Medialab-Prado turns Madrid into a screen of solid interfaces and urban digital games

Until next time 7 July, Medialab-Prado holds the collaborative development workshop “Solid interfaces and digital games in public spaces”, showing the projects in the streets of central Madrid.

Medialab-Prado will show the projects selected in the collaborative development workshop “Solid interfaces and urban games: “Digital Games in public spaces”, that can be seen until 7 July in some central streets of Madrid.

These selected projects use interactive street furniture, environmental sensors, digital facades, multiplayer video game dynamics, sound compositions or Guerrilla Gardening to propose other ways of living the city and making it more sustainable.

Collaborators enrolled in this intensive workshop also participate in the production of the selected projects, aimed at thinking about play in public space as an opportunity to generate and create other urban uses and the links established between citizens, in which the city is the interface.

During these seven days the work and experimentation platform dedicated to the digital façade of Medialab-Prado, together with collaborators, workshop tutors and technical project assistants, with the advice of Nerea Calvillo, curator for Medialab-Prado of Connecting Cities, ideas will be tested and prototypes developed. Next, a brief summary of these projects that can be seen in Madrid.

Sonic Skate Plaza

The Sonic Skate Plaza proposal, by Pablo Serret de Ena, It is an intervention in the public space in which the Plaza de Las Letras in Madrid becomes a stage for a “Skater Orchestra”. With the use of different sensors located on the surface of the square and its urban furniture, These elements are transformed into an interface that activates sound compositions with the movement of the skaters who usually use the square.. From their interaction, routes and skills can generate multiple and variable compositions, resulting in sound pieces created by using the skateboard as an instrument.

Real-time audio can be broadcast well over public speakers (event) or by wireless frequency (fixed installation), the latter being accessible through mobile phones and headphones. The fixed installation would also result in a platform where the sound associated with the sensors could be “curated” and intervened by different sound artists., musicