Two years running! I’ve made it onto the shortlisted project for the Playable City Award:
Now me, and my amazing co-collaborators from the UK and Brazil need your help: your comments and thoughts will help us win over the judges, and win the award!
You can find out lots about the project here: which has been developed by myself, Natasha Chubbuck, Filipe Calegario and Thaís Vidal.
Press Play – or ‘Toca Aí – is a project that creates musical interventions that activate public spaces. Based around impromptu and transitory moments of collaborative musical play, Press Play links strangers to each other, individuals to urban space and creates moments of surprise, delight and connection.
Press Play works by installing simple, touch sensitive panels in any public space. Each sensor is programmed with a channel of a musical track, which will play when touched. Multiple sensors can be touched to play more layers of sound, but to play a whole piece, to remix music, or improvise with sounds, it is essential for several people to play together.
The project developed from conversation around experiences that make living in a city a unique and joyous experience. Time and again music emerges as a common theme in people’s memories of the times they felt most connected to their city. Hearing music in an unexpected space can act as a ‘portal’ to a memory or a feeling, of joyousness, of dancing, of Carnival, of colour. Press Play creates these ‘portals’ within the fabric of the city, activated through your (individual) touch, and amplified by working with others around you, creating transient moments of coming together, reflection and joy.
Our proposal for Bristol develops Press Play into a series of connected interventions across the city. Beginning with a musical installation in one central location, the project will develop as a ripple effect of sonic interventions across Bristol. Interventions will pop up in different locations, on different scales, and with different kinds of music. Open for all to play, at night the installations transform; when enough people are playing, lights at every location will pulse with a glowing ambience, linking players city-wide and inviting more to join the game.
Short film from a proof of concept prototype developed during the Recife: The Playable City Labs in Brazil