Now Play This, Somerset House, London: - A Festival of Experimental Game Design

Between 6-14th April 2024 three Interactive artefacts by Collectarium and Peter Maloney will be exhibited as part of the NOW PLAY THIS exhibition at London's Somerset House New Wing Gallery. Now Play This celebrates its first decade of exploring games and playfulness by highlighting the creative power and ubiquity of play. This year’s theme “Liminality: Playing between worlds” is an invitation to think of play as a place both for introspection and connection. It is a call to reconsider our understanding of play and games and their relationship to our everyday lives and to other art forms. As part of the city-wide London Games Festival, this year’s Now Play This features games that ask players to think of the way they perceive the spaces around them, and about the way people relate to one another. Encouraging self-reflection, the interactive festival explores the transitory, borderless spaces between artist’s imaginations and audiences' inner worlds. The Lockdown Space Collection was developed in 2021, a collaboration between Collectarium (Designers Sophie Beard and Alyson Waller) and Virtual World-builder and academic Peter Maloney. The project invited people to submit observations on how their home environment had changed during lockdown by sharing text and image or video through the Instagram social media application. During lockdown domestic spaces became extraordinary through the way in which people had to rapidly re-imagine their homes. The Lockdown Space collection documents these unusual temporary and ‘in-between’ liminal spaces. The domestic home became the place where we work, socialise, exercise, learn, create, entertain, play, celebrate and escape. Collectarium is a publishing platform co-founded by designers Allyson Waller and Sophie Beard that creates design activities, and documents how these engage audiences into new ways of seeing. Now Play This is supported by the London Games Festival, Arts Council England and Goethe-Institute, London.