a cattle run, leading the entire party to their slaughter. The other was much more subtle – a doorway opened only by the right sequence of notes on a wind chime that hung from the tree branch. That kind of forced-hand thinking goes back to early teachers who said, “If the rules don’t say you can’t, you probably can.”

In your art, are there ways to force the hand of your audience/reader/participant?

And then are there ways to reimagine that force so that the attentive will find a way through? For mystery writers, this is second nature – it’s the set of clues hiding behind red herrings. But for painters, it might be color. I found this image by a guy named Michael Scott. It’s simple ::

…but by forced perspective and arranging objects, it forces you into a tangible action: seeing the most dominant color – red – last.

Finding myself inspired by Ransmeier today, and finding myself amplifying creative restrictions to liberate my audience towards a specific path by using tangible actions. After all, without restrictions to prevent us from becoming who we aren’t, we cannot be free to become who we are.

How do you make tangible actions? How do you guide your audience?

And do you leave backdoors for the curious?

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Free stories for readers and encouragement for artists ::