In his Rules of the Game series from 1995, the Houston-based artist Charles Wiese used original and collected images to create these digitally manipulated photographic collages. Centered around the theme of play and recreation, titles include: Compulsories, Swing Shift, Night Shift, Sympathetic Pregnancy, The Judges, Corporate Incentives, and Performance Review.

Three additional related photographs (The Life of the Party, The Embryonic Sea, and The Iron Man-Science Makes a Better Athlete) complement the Rules of the Game series. Wiese’s photographic prints may appear crude by today’s standards, but the images were created at a pivotal time in the development of digital photography. In the early 1990s, software and hardware to create these images was becoming more available to professionals such as Wiese as well as to the general public. The artist was an early practitioner of what was then the emerging field of art production, with minimal historical context.