Welcome to MOMA

Art in the Air

Art in the Air is an evolving & expansive planet-wide community arts project that explores the intersections between fantasy, reality and the digital realm.

Access to the project is facilitated and co-ordinated via this wiki. Participants in the project engage by making, playing and sharing art, stories and games around three themes:

• aviation
• art
• the fictional island nation of Fafifi.

The Museum as a Work of Art

FAFIFI: Art, Propaganda & Otherness is an essay by David Rose exploring the challenges presented by issues such as racism, colonisation and cultural appropriation in an international narrative-driven creative project like MOMA. To read the essay please click on the image above

The Museum of Moving Art (MOMA) is the primary output of the Art in the Air community arts project.

MOMA is itself a work of art, more specifically a composite artwork (an artwork comprised of other artworks). It takes form in the physical world as an expansive and evolving matrix of visual & performance art, pop-up spaces, installations, stories, digital media and a set of inter-related RPGs (role playing games: both physical table-top games and interactive computer games). These elements are all crated collaboratively by participants in the Art in the Sky community arts project.

The Museum of Moving Art also exists in the imagination of participants role-playing in the Art in the Air story world.

Make, Play, Share

Participants in the project engage by making, playing and sharing art and games around the theme of art in the sky. MOMA brings together art and aviation by means of a fictional narrative centred on a big museum in the small island nation state of Fafifi.

MOMA was originally conceived of as "street art with theatrical tendencies" and has a strong role-playing component. Early and obvious roles to play were those of museum visitor, artist and curator (along with other roles associated with the existence of museums). As the project evolved however, MOMA found its home on Fafifi and the gaming element became more developed - this opened up a whole new world and a greater variety of potential fantasies, particularly those involving aviation and travel.

If any of this makes any sense to you and you are interested, you can get involved right now by simply creating an account here, then you can contribute to this wiki as you explore it. You may find other players, participants & collaborators currently online at our Discord server (where you can chat in real time, share screens and have voice/video calls if you like).

Place-holder graphic non-commercially appropriated from the Disney Corporation

Community Arts Participation

Level 3 - David playing Loretta Monetta with Jack & Danousha at TAFE

Having fun, socializing and being creative helps to keep individuals healthy and communities strong.

A major goal of the project is to facilitate face-to-face social interaction by using digital technology to bring people together for safe, creative and rewarding social experiences. We are not against computer gaming - far from it - we are though concerned with the escalating growth of digital media addiction and its attendant social isolation in the virtual. The recent global pandemic has highlighted the need to address the importance of psychosocial health as a key determinant in the health of individuals and the societies in which they live. We know that by playing and being creative, humanity thrives!

Art and artists always have important roles in communities and in societies, especially in times of crisis. The educated artist understands that "personal is political"; therefore accessibility, inclusiveness and diversity are key elements influencing game and project design here.

A straight-friendly Queer Space

One of the main design goals of the MOMA project, is to create a straight-friendly Queer Space in the international aviation & online gaming communities. It is natural for any minority within a dominant society to seek out their own and find places within the whole where - for that time and place - they are not the minority; and where they are not subject to the often subconscious oppression of the dominant society. It is a great honour for an "other" to be invited into these safe community spaces, and if you have been invited, it means you have been given some trust that you will be respectful and careful.

Pacifica & First Nations people in Oceania

We warmly welcome and encourage the participation of First Nations communities and individuals in the design and development of this project which has been initiated in Oceania and has a fictional narrative set there. If you are of First Nations/Islander heritage and wish to take a leading role, please feel free to create content at this wiki and in the Discord platform. Contact David Rose, he will be happy to help you get started.

Fafifi: an imaginary island in Oceania

The Museum of Moving Art exists in a story world, and in this fantasy there is actually a beautiful light-filled museum built into a cliff face on the Coral Sea island of Fafifi.

Fafifi is a special island with a remarkable and unique history and culture. It has developed a booming economy based on the arts, organic agriculture, international tourism, aviation and education. Fafifis have achieved social and economic success by managing to protect and maintain their traditional cultural values & ethics, by promoting personal & national sovereignty and by successfully resisting European colonisation. How this came to be might be one of the many stories that unfold in our Story World - along with adventures, wins, loves, losses and much much more.

Flight Mode: a table-top Game

Amelia Earhardt: pioneering aviator - a real source of inspiration.

A physical table-top board game called Flight Mode is well into development with a prototype expected to be play tested in the coming months. Check out the Game Development Document (GDD) here.

The more you play, the deeper you go... you might for example find out how famous aviator Amelia Earhardt found her way into the MOMA story world, and how she is honoured on the Island of Fafifi.

MSFS 2020 Addon: Research & Development

Currently good progress is being made researching the possibility of utilizing the dramatic and cinematic potential of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 as a way of playing in the MOMA story world. It looks very promising! So far we have determined that some of the preliminary design ideas are indeed feasible (if not ambitious): a fictitious island integrated into the sim and interactive cabin animations involving flight attendants & passengers.

How do you play?

You don't have to be an artist to play at MOMA, but if you want to, you can have fun pretending.

Entry level games allow new players to have fun exploring a variety of roles, activities and story-lines (hint: the easiest role is Museum Visitor - you're doing it already). In more advanced levels of the physical stream (in real life), gameplay is directed to the creation and placement of pop-up installations and structures which have the capacity to move. This is co-ordinated by some players acting as curators and involves face-to-face interaction and outreach to artists in local communities.

Digital art is also being created, curated and exhibited here at this wiki and on the personal devices of participants in the Art in the Sky project.

Stories created in the physical games can be played out in the digital realm, manifesting as gameplay in open world simulation games such as Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 (via the use of addons & mods created here at MOMA). The opposite is also true, narratives created in the digital realm can find their way into the physical stream manifesting as street theatre, physical artworks or as gameplay in table-top games.

To start playing now, create an account here and begin by exploring the links on the left. You may find other players currently online at our Discord server.

We need Faces!

Here's a simple graphic arts challenge to create and upload an image to be part of the Flying Art table-top game. The Gameplay Sheets in Level 1 need a varied selection of "passport photos"; part of the gameplay involves players creating a character to go with the "photo". Because it is an art game and supposed to be fun, they don't actually have to be proper photographic images, they just need to be portraits of faces (they could be collage, drawings, paintings, digital art - framed in the style of a passport mug shot). If you would like to contribute a selfie or some other "passport photo" creation, simply login and select Upload file from the Tools menu in the left sidebar. (Please put _Passport_Level_1 in the title of the File in your upload window.)

Coming Soon: take the Random Image challenge

Replace that blank canvas!

Work-in-progress on this idea....

Would you like to have your image on that wall on the welcome page of MOMA?

Can you use layers, crop and re-size in Photoshop, GIMP or some other image editing app?

Watch this space. A simple wiki art challenge coming soon ;-)