About

Expanded Play is a practice-based lab for creative enterpreneurs, artists, designers, engineers and academics focusing on Play as Experience at the Intersection of creativity, technology, research, social change and development.

Based in London, UK, and Zaragoza, Spain, Expanded Play is actively supported by the Milla Digital project, an initiative of the Zaragoza City Council.

As digital technologies permeate our society, culture, politics, togetherness, and everyday lives, while interactive games establish themselves not only as one of the biggest industries today, but also as a social and cultural phenomenon to impact our everyday, we are all complicit, in varying degrees, in what Edward Castranova has described as an exodus to the virtual world. While this exodus has been taking place, 21st Century discourses have been rejecting utopic (or, for some, dystopic) cybernetic notions of downloadable selves and obsolete bodies (Stelarc), looking to bring back into the picture physical bodies and instances of materiality ( N. Katherine Hayles, Anna Munster, among others).

Expanded Play is interested in studying, commissioning, producing and presenting innovative practices that situate themselves at the intersections, cross-overs and overlaps between the physical and the digital. Our aim is to look at game-play and ludic interventions which, through a new generation of platforms and interfaces, expand our understanding and enrich out experience of play as an integral, indeed crucial, human activity that helps define culture (Roger Caillois) and networks.

Expanded Play is concerned with investigating and promoting links between artistic and academic environments and creative industries, aiming to support exchanges in innovation and cutting-edge practice and discourse, in order to inspire the makers and thinkers of the future. A core concern is providing access points for local communities of artists, cultural professionals and creative entrepreneurs to tap into possibilities for future developments and collaborations across sectors.

Expanded Play Sessions is the first of a series of events and a festival taking place in Zaragoza (Spain) as part of the international project Milla Digital. The event brings together creative professionals, artists, industry leaders and academics to discuss innovation, trends and challenges in the gaming and digital media industry and the arts. This first edition, held in Zaragoza, is part of the activities designed to gather the creative community of the city around the forthcoming Centre for Art & Technology Zaragoza, one of the main highlights of the Milla Digital project.

Expanded Play Sessions stand out as a curated gathering aiming to further creativity through technology and art practice as Play.

Let's play together.


Expanded Play Team.