TL;DR: go here.
Exciting announcement! Jake Tucker, on the strength of a few people’s recommendations (which is awesome) has invited me to be VideoBrains‘ new resident speaker. For those of you who don’t know, VideoBrains is a (currently) London-based monthly night of talks around games. There’s a different theme each month, this month’s was All’s Fair In Love and Games (about love, sex, and games) and next month’s is Non Player Characters (and however the speakers are going to respond to the theme of NPCs)
But as it’s not just a one off talk, but 6 months as resident speaker, I have the opportunity to try out something a bit inventive. So I’m picking a theme of my own! Starting in June I’m going to do a monthly series of talks on the psychogeography of games.
If you’ve not come across it before, psychogeography (which my autocorrect has learnt 3 different spellings of, well done me.) is a really chewy word for how our environments make us feel; how they effect us. I’m interested in how where we come from affects what we make – so what I’m going to do is spend time with great people who make games walking in a place that is where they live, work, or is otherwise important to them.
Each month I’ll make a new performance/talk/thing in response to that experience. Each month’s thing will respond entirely to the experience of walking with game designers.
Examples of people I have spoken to about doing the thing:
- Ed Key (Proteus): a walk through the Lake District where he lives and walks, talking about his relationship to the fell landscape, his ideas on rewilding, and the affect nature has in and on his work.
- George Buckenham (@v21 – Cubes, Wild Rumpus, Mutazione): George grew up in far West London – near Richmond. He now lives in East London (Stepney). He and I will walk from where he lives now, to where he grew up, without once referencing a map. We won’t stop until we’ve made it.
Each one will be different. Each thing I make will be different.
There will be 3 men and 3 women (I have 6 people in mind, just haven’t had all the conversations yet) 2 of whom are based outside the UK, 2 in London, and two in Not London.
And the results will take in p much all of my practice, I might make interactive sound based performance for a crowd, I might do a new piece of storytelling or spoken word inspired by our conversations, it might just be a photo tour of where we went and what we saw.
If you’re interested in the sound of this, you can help, too. I’ve set up a Patreon – which is sort of monthly subscription crowdfunding – you can cancel at any time, but if you choose to put $5 or so my way each month, it’ll go towards supporting me do a really cool thing, which is going to take up a bit more time than an average talk (4-5 days a month I reckon). Plus if you do choose to back me in making this thing then you’ll get all of the inside knowledge – who I’m walking with, all of the source material and thoughts that those who see the videos of the final pieces won’t see, and there are a couple of cool rewards, plus a zine I’ll make of the 6 pieces that you can get at the end of this year/beginning of the next.
So yeah, read more about that on Patreon and look out for me at VideoBrains from June!