Short Abstract:

What’s Your Game explores the potential of playfulness and movement for approaching public space in anthropology and art. We invite participants to explore the streets of Belfast on-site and online. We engage in collaborative fieldwork, generating dialogue about hope, transformation and public space.

Long Abstract:

Playful approaches help us to leave known paths, take a step outside and explore our practice from different perspectives. The idea of the game creates a safe space for curiosity and tinkering that can ignite new insights in art and anthropology.

What’s Your Game opens a transdisciplinary and international dialogue about spatial experience through playfulness and movement. Our group assembles various disciplines like anthropology, visual art, literature and performance. We experiment with (1) employing the framework of a game to provoke unexpected experience in public spaces (2) gathering and analysis of ethnographic data 'in motion', (3) the use of digital methods in mobile research and (4) the role of collaboration.

During the first part of the lab, groups of participants collaboratively explore urban space. Each group sets the rules of their game, defining how to move. Three different roles in each group allow on-site and online participation: Performer-ethnographer, on-site observer feeding a live-stream and online meta-observer watching the live stream and commenting. An ethnographic app facilitates reflexive fieldwork and collecting data.

During the lab’s second part, participants discuss the collected material. Our aim is to reflect on the significance of (virtual) transdisciplinary experiments to the study of hope, transformation and public space. We seek to gain a more embodied and emplaced understanding of connections between playfulness and mobility as topics in anthropology and art.

We look forward to playing together!

Please register:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IEjEsBOwSrnA31r1_hcOOIRdTiPYIOkp-eb7qZQNtvU/edit?usp=sharing