Digital creativity, play and labour in everyday life

A workshop on Ambient Play: Digital creativity, play and labour in everyday life will be held in collaboration with the Digital Ethnography Research Centre of RMIT University in Barcelona, Spain on June 20-21, 2015

The aim of the symposium is to address the new types of labour emerging around mobile media and gaming areas. Phenomena such as Let’s Play (shared videos of people playing games) and mobile lifestyle apps (as part of the quantified self) represent new forms of play and labour within everyday life. This symposium will draw from experts around digital methods and theories to outline some new ways for understanding these phenomenona.

Some of the questions that will be addressed include:

• What are some of the socio-cultural and creative ways mobile phone users are shaping apps through existing work and leisure practices?
• How are mobile media apps like mindfulness quantifying a user’s life? And how can users resist these forms of normalisations?
• How are emergent game player industries like Let’s Play (shared videos of playing) shaping relationships and representations of play, labour and playbour? How does this reshape conceptualisations between players and spectatorship?

Speakers include: Ursula Huws; Rosalind Gill; Juliet Webster; Tania Lewis; Sarah Pink; Jo Tacchi; Heather Horst; Larissa Hjorth; Emma Witkowski.

The event will be held at the RMIT Europe Centre in Barcelona, Minerva 2 08006 Barcelona, Spain.