{"id":52,"date":"2015-06-15T14:51:32","date_gmt":"2015-06-15T14:51:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/newwp\/?p=52"},"modified":"2015-12-03T08:50:41","modified_gmt":"2015-12-03T08:50:41","slug":"wellcome-play-spectacular","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/2015\/06\/15\/wellcome-play-spectacular\/","title":{"rendered":"Wellcome Spectacular: Play"},"content":{"rendered":"
PLAY SPECTACULAR GALLERY<\/i><\/b><\/div>\n
…<\/div>\n
The Play Spectacular was a free night of play at Wellcome Collection<\/a>\u00a0on Friday 3rd July. We filled the building with games, talks, words, puzzles and all sorts of\u00a0strange activities – the gallery above has pictures of most of the different things that were going on (not quite all)!<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

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The Wellcome is an amazing building, and so well-suited to play – it’s already filled with strange sightlines, enticing corners, and interactive exhibits. We did our best to take advantage of that, while fitting in among the existing exhibitis.<\/p>\n

On Level -1 we had a series of talks from biologist Isabel Behncke Izquierdo, curator Irving Finkel and journalist Leigh Alexander. We also had a room full of games related\u00a0to intimacy. Some of them were about sex, and some of them were just about hanging out and connecting with people – Stick Shift<\/em> by Robert Yang; Egg Boss<\/em> by G.P. Lackey, Paloma Dawkins and Ylang Ylang; Sext Machine<\/em> by Mike Lazer-Walker; An Encounter in the Woods<\/em> by Sam Sheffield; Campfire<\/em> by Florian Decupper; and Plug & Play<\/em> by Etter Studio.<\/p>\n

On the first floor, in the Medicine Man gallery, we had Secret Habitat<\/em> by Strangethink and Sembl<\/em> by Catherine Styles – games about galleries and gallery exhibits for the most traditional gallery space in the building. Elsewhere across the floor, we played\u00a0games that sit between physical and digital. The space opened with two different distorted billiards games, one physical (Ed Saperia’s Home Turf<\/em>) and one digital (Nerial’s Magic Shot<\/em>). From there, we had Ludosity’s upcoming Progress<\/em>, Robin Baumgarten’s Line Wobbler<\/em>, Alistair Aitcheson’s Codex Bash<\/em>, and Deep Dark Hole’s Elbow Room<\/em>. Finally, in the studio – decorated with astroturf for the occasion – we had a programme of three sport-style games, Steven Goodwin’s Reversed Reversi<\/em>, Ivan Gonzalez’s Goggle<\/em> and Brian Peterson and Arkadium’s Light Fight<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Reading Room on the second floor was filled with\u00a0games relating to words – old-fashioned parlour games; a pile of game books to nestle into the armchairs with; Emily Short’s San Tilapian Studies<\/em>; game poems from Hannah Nicklin, Harry Giles and Adam Dixon; Squinky’s Interruption Junction<\/em>; and new Twine games from Alice Maz, pyun-pyun and Nina Freeman.<\/p>\n

On the top floor there was a board game lounge. New works (our own Racing Line<\/em> and Nicolas Maravitti’s Tag Mixing)<\/em>\u00a0sat alongside a mix of modern board games and reproductions of old games from Wellcome’s digital collection.<\/p>\n

Finally, roaming around the whole building we had two more new commissions: Hilary O’Shaugnessy’s Not for the Fainthearted<\/em>, putting players in the role of museum invigilators, and Block Stop’s Final Call<\/em>, where players direct a performer elsewhere in the building as she attempts to commit a covert assassination.<\/p>\n

We’d spent a lot of time thinking about how to coax people into play – but in the end, we shouldn’t have worried! Everyone was so\u00a0willing to look and think and comment and join in – engaging with the games and with Wellcome Collection’s ongoing exhibits throughout the night.\u00a0We had an amazing time. Thank you to everyone who showed a game, and everyone who came along and played.<\/p>\n

All images copyright Wellcome Collection.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PLAY SPECTACULAR GALLERY … The Play Spectacular was a free night of play at Wellcome Collection\u00a0on Friday 3rd July. We filled the building with games, talks, words, puzzles and all sorts of\u00a0strange activities – the gallery above has pictures of most of the different things that were going on (not quite all)!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":207,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,2,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":235,"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions\/235"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}