IMPORTANT! Due to illness, the event has been postponed to January 21st.

Join us for a special event, organised as part of the PainGame exhibition. The afternoon will feature a talk by Sabine Harrer, followed by a Q&A with the audience. On this occasion, it will also be possible to see the PainGame exhibition curated by Verity Oberg & Nika Lenz.

The conversation with Elise Terranova will no longer take place during the event, but it’s still planned for a future episode of her Life & Dev podcast, so make sure to subscribe to it! http://lifeanddev.com/

SCHEDULE

— 15:00 Doors
— 15:30–16:30 Talk by Sabine Harrer + Q&A
— 18:00 End

The event is free to attend, but we’ll be asking for donations for those who can (and want to) support.

ABOUT THE TALK

The talking dead: Remembering our loved ones through game design

The death of a loved one can be a soul-crushing thing. That’s because loss often comes with a loss for words: How to adequately make sense of, talk about this relationship? It also comes with the challenge of living on: How to remember, honour, and even stay in touch with the dead? This talk explores game design as a language to talk with and about the dead. When the desire for words is there, game design is an option to explore difficult feelings around death playfully. It can give designers and players a sense of safety when navigating painful experiences. And it can use gameplay to indicate appropriate ways to talk about the dead. As the talking dead, our passed relatives, friends, and children live on in our games.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

— Sabine Harrer is a Berlin/Copenhagen based game designer, researcher, and lecturer. As member of the Copenhagen Game Collective she has collaborated on play experiences which use game design as artistic tool. Performative, material, and digital elements flow together to explore ordinary experience, social power, and human vulnerability. Sabine is currently teaching intimate game design at BTK, Berlin, and directing the IF game Minded, supported by the Danish Film Institute, Copenhagen.
https://enibolas.com // @enibolas

ABOUT THE PAINGAME EXHIBITION

The exhibition aims to explore the effects, agency, and interaction between pain and pleasure. Power and vulnerability. Attraction and compensation. Inspiration and triumph. What are the indicators of pain? Which memories do they bring? What stories lie behind the scars? How do painful experiences influence the relationship to pain itself and how do people deal with pain? Why does one purposefully put oneself in situations that inevitably will be painful? What makes it attractive? How can strange, uncomfortable or even painful experiences create intimacy, empathy, creativity or authenticity?

PainGame features paintings, tapestry, textile art, sculpture, collage, installation, games and video art by Riikka Hyvönen, Ellen Schinderman, Natalie Baxter, Spencer Chalk-Levy, Jim Avignon, Philip Crawford, Mathieu Brohan, Simon Thiel, Audrey Nervi and more.

The exhibition is curated by Verity Oberg & Nika Lenz and will be running at Schau Fenster on January 12–29.

Find out more about PainGame at https://paingameberlin.weebly.com