The Sandpit / 2008-2013 / for Hide&Seek
In 2008, Alex Fleetwood and I founded the Sandpit: a playtesting event for people making live interactive work to try out their ideas. Over the course of the next five years, I curated over 40 Sandpit events, including a V&A Late Opening (pictured here); a tour taking in venues and festivals across the UK, including FACT (Liverpool), DocFest (Sheffield), the Forest Fringe (Edinburgh), the Lighthouse (Brighton) and National Theatre Wales (Cardiff); and London events at the Southbank Centre, ICA, BAC, BFI, Holland Park, Soho Theatre, the National Maritime Museum, and Shunt.
We supported the development of hundreds of new games, including work from seasoned designers and from first-time game-makers, working with them to develop their games and to find ways to present them to audiences that both provided a positive experience for visitors, and allowed the artists to get valuable feedback. As part of this we also regularly created updated zines of casual games that people could play throughout the night, with evolving rulesets and a mixture of traditional and new work.
Images here are from the 2010 Friday Late: Playgrounds event at the V&A.