This is part of a series of PlayAway Conversations, speaking with people working outside of the games sector about games, creativity and the crossovers between real-world and online environments.
Caroline Shedden
Christopher Kelly
Jennifer Lawrie
David Rocks
PlayAway Conversation
with Secondary School Music Teachers: – Christopher Kelly, Music Teacher, Ardrossan Academy – Jennifer Lawrie, Music Teacher, Garnock Community Campus – David Rocks, Music Teacher, Greenwood Academy – Caroline Shedden, Principal Teacher of Music and Drama, Garnock Community Campus
This conversation was organised in with Music Education Partnership Group and We Make Music Scotland.
This video is part of a series of PlayAway Conversations with people working outside of the games sector about games, creativity and the crossovers between real-world and online environments.
PlayAway Conversation
with Kate Wimpress & Genevieve Kay-Gourley, from North Edinburgh Arts
Kate Wimpress is the Director of North Edinburgh Arts and Chair of Scotland’s Regeneration Forum (SURF).
Genevieve Kay-Gourley is the Depute Director of North Edinburgh Arts.
North Edinburgh Arts (NEA) is a purpose built cultural centre offering local residents a place to relax, explore, learn, meet, volunteer and have fun. Our award winning venue incorporates two studios, a 96 seat theatre, recording studio, gallery, offices and a café with children’s play area leading onto a large garden. It is loved by the local community attracting over 34,000 visits last year.
Over 30 hours of creative activities are on offer each week, most with a family focus, alongside a wide range of other events such as exhibitions, dance shows, circus skills workshops, community theatre, poetry readings and film clubs. We are also home to Muirhouse Link Up and Tinderbox Orchestra.
Through partnership working and ongoing local and city consultation the award-winning centre, opened in 2002 acts as the cultural centre of the community, providing a safe, enjoyable and creative environment for people of all ages to relax and develop within.
This video is part of a series of conversations with people working outside of the games industry about games, creativity and the crossovers between real-world and online environments.
This is part of a series of PlayAway Conversations with people working outside of the games sector around games, creativity and the crossovers between real-world and online environments.
PlayAway Conversation
with Shauna Macdonald, Artistic Director of Edinburgh Youth Theatre
Trained at The Royal Academy of Music and Drama, Shauna has 20 years experience in film, television, theatre and radio. Best known for her work in The Descent, Spooks, Filth and Danger Mouse she is a critically acclaimed actor and director.
She has been part of Edinburgh Youth Theatre since 2014. Her approach to drama teaching is influenced by her many years experience and knowledge of working professionally in the business and also by her love of devising and writing.
This video is part of a series of conversations with people working outside of the gaming industry about games, creativity and the crossovers between real-world and online environments.
PlayAway Conversation
with Dougie Irvine, Artistic Director of Visible Fictions
Music, Games, Open Mic & End of Festival Celebrations!
*Please note, Chipzel was previously advertised as the headline act but sadly has had to cancel performing at the festival due to family reasons. We wish Niamh and her family all the best.
As a result we will now be getting together for the Live Music Show on Zoom (instead of Twitch). Please register for the event and we will send you the Zoom link!
Join us for the closing night of Tinderbox PlayAway Festival with an amazing line-up of live music, games & end of festival celebrations!
Join us for the closing night of Tinderbox PlayAway Festival with an amazing line up of live music, games & end of festival celebrations!
About this Event
We are gathering an almighty line-up of live musicians to celebrate the end of the Tinderbox PlayAway festival! Join us for the closing night PlayAway Party!
*Please note, Chipzel was previously advertised as the headline act but sadly has had to cancel performing at the festival due to family reasons. We wish Niamh and her family all the best.
As a result we will now be getting together for the Live Music Show on Zoom (instead of Twitch). Please register for the event and we will send you the Zoom link!
Jed Milroy Adventure Folk pioneer, veteran of legendary ‘Whisky River Boat Band’ and Assistant Director of Tinderbox Collective. Jed toured extensively with psychedelic rockers ‘The Aliens’ before making a dignified escape into the world of Bluegrass to join Scottish 7 piece, ‘Southern Tenant Folk Union’. Expect a foot stomping mix of Americana and Traditional Celtic music. Banjo, guitar, vocals.
The False Economy Esther Swift has travelled the world extensively with her music making and embraces many different influences in her virtuosic harp playing, composing and song writing. She writes songs about her homeland of Scotland, drawing on her folk roots and taking inspiration from nature and the people she meets along the way. An eclectic blend of jazz, folk, classical and everything in between Esther will share with you her stories and musical experiences from around the world.
