Play with your City!

Every day you change your city in the ways you traverse, occupy, engage with or otherwise ignore its various spaces. Architecture+Philosophy presents a panel of practitioners who have designed ways in which to engage with your own city as though for the first time. Come and play.

Facilitated by Esther Anatolitis, the presentation and discussion session will include:

•  Jason Maling: Jason has guided people towards publicly spanking each other on the original site of Lords Cricket Ground, bloodied his knees in penance on the streets of London and used sharp sticks to remap cities in France. He once ranted his way through most of the ruined Abbeys of rural England, and harnessed artists for public transport in Melbourne. Jason designs systems for shifting locations and social settings where the work becomes a collaboratively mediated tool. Often using the structure of games, the roles of players and the rules of play continually evolve through individual and collective expressions of what is ‘allowed’. People enter and exit the systems as they choose, some becoming involved with projects over long periods of time. For Maling the live experience is a negotiation over the public necessity of each work. Can it exist here? Who wants it? What does it mean to them? When is it time to leave?
•  Ian Woodcock, Research Fellow in Urban Design at the University of Melbourne, will be speaking about en route, a pedestrian-based live art event on the streets of your city in which the private and the public, imaginal and concrete, intersect and overlap. Setting out on foot with an ipod and mobile phone, participants are guided through laneways, streets, shops, cafés, listening to audio-snatches – musings, narratives, playlists – that intertwine with wandering, observation and (found) experiences. en route engages with the spontaneous choreography of the city as streetscapes and passers-by become the site onto which participants’ own personal cinema is projected. Winner of the 2009 Melbourne Fringe Festival Best Live Art Award, the 2010 Adelaide Fringe Festival Touring Award, and two 2010 Green Room Awards. By the Betty Booke. Conceived by Julian Rickert, with artists Suzanne Kersten, Clair Korobacz and Paul Moir.

Now in its sixth year, ARCHITECTURE+PHILOSOPHY provides a unique space of exchange. While what we provide is a local space – Melbourne practitioners on Melbourne issues – the series engages with questions of contemporary urbanism, planning, technology, space, system, design, distribution and other issues in the productive overlap between the two disciplines. We curate a diverse range of presentations, from research students and established academics to architecture and planning practitioners, policy makers, public artists and those working in the world between theory, buildings and the city.