Playful street tiles, artful games and radioscapes at the next This happened – Utrecht

After a bit of a long sum­mer break Alexan­der, Ianus and I are back with anoth­er edi­tion of This hap­pened – Utrecht. Read about the pro­gram of the sev­enth edi­tion below. We’ll add a fourth speak­er to the ros­ter soon. The event is sched­uled for Mon­day 4 Octo­ber at The­ater Kikker in Utrecht. Doors open at 7:30PM. The reg­is­tra­tion opens next week on Mon­day 20 Sep­tem­ber at 12:00PM.

The Patchingzone

Anne Nigten is direc­tor of The Patch­ing­zone, a trans­dis­ci­pli­nary lab­o­ra­to­ry for inno­va­tion where Mas­ter, doc­tor, post-doc stu­dents and pro­fes­sion­als from dif­fer­ent back­grounds cre­ate mean­ing­ful con­tent. Ear­li­er, Anne Nigten was man­ag­er of V2_lab and com­plet­ed a PhD on a method for cre­ative research and devel­op­ment. Go-for-IT! is a city game cre­at­ed togeth­er with cit­i­zens of South Rot­ter­dam and launched in Decem­ber 2009. On four play­grounds in the area street tiles were equipped with LEDs. Locals could play games with their feet, sim­i­lar to con­sole game dance mats.

Ibb and Obb

Richard Boeser is an inde­pen­dent design­er based in Rot­ter­dam. His stu­dio Sparp­weed is cur­rent­ly work­ing on the game Ibb and Obb, sched­uled to launch for Playsta­tion Net­work and PC in August 2011. Ibb and Obb is a coop­er­a­tive game for two play­ers who togeth­er must find a way through a world where grav­i­ty is flipped across the hori­zon. Play­ers move between both sides of the world through por­tals. They can surf on grav­i­ty, soul­hop ene­mies and col­lect dia­monds. The game is part­ly financed by the Game Fund, an arrange­ment that seeks to stim­u­late the devel­op­ment of artis­tic games in the Netherlands.

Radioscape

Edwin van der Hei­de stud­ied sonol­o­gy at the Roy­al Con­ser­va­to­ry in The Hague. He now works as an artist in the field of sound, space and inter­ac­tion. Radioscape trans­forms urban space into an acoustic labyrinth. Based on the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples of radio each par­tic­i­pant is equipped with a receiv­er, head­phones and an anten­na. Fif­teen trans­mit­ters each broad­cast their own com­po­si­tion. Inspired by short wave sounds, they over­lap to form a meta­com­po­si­tion. By chang­ing posi­tion, the inter­pre­ta­tion of sound is changed as well.

A big thank you to our spon­sors, Microsoft and Fier for mak­ing this one happen.