Holly Gramazio |

Browsing Articles Written by

Holly Gramazio

An Instructional Guide to Awkward Moments

An Instructional Guide to Awkward Moments is a booklet of short games about awkwardness and intimacy, designed for the Science Gallery in Dublin.

Each game takes a different moment of a potential failed connection and turns it into something playable – whether that’s eye contact with people on the street, conversations with familiar strangers, a phone conversation with a lot of lag, people-watching through windows, scrolling through old text messages, or desperately signalling from the top of a tower in a terrible post-apocalypse.

Some of them can be played within the gallery itself, responding to the space and the other works in the show; some can be played in the space around it; some aren’t currently playable but might be in the future (few of us currently have an astronaut wife on Mars, for example).

An Instructional Guide to Awkward Moments is part of Intimacy, running at Science Gallery Dublin until 24 February 2019.

As I Was Saying…

Goodrich Castle (photo above by Robert Moranelli) is an amazing place – a set of walls and towers and castle fragments that Wordsworth considered the “noblest ruin in Herefordshire”, now cared for by English Heritage.

And this summer, we made a game for it, to run as part of the castle’s on-site family interpretation. If you visit, you can check it out for free from the visitor centre – something to play while you walk around and explore.

It’s a card game for families and groups to play as they explore the castle, called As I Was Saying. It draws on the real history of the castle, and the people who were there around 1296 and 1297 – from countesses to clerks and coachmen.

Inverted Operas

Holly was recently in Frankfurt to take part in Playsonic, a festival at Alte Oper investigating the overlap between games and music. Our contribution: “Inverted Operas”, a collaboration with composer David Helbich and architect Rosario Talevi.

“Inverted Operas” took music from outside the opera house, and placed it in the public square outside. Across the weekend, visitors found moveable mirrored sculptures inspired by elements of the opera house’s interior decoration; performers with many different instruments; and cards that they could use to guide them as they listened to the music.