Inter Playing with Performance/Performing Play – Creating hybrid experiences at the fringes of video games and performance
The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland has a weekly series of research talks, exploring different areas of the creative world and performing arts.
The event on October 12 at 18:00 features Dr Mona Bozdog, Lecturer in Immersive Experience Design at the University of Abertay.
The talk will focus on Mona’s doctoral project which teased out the opportunities and challenges of the cross-disciplinary practice of performance and videogame design.
Mona will present the two playful outcomes of this project, the Inchcolm Project and Generation ZX(X), and discuss how these types of hybrid approaches to design can enrich the fields of game design and contemporary performance, by opening new areas for practice and new design frameworks, strategies and techniques.
The Inchcolm Project
This project brought the video game Dear Esther to life on Inchcolm island in the Firth of Forth. During the two hour experience on Inchcolm the audience/players wander freely on the island encountering geo-tagged audio, live music, performers and installation spaces evocative of the game world, a playthrough of the game projected in the 12th century Inchcolm abbey, and an orchestral performance of the video game’s soundtrack (composed by Jessica Curry, arranged by Luci Holland and David Jamieson, performed by Mantra Collective).
Generation ZX(X)
Generation ZX(X) was a thank you, from the current generation to the ladies who worked on the assembly lines of the TIMEX factory in Dundee in the 1980s, who through their labour, and unaware of their contribution, gave Dundee a new future: the video game industry.
The event brought together performance, historical accounts, video and arcade games, and live music.
The performance drew attention to three core aspects surrounding the TIMEX factory in Dundee: the gender dynamics (the vast majority of the assembly line workers were women whereas the vast majority of early coders and game makers were men), the heritage of the ZX Spectrum (the manufacturing of the ZX Spectrum in Dundee contributed to the city’s strong video game industry and education), and its contribution to the rise of the technology-savvy generation Z (Abertay’s video games courses are the first and still a world leader).
Playing With Performance / Performing Play will be live captioned and BSL interpreted.
Tickets are free. Register here to attend online.
Photo by Jacob Mejicanos on Unsplash