PlaGMaDA/Game Center presentation this Sunday

I will be giving a free, public presentation on PlaGMaDA and it's doings at the Bruce High Quality Foundation University.  Here's some of the info:

BHQFU 34 Avenue A, 3rd Fl.  New York, NY 10009

Please join us THIS SUNDAY at 4pm for a Game Arts themed BHQFU Visting Lecture Series Lecture. We are bringing together the NYU Game Center and the Play Generated Map and Document Archive (PlaGMaDA). Our guests will consider educational, curatorial, aesthetic and archival issues related to Game Art in presentations and a lively discussion. The NYU Game Center (represented by Charles J Pratt) is dedicated to the exploration of games as a cultural form and game design as creative practice. Their approach to the study of games is based on a simple idea: games matter. Just like other cultural forms – music, film, literature, painting, dance, theater – games are valuable for their own sake. Games are worth studying, not merely as artifacts of advanced digital technology, or for their potential to educate, or as products within a thriving global industry, but in and of themselves, as experiences that entertain us, move us, explore complex topics, communicate profound ideas, and illuminate elusive truths about ourselves, the world around us, and each other. The PlaGMaDA (represented by director Tim Hutchings) preserves, presents, and interprets play generated cultural artifacts, namely manuscripts and drawings created to communicate a shared imaginative space. The Archive solicits, collects, describes, and publicly displays these documents so as to demonstrate their relevance, presenting them as both a historical record of a revolutionary period of experimental play and as aesthetic objects in their own right. By fostering discussion and educating the public, it is hoped that the folkways which generate these documents can be encouraged and preserved for future generations. Speakers: Charles J Pratt is an instructor at the NYU Game Center. He has been a freelance game designer since he graduated from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) in 2007. He’s worked on projects for companies as varied as Adult Swim, Footlocker, and the British government. He’s also been involved with a number of independent games such as the early web-based social game Casablanca, the street game Search Brigade, and most recently a tower defense game for the iPhone called Critter Defense. In his spare time he teaches Game Studies, he blogs at GameDesignAdvance, and he hosts the podcast Another Castle, a series of long form interviews with people working and thinking about games in the New York metropolitan area. Tim Hutchings is the founding director of The Play Generated Map and Document Archive (plagmada.org), a quasi-scholarly project that collects and preserves the ephemeral products of games and game play. The archive is a partner of The Strong Museum in Rochester, NY. Exhibitions have been mounted from the museum holdings at FACT in Liverpool, the Nikolaj Kunsthalle in Copenhagen, Netherlands Instituut voor Mediakunst, and Cranbrook among others. The archive has also begun a publishing project, examining the space for play between game studies and fine art. Hutchings is also a fine artist most recently represented by the I-20 Gallery here in NYC. He's had solo projects at the Kunsthalle Wien, the Long Beach Museum of Art and elsewhere. Upcoming game/art crossover projects will be featured at the SFMOMA and PS1. ---- The BHQFU Visiting Lecture Series seeks to connect artists, critics, and curators engaged with the contemporary uses of art including its relationship to other scholarly disciplines such as education, literature, architecture, design, philosophy, and the sciences. Because lectures are open to the public and because many of the above disciplines are represented by other courses offered at BHQFU, the Visiting Lecture Series is conceived of both as: 1. a platform for introducing the university to outsiders (a “gateway drug,” if you will) and 2. as an opportunity to mix seasoned and less-experienced figures from a diverse array of discursive communities. Each meeting of this bi-weekly series, appropriate representatives from BHQFU classes will be tapped to nominally moderate the event and briefly present the goings on of their classes before lecturers speak on a chosen topic. The Lecture Series also intends to host conversations between two or more luminaries and half-an-hour following the presentation will be set aside for a Q & A period.