By: Karina Valdes
Miami, are you ready to play? For the first time, a team of University of Miami School of Communication faculty have organized Miami @ Play, a curated collection of art and design work that seeks to demonstrate a range of playful experiences and celebrates the unparalleled way games unite communities and people. This inaugural Miami @ Play event is in coordination with the 2018 Filmgate Interactive Festival and presented during the week of Art Basel-Miami.
Lindsay Grace, Knight Chair in Interactive Media, Clay Ewing, associate professor, and Lien Tran, assistant professor, all from the UM School of Communication, worked together with Filmgate Miami’s executive director Diliana Alexander to curate the selected works. Together they created the call for submissions, curated the selections, set up more than half of the projects in the exhibition space in downtown Miami, and coordinated with the artists traveling to Miami to install their own work. They also created the archive website and will be producing a book to chronicle the exhibited works.
“We solicited submissions from the general game making community, and received work from Europe, the U.S., and Canada. We selected 10 projects from more than 30 submissions. We then included five additional projects from UM faculty and students, and work submitted to Filmgate Interactive. We had a 30% acceptance rate, with the selected work from artists based all over the country and in Scotland,” said Grace.
Stiltsville VR, Healer, and Sweatshop Superstar – three projects created by UM faculty and alumni – will be available for attendees to experience along with a dozen more curated Miami @ Play experiences.
Miami @ Play runs Dec. 1-6 and is part of Filmgate Interactive’s XR and Gaming Portal located on the 6th floor of the Mana building at 155 S. MIAMI AVENUE, MIAMI, FL 33130. For tickets visit https://www.eventbrite.com/e/filmgate-interactive-media-festival-06-art-basel-week-2018-tickets-50145625917. For more on Miami @ Play, please visit, http://miamiplay.org/.