An improvising saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Matt Wright is one third of the new music ensemble Sink, whose theatrical live shows and improvisational work continue to inspire audiences and artists alike. Recent achievements include five star reviews for their latest Fringe show and completion of their soon to be released third album ‘Popupocalypse’. Since 2012 Matt has been making his own bespoke tuned percussion, manufactured from discarded gas canisters. Matt is also the co-founding Director and Producer of the Pianodrome, the world’s first amphitheatre made entirely from upcycled pianos.
The Jellyman’s Daughter Scottish band The Jellyman’s Daughter lands squarely in the middle of a crossroads between bluegrass, post-rock, folk and soul, managing at the same time to sound not a whole lot like any of those genres. Emily and Graham write their songs together with a focus on doing something new, mixing their intimate vocal harmonies with wild and visceral cello, driving guitar and sweet mandolin, complimented brilliantly by banjo (Jamie Francis) and double bass (Herbie Loening).
In 2018 The Jellyman’s Daughter released their new album, ‘Dead Reckoning’. It represents a marked step forward in maturity, depth and scope for the duo, achieving 5 stars in multiple publications and inclusion in Popmatters’ ‘The 20 Best Folk Albums of 2018’. The past couple of years have seen the band tour extensively around the globe, playing prestigious festivals from Scotland’s own Celtic Connections to Australia’s Port Fairy Folk Festival.
John “Slide20XX” Smith John Hamilton Smith V (aka, Slide20XX) is a composer who decided to write music for video games at the age of 13 and hasn’t stopped since. His work has appeared in Against Gravity’s VR title “Rec Room,” a Princeton affiliated massively multiplayer neuroscience game named “EyeWire,” and crowd-controlled music-based video games designed and shown at the Red Bull Music Academy in Madrid, Spain and MIT’s festival of arts and technology, Hacking Arts. His most recent work has included the soundtrack for Calico, a game about magical girls running a cat cafe, and music for a pair of anti-racism PSAs created by Cartoon Network series, Steven Universe. He also works as composer, sound designer, and creative director for his game company, Games Without Words.
The Gamba Geek Águeda Macias is a Brazilian viola da gamba player, arranger and composer passionate about fusing modern music, particularly video game music, with Renaissance and Baroque aesthetics. Her main platform is her YouTube channel, where she posts videos of her singing and playing the viola da gamba, luteguitar, recorder and harpsichord under the pseudonym The Gamba Geek. She is a member of video game music collectives Coin Ops. and Gamelark Records, contributing regularly to albums and EPs. Currently she lives in Germany, where she specializes in Early Music at the University of Arts Bremen.
Panelists: Nainita Desai (Telling Lies) Guy Jackson (Sea of Solitude) Tess Tyler (PLAYNE: The Meditation Game, LEGO® Worlds, Dead and Buried)
Chaired by: Jenny Nelson (Scala Radio)
Join media composers Nainita Desai, Guy Jackson and Tess Tyler in a discussion with Jenny Nelson on their careers and journeys in game music.
Jenny Nelson Jenny Nelson is Programme Manager at Scala Radio, the UK’s newest classical music and entertainment station. She produces a range of specialist music programmes including Mark Kermode’s film music show (Saturday 1-3pm) and The Console with Luci Holland (Tinderbox/Scala Radio), the only weekly show devoted to games music on UK national radio (Saturdays 5-6pm, repeated on Sundays 10-11pm).
Nainita Desai Nainita Desai, is an Ivor Novello Awards, BIFA nominee, BAFTA Breakthrough Brit, and the IFMCA Breakthrough Composer of 2020. Her recent projects include Oscar nominated and BAFTA and Cannes winning feature documentary ‘For Sama’, and ‘The Reason I Jump’, the Sundance winning feature. Other recent credits include: BBC drama series, ‘Unprecedented’; Netflix’s most-watched documentary, ‘American Murder: The Family Next Door’; the hit Netflix India series ‘Bad Boy Billionaires’; and the acclaimed interactive video game ‘Telling Lies’, released by Annapurna Interactive. She is currently working on games for Half Mermaid and Silver Rain Games / Electronic Arts.
Guy Jackson Based in London, England, Guy Jackson is a composer who specialises in highly emotional, crafted, layered musical compositions, amalgamating acoustic and electronic sounds and encompassing both classical and ambient genres.
