Acknowledgement of Country

Overview

Join Melbourne’s urban play community to experience installation and events connecting music, games and fashion with public space. Playable City Melbourne is an arts festival distributed over space and time responding to ways our cities are changing in response to the pandemic. Play musical plants in a parklet, join street games with physical distancing, or experience a 3-hour show in the privacy of your own phone. The everchanging program responds to our current collective mood: hopeful, exhausted, lost, found, vulnerable, resilient, or all of the above. Featuring work from PAN Studio, Chad Toprak, Helen Kwok, Playable Streets, 64 Ways of Being and many others, urban play will hit the streets from October 2021.

Last weekend we launched our playful parklet with live music game Communitas featuring Tanya George, Paul Guseli and Dan Witton. Players became part of the music via four gestures and at one stage played across the street to the surprise of drivers along Little Lonsdale Street.

Three new games launch this weekend:

Yomeciband: 2-5pm Saturday November 27
SKIT: 10-4pm Sunday November 28 (in Shilling Lane)
Flip the City: 1-5pm Sunday November 28

The creatures of Yomeciband welcome people back to the city by making Little Lonsdale playable, the mashup of hopskotch and Twister that is SKIT turns Shilling Lane into a life-size board game, and Flip the City transforms our parklet into a cr eative workshop inviting you to reframe the city with Public Assembly.

Rainbow Paths and 64 Ways of Being are playable anytime!

Full program runs November 20—December 5 ::: follow @playablemelb for updates!

About the artist

Dr Troy Innocent:

Curator Dr Innocent is an urban play scholar, artist gamemaker and VC Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. His work connects digital media poetics, creative code, visual language, mixed realities and playable cities. Innocent develops augmented reality games that blend physical objects with digital interfaces to reimagine everyday urban environments in playful ways; situating his work in Melbourne, Bristol, Barcelona, Istanbul, Ogaki, Sydney, Singapore and Hong Kong. Working with the city as a material, his practice explores ways of being that reimagine, reconfigure and reconnect with the world.

Watershed:

Cultural cinema, talent development and creative technology. Watershed champions engagement, imagination and ingenuity, working locally, nationally and globally from our home in Bristol, UK.

RMIT:

One of Australia’s original tertiary institutions, RMIT University enjoys an international reputation for excellence in educations, research, and engagement with industry and community.

RMIT is a world leader in Art and Design; Architecture; Education; Engineering; Development; Computer Science and Information Systems; Business and Management; and Communication and Media Studies.