Booklaunch: Playful Mapping in the Digital Age

13 March 2017, 17:00 – 18:30 @ SPUI 25, Amsterdam

To register, follow the link here.

From Mah-Jong, to the introduction of Prussian war-games, through to the emergence of location-based play: maps and play share a long and diverse history. Join us for the Amsterdam launch of the bookPlayful Mapping in The Digital Age, ‘ which shows how playing and mapping can be liberating, dangerous, subversive and performative.

Playful mapping in the digital age shows how mapping and playing unfold in the digital age and in which ways the relations between these apparently separate tropes are increasingly woven together. Fluid networks of interaction have encouraged a proliferation of hybrid forms of mapping and playing. A rich plethora of contemporary case-studies, ranging from fieldwork, golf, activism and automotive navigation to pervasive and desktop-based games, emphasizes this trend. Examining these cases shows how mapping and playing can form productive synergies, but also encourages new ways of being, knowing and shaping our everyday lives. This afternoon, the Members of the Playful Mapping Collective explore how play can be more than just an object or practice, and instead focus on its potential as a method for understanding maps and spatiality.

After two keynote lectures and the book launch, there will be a panel discussion with the speakers. Sybille Lammers will moderate the evening.

About the speakers

Clancy Wilmott is a senior tutor at the University of Manchester. She holds a PhD in Human Geography on the indeterminacies of mobile mapping in Sydney and Hong Kong.

Emma Fraser is a PhD researcher in Sociology at the University of Manchester. Emma’s work is focused on urban ruins and decay, post-apocalyptic video games, and the writings of Walter Benjamin.

Alex Gekker is a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam. He completed his PhD in Utrecht University on the interplay between modern map-making practices, digital interfaces and the power that arises in between them.

Sybille Lammes is Associate Professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. She is currently the principal investigator of the ERC Proof of Concept Playfields.

Michiel de Lange is an Assistant Professor in New Media Studies, Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University; co-founder of The Mobile City; advisor e-culture at Mediafonds; and works as a researcher in the field of (mobile) media, urban culture, identity and play.

Geert Lovink is a media theorist, internet critic and author of Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012) and Social Media Abyss (2016). Since 2004 he is researcher in the School for Communication and Media Design at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences where he is the director of the Institute of Network Cultures.