His work is perfectly suited to the silver screen, enhancing and supporting the mood and tone of a broad variety of visual content.
Tess Tyler Tess is an award winning Bristol, UK based composer for the screen. She made her orchestral recording debut at Air Lyndhurst Studios in London with her score for the video game Steampunk Riders. This work being one amongst many for orchestra, Tess has recorded her music with the likes of the London Session Orchestra, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, The Budapest Art Orchestra, and The Bratislava Symphony. In 2017, a medley of her orchestral scores has been showcased in famous concert halls across the United Kingdom as part of the Heroes and Legends Tour with the Bournemouth Symphony. In October 2018, Tess worked with the composer, songwriter, and musical innovator Imogen Heap. Together they developed a project entitled, The Life of A Song, and as a result Tess composed, performed and produced on the highly successful single, Marble.Tess continues to write music for the screen, as well as a recording artist. In 2020 she debuted her first LP, ‘_fractals’.
Scala Radio is an entertainment radio station playing classical music in the UK. Playing familiar masters from Mozart and Holst to surprising new works from living composers like Karl Jenkins, Rebecca Dale and Thom Yorke, join us as Scala Radio brings classical music into the 21st century. Scala Radio is available on DAB, on our website and on our Scala Radio App.
Game Music Connect was created by James Hannigan and John Broomhall to celebrate and explore the amazing music and sound design of video games and the extraordinary talent behind it via an insightful series of conversations, lectures and case studies from around the world.
Mini-talks & Demos (Zoom Event): Zoom Obscura – Works in Progress Challenging cultures of video-calling through creative intervention
Artists/Speakers: Ilsa Pouwels, Michael Baldwin, Bea Wijshijer, Paul O’Neill, Martin Disley
Challenging cultures of video-calling through creative intervention: A series of short talks and demos from five artists who have been experimenting with a range of creative and technological ideas to subvert your normal experience of Zoom!
Zoom Obscura is a project that enables us to playfully negotiate our own presence and our own value in the spaces of online video-calling. We bring together artists, academics, hackers, designers and creative technologists to develop critical interventions that make the problematic workings of these technologies legible to wider audiences while empowering users to experiment with, and control how their personal data (visual, audible, text input) manifest in online spaces.
Ilsa Pouwels Ilse is currently at the Umeå Institute of Design working on her graduate thesis. Focusing on creating interventions that explore and challenge the relation we have with our technologies, undermine through design. Before, she spend time at Tellart and LEGO as an interaction designer. As a designer she is trying to take up challenging problems of merging the physical and digital for societal contexts. With a heart for exploring new technologies through prototyping, approaching them from a different angle to bring a little magic to the world. http://www.ilsepouwels.nl
Michael Baldwin I am an American composer whose current work focuses on ways of composing experiences within and through background sociomusical activities. This work has thus far involved audiences and performing musicians listening to audio guides that lead them across discreet sonic, choreographic, and emotional terrains in parallel with musical performances and interpersonal interactions in concert settings. https://michaelbaldwin.online
Bea Wijshijer B. Wijshijer is a research-based artist working within digital media and video installation. Wijshijer utilizes online trends and subcultures to deconstruct mediated intimacies and personas on digital platforms. Informed by acceleration aesthetics, their work plays with excess and artifice to interrogate the ways in which late capitalism affects our digital lives. Wijshijer received their BFA in Printmaking from OCAD University in 2017 and an MFA from the University of Waterloo in 2020. https://www.shrimpychip.net/
Paul O’Neill Paul is an artist and researcher based in Dublin, Ireland. His practice and research is concerned with the implications of our collective dependency on networked technologies and infrastructures. This discourse is reflected in his academic background, he holds an MSc Multimedia from Dublin City University and an MA in Digital Art from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. Paul is currently completing a PhD which focuses on media art practices that critique and subvert techno-solutionist narratives and histories. https://aswemaysink.com/
Martin Disley Martin is an artist, researcher and creative technologist based in Edinburgh, Scotland. His work interrogates computer vision systems by manifesting their internal contradictions in image, video and sound. Martin was recently artist-in-residence at the National Library of Scotland and his work has exhibited at the V&A Museum (Dundee, Scotland), Summerhall (Edinburgh, Scotland), The Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow, Scotland), Guterhallen Gallery (Soligen, Germany), Sala Aranyo (Barcelona, Spain) and Kunstencentrum Vooruit (Ghent, Belgium). http://www.martindisley.co.uk
Foxdog Studios Foxdog Studios, Lloyd Henning and Peter Sutton, are computer programmers turned live performers. They create comedy shows that put the audience in control of interactive games and DIY gadgets. Their live show, “Robot Chef”, was a sell-out at the Edinburgh Fringe and had viewers cook sausage and beans by controlling a robot on their phones (a highlight being firing a hotdog from a cannon).
