It’s that time of year again when we start putting together our program for the festival and looking for speakers, games, volunteers, and associate producers. Read on for more detail on how you can get involved in Freeplay 2012. Continue reading | 1 Comment
Normally around this time – when it becomes necessary to announce that Freeplay is actually happening – we take a look back and reflect on the changes since the very first Freeplay and try to place what’s happening around us in some sort of context.
We don’t want to do that this year.
Instead, we want to look around at the moment we’re in now, reflect on that, see how it’s informed the festival, and then turn our eyes towards the future. Six months isn’t that long away, but beyond that there will be another six, and then another six, and then another, and that’s where the amazing stuff lives, not in the past, but in the future – and where we think the 2012 Freeplay festival theme fits into that. Continue reading
We had to get permission, but we’re glad we did because it means our Playday on the 29th will be spreading out from NGV Studio and into Federation Square, who, it just so happens, will also be playing Pac Man on the big screen in the Main Square! Continue reading
On October 29th (this Satuday!), we’ll once again be turning the National Gallery of Victoria Studio into a place of play. This time, we’ve teamed up with Pop Up Playground and Coney to run a bunch of games, some playful secret agent missions, and a few surprises that you’ll just have to come along to check out. Continue reading
Over the weekend, we ran a bit of a game jam at the NGV Studio.
On Saturday, we had people come through and draw pictures that we’ve now stuck on the wall of the gallery, and which we’ll leave there until the end of the show in November.
Click through to see the pictures & play the games Continue reading | 1 Comment
Coming out of Freeplay were really concrete and tangible themes of inclusion, accessibility, gender, and recognition, which we hadn’t really given space within the festival itself to properly explore. We didn’t want to wait a whole year before doing that though so we decided to put our feelers out and see if any other groups would be interested in exploring those topics in relation to gaming. Continue reading
Time warps in strange ways after a festival. We know it’s been a month since Freeplay because our calendar says so – and also because we’re gearing up for…
Game/Play at NGV Studio Continue reading | 4 Comments
This year’s Freeplay is barely over and we’re already turning our heads to our next project with the National Gallery of Victoria in their newest gallery space, NGV Studio.
We’re helping to curate a mix of the digital, analogue, playful, artistic, and creative from Saturday 24 September – Sunday 23 October, and we’re looking for art, games and people to showcase their work. Continue reading
Thanks to everyone who submitted a slide for our (un)Keynote this year and who then generously gave us permission to put their slides up online. They’re a mix of insight, wisdom, call to arms, reflection, science, and art, and reflect the individual views of their creators, but stitched together perfectly illustrate our theme of Handmade. Continue reading
When we came up with our theme of Handmade for this year’s festival we sketched out a list of ideas that it meant to us, one of which was the realisation that a festival wasn’t actually a concrete thing without an audience. In many ways the process of designing a festival is like designing a game. You’re creating a possibility space for an experience – an experience that becomes unique for everyone who comes along, influenced by their focus, their desires, their relationship to the speakers or the topic or each other, and things as simple as where they sit in the room. Continue reading