Object oriented poker was a project that i worked on with 3 other Goldsmiths students, Louisa Cranmore, Luke Thompson, and Annett Klich.

We were set a brief to exchange an object which we had bought for £1 up and to end with an object or set of objects that were more “valuable” than our initial investment. The object we were trading up from was 100 sheets of 70gsm white paper.

We realised that our paper was fairly worthless and decided that we would have to engineer or design a system where our worthless paper was more valuable.

Our system looked at ideas of gambling as a system of exchange and was a way of questioning exchange and systems of value. Rather than a person simply giving and receiving something of roughly the same value in exchange, there was an added element of risk, which meant that the outcome was unpredictable, i.e. every player has to put an object into the pot to get something back but there is no guarantee they will get anything back at all.

We were looking at introducing an element of barter to the game, where at each hand there would be the need to discuss the value of objects and combinations of objects, this was again a more organic system, allowing each objects value to increase and decrease throughout the game.