Play as Inquiry event construes practices as play
In November 2013, Sha Xin Wei (Associate professor, Design and Computation Arts), Michael Montanaro (Associate professor, Contemporary Dance) and members of the Topological Media Lab hosted Play as Inquiry, a three-day practicum, at the Gray Center for Arts of the University of Chicago.
The event explored asked how artists and scholars might construe their practices as play, and featured distinct and experimental approached to research and production in various fields including game design, transmedia installation, public health, choreography, political science, experimental writing and anthropology.
Play as Inquiry was organized by Patrick Jagoda (University of Chicago faculty member in the Department of English and co-founder of Game Changer Chicago Design Lab), and Sha (Canada Research Chair in New Media and Research Director of the Topological Media Lab at Concordia University) in association with Alkemie Atelier, a Montreal-based multidisciplinary creative collaborative. It served as culmination of their year-long Mellon Fellowship for Arts Practice & Scholarship at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry.
For more information about the project, visit the Topological Media Lab website.