ConFab
ConFab, Offbeat Live Art Festival, Oxford, 2023 photo: Sharon Bennett
ConFab - an informal, private conversation or chat.
ConFab is an interactive art installation and event. Participants are facilitated to become ‘un-strangers’ and for a brief moment have a ‘confab’ before moving on into the rest of their day.
“Everyone in the world is a friend if you can just get them to see that you don’t want to be unfriends” (E.Nesbit, The Railway Children 1906)
Participants are given a sticker with a letter printed on it and a piece of paper with a matrix of conversation starters printed on. They wear the sticker as they move around the gallery building and when they meet someone who is also wearing a ConFab sticker they are invited to introduce themselves and start a conversation. The pairing of the letters on their stickers creates a grid reference that corresponds to the matrix of conversation starters/topics.
Poster design
Crambo is a rhyming game which was played as early as the 14th century under the name of the ABC of Aristotle. It is also known as capping the rhyme. In the days of the Stuarts it was very popular, and is frequently mentioned in the writings of the time. Thus William Congreve’s 1695 play Love for Love, contains the passage, “Get the Maids to Crambo in an Evening, and learn the knack of Rhyming.” The game is played with two or more players. First a player thinks of a word and tells the others what it rhymes with. The others do not name the actual word they guess but describe its meaning.
Example with three players.
Player one: “I know a word that rhymes with goat.”
Player two: “Does it protect a castle?”
Player one: “No, it is not a moat.”
Player three: “Does it sail?”
Player one: “No, it is not a boat.”
This proceeds until the right word is guessed.