Troy Innocent
Dr Innocent (he/they) is an urban play scholar, artist gamemaker and Director of the future play lab at RMIT University in Narrm Melbourne. The lab develops socially engaged and site responsive urban play connecting experimental game design, public space, posthuman methods, and creative technologies. Working with the city as a material, their approach to reworlding develops posthuman methods that reimagine, reconfigure and reconnect with the world. This involves transdisciplinary practices across design, sculpture, animation, sound, light and installation using methods of multiplatform storytelling that connect objects with their environment to build speculative worlds that playfully defamiliarise and disrupt urban life.
These worlds explore connections between language and reality, working with the affect of constructed aesthetic languages that traverse geometric abstraction and digital iconography, learned through play. Innocent has 25 years’ experience in gallery-based exhibitions, symposia and site-specific projects, developing augmented reality games that blend physical objects with digital interfaces to reimagine everyday urban environments in playful ways; situating his work in Aarhus, Melbourne, Bristol, Barcelona, Istanbul, Ogaki, Sydney, Tampere and Hong Kong. They are creator of 64 Ways of Being, an urban adventure platform combining audio walks and mixed realities to situate players in new experiences of place.
Four player arcade game, light and sound. With thanks to Lester Asperga for installation support.
Yawa means journey in Boon Wurrung language. Up to four players each become a possum spirit (walert marrup) as they explore a colourful world filled with Boon Wurrung language. As the possum spirits move about the world they reveal words about place that are spoken by N’arwee’t Carolyn Briggs and appear also on the game map. These words describe aspects of what once was in South Melbourne, a rich wetland filled with plants, flowers, animals in which places like Emerald Hill were gathering sites for the Yalukut Weelam of the Boon Wurrung for thousands of years.