On May 13th, the day preceding DiGRA conference, we are going to host a workshop with the kind collaboration of Leuphana Arts Program. The workshop intends to stimulate a debate about the increasing mutual influence and contaminations between the artistic context and the production of game environments. Game designers often experiment with new forms of storytelling, urban interventions, network-based communications and experimental interfaces. These explorations communicate with the artistic context, are presented by curators and art critics and make an impact in the media art sector. The workshop invites two participants who have significantly worked at the intersection between these two worlds.
Lindsay Grace is Associate Professor in Digital Games and Persuasive Play at the American University of Washington, DC and director of the American University Game Lab. Lindsay has been curating several game art exhibitions, including ‘Indies from the Middle’ at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington (2014) and two editions of Blank Arcade, an exhibition of creative game art (the second edition of Blank Arcade will take place in Lüneburg in the days following the workshop).
Lindsay Grace’s creative practice is focused on uses of interactive media to explore cultural standards. His work primarily pursues educational experiences and editorial critique of the social relationship between computers and humans. His game design projects have received awards from the “Games for Change” Festival, “Meaningful Play”, “Advances in Computer Entertainment”, and “Gamescape”. He has published more than 30 papers, articles and book chapters on games since 2009. His creative work has been selected for showcases in more than eight countries and 12 US-American states, including New York, Paris, Rio De Janeiro, Singapore, Istanbul, Sao Paulo, Chicago and Vancouver.
Pérola Bonfanti was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In the last years she has been living in between her home town, New York City, and Vienna. Working in multimedia collaborations and developing interactive urban art projects, she specializes in the concept of game and site-specific platforms. Notable game experiments include 13 Portals, an urban art game played between digital and real environments through the East Village of New York City (2013). Another notable work is 4 Aces, an alternate reality game that took place in Vienna, Austria, and involved many important institutions such as the Albertina Museum and the Art History Museum, received a commission and technical support from the Ars Electronica organization, and was sponsored by CC Real. The urban installation of 4 Aces took place at the open spaces of the Hofburg Palace.
Daughter of an important Italo-Brazilian neo-expressionist painter, Gianguido Bonfanti, she grew up in an artistic environment. Interested in other artistic languages, such as music and literature, Pérola Bonfanti graduated in Music at the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro in 2009. Since 2001, she has been part of the visual art school, Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, as a student, working with many important teachers, and later as a supervisor in the Programa Fundamentação sponsored by the Secretary of Culture of the State of Rio de Janeiro. Pérola has worked with private and non-private collectors since 2011 in countries such as United States, Austria, France, Israel, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil.
The workshop will take place on May 13th, from 1pm until 7pm, in Konferenzraum n.332 at Sülztorstraße 21-25, 21335 Lüneburg. If you want to join please write to: paolo.ruffino@inkubator.leuphana.de.