It was an event that happened on September 29th and which was organized by MOB. It aimed to unite the virtual world and the public through the game. Workshops, talks, video games and interactive installations were held.
The program had several different proposals, in which the works of two mobbers, who find in art a healthy distraction, stood out.
Such is the case of Jake Pyne (https://twitter.com/_okjake), who works remotely as a software engineer at Auth0 and thinks that “art is not necessarily related to aesthetics, but the use of some medium to present perspective, evoke a series of thoughts or emotions that you might not be used to”. And he states that “we all have our own ‘lens’ that we see the world through that affects our perception of everything we experience”.
One role of artists is to encourage
all of us to try different lenses
Jake has been working on an idea for a while, and WePlay was a great excuse to finish it off and try it out. That’s how he created an installation that looks for moments of similarity between strangers in the same space.
“After this first experience I must admit that I liked the mixture of people who showed up for the festival, most of them showed up curious but with some kind of nervous scepticism that melted away when they started playing with the installations, that was really rewarding “.
“Personally, I like giving adults permission to play. Kids know how to do this perfectly, it comes naturally to them because they’re discovering new things about the world every day. For adults, it’s more difficult, but if you change their environment to behave in a way that they’re not anticipating and you’ve discovered they’ll often go through the same process “, assures this young English.
For his part, Chema (http://www.chemavalle.com/portfolio/apps/), who spends most of his time programming, had been working on the evenings for around two weeks on this floppy disk remix machine. “The idea of using physical props to mix music was in my mind since a few years but it was proposed to me when WePlay showed up. So, I started looking at AR tech and if it would have been feasible to do it, and luckily it was! The main goal was to achieve closer to the world of electronic music production, regardless age, knowledge of music or affinity with technology, in a way that would be intuitive and most importantly, having fun. That’s why it had to be something physically based and also, in order to make it as accessible as it could be, the whole concept relies on just a normal phone and some paper printed AR markers “.
Although this Spanish from the south confesses that “this is just a hobby” for him, ever since he was a kid he had been interested in digital art, either graphic design or music, “there was something incredibly appealing about creating things from ´thin air´ just with the help of a computer “. That’s why he is into exploring new ways of interacting with the digital world.
Finally, he concludes about We Play that he “loved the diversity of the audience; there were groups of friends wanting to have fun, kids with their families, curious people dropping by, after going to the supermarket, etc”.
It was very interesting to see all
of them playing with it and I got
a lot of ideas for future interactions
The presentation of Smart Global Village took place at We Play; a creativity tool puzzle game was led by Miquel Navarro Warks (https://www.instagram.com/p/BkcsQIEFkUr/?taken-by=warks_lab) and was an educational proposal of design, settle at the Eixample created by Ildefons Cerdà. It was about virtually redesigning an urban island from the beginning
Last but not least, the Game Jam organized by Barcelona Activa must be congratulated with honours. Creating a team and with the help of mentors, the guys from IT Academy worked for four days developing a functioning interactive installation.
What could you find in the exbihition?
UGIF XPRESS HACKATHON (WARKS Y LAb4REALITY)
uGIF Xpress HACKatON is an experience of creation of an express interactive experience where each one of the 100 participants will create a GIF. They will be then projected in the store Araña in Raval, to be part of its first collaborative digital exhibition. Among all the GIFs created, a design will then be chosen to be decomposed in two pictures and printed in white tee shirts. This tee shirt will be the first piece of clothes created from a digital work, and it will be on sale in the store Araña, calle Riera Baixa 5.
ONE LAST BEAT (HECTOR MONERRIS)
A homemade interactive short film that explores the purpose of life in a funny and reckless way.
RANDOM VIRGIN GENERATOR (ZINKETE)
With your keyboard, send your prayers to the digital gods.
Likepad aims to connect the virtual and the physical world, allowing the user to like their surroundings, using their own fingerprint as part of their identity. Performing the same act of liking in the physical world.
Geometry, nature and augmented reality.
ESCAPE FROM MONOCHROME (WALDEMAR RAMOS)
Discover an augmented reality fantasy world.
SOLA (AGUSTINA ISIDORI)
SOLA recreates the personal experience of the fear of walking at night into a city where gender violence is present every day.
“Orwell 3000” is the new model of IoT pacemaker by Social Control Labs: it has internet connection and GPS! A new concept of pacemaker that will revolutionise the way of how dictators rule their totalitarian regime! Are you a great dictator and you are tired of spending tons of money and time on your repression system?
HEART BIT
A maker kit to keep beating. Our bundles of love, fun and learning will keep you beating!
A sincere “hi” can be the beginning of our humanity, where the other is part of one. A long and exaggerated greeting can, therefore, become a metaphor of our still alive humanity and differences.
Thank you all for being part of WePlay! 🙂