The pandemic has turned their stage shows into interactive online pieces, streamed live weekly on Twitch, including “Escape The North” which was featured as part of the Guardian’s coverage of comedy streaming. foxdogstudios.com
Zoom Obscura Team Zoom Obscura is led by researchers from the University of Edinburgh (Pip Thornton, Chris Elsden and Chris Speed), Durham University (Andrew Dwyer), and Kings College London (Mike Duggan), and is in collaboration with Edinburgh-based art & music collective Tinderbox Collective and curator Hannah Redler-Hawes.
Intro to Pure Data & Interactive Sound with Yann Seznec
Price £10/£5 (conc)
If you are on low income please get in touch at admin@tinderboxcollective.org to ask about free spaces
In this interactive workshop with sonic artist Yann Seznec, we’ll be introduced to the basics of getting started with visual programming language Pure Data, and its power for interactive audio.
Suitable for anyone interested in creative technology, completely new to design, and experienced designers with an interest in learning new tools.
To take your digital making further, check out our Bitsy One-Day Game Jam on Tues 2nd March too!
For ages 16+
This workshop is held via a Zoom Call and spaces are limited – please register to attend
Yann Seznec is an artist whose work focuses on sound, music, physical interaction, games, and building new instruments. Recent projects include residencies at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, the Floating Cinema in London, Playable City Lagos, and Timespan in the Scottish Highlands. He has performed at The Roundhouse London, Mutek Montreal, Melbourne Recital Hall, Liquid Rooms Tokyo, Köln Philharmonie, Fak’ugesi Johannesburg, and more. Much of his work involves building custom instruments such as musical pigsties, slinky instruments, candle-based sound installations, electromechanical mushroom spore reactors, and more.
He is founder of BAFTA-winning creative studio Lucky Frame. In December 2015 he received the British Composer Award for Sonic Art for his 2014 Edinburgh Art Festival work “Currents”.
Yann has been Game Designer in Residence at the MICA Game Lab in Baltimore, Maryland, since 2019. This residency runs until August 2021.
An exploration of generating and creating art with machine learning, with artist and AI researchers Derrick Schultz and Lia Coleman.
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Derrick Schultz
Artificial Images is the art practice of Derrick Schultz. Utilizing cutting edge machine learning technology, his work explores multisensory perception, generative abstraction, and the future of ecology.
In addition to creating his own work, Derrick also teaches machine learning to artists, designers, and image makers. Artificial Images courses combine small group personal instruction with a digital community from across the world.
Lia Coleman is an artist, AI researcher, and educator. She makes art with AI and teaches others how to do it.
Lia teaches machine learning art at Rhode Island School of Design, as well as classes through Artificial Images. She has spoken on AI art at NeurIPS, New York University, RISD, Mozilla Festival, Gray Area, and Partnership on AI. Her writing on AI and new media art has been published by Princeton Architectural Press and Neocha Magazine. Lia holds a BSc in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is an alumnus of the School for Poetic Computation in NYC.
Creative Informatics supports creative individuals and organisations in Edinburgh and South East Scotland to do inspiring things with data. Find out about their funding and development opportunities at creativeinformatics.org
An introduction to TidalCycles with creator Alex McLean, and its playful, pattern-based approach to making live music with code.
Alex McLean Alex is a musician, software artist and researcher based between Sheffield and Munich. He is active across the digital arts, co-founding the Algorave and TOPLAP live coding movements, and the AlgoMech festival for algorithmic and mechanical movement. He created the popular free/open source TidalCycles live coding environment for music, performing with it at festivals around the world including Sonar, Glastonbury, STRP, Vivo, Transmediale, Ars Electronica and No Bounds. As a researcher he works part time as part of the PENELOPE project, investigating the structures of ancient weaves, and re-inserting weaving in the history of science and technology.
Creative Informatics supports creative individuals and organisations in Edinburgh and South East Scotland to do inspiring things with data. Find out about their funding and development opportunities at creativeinformatics.org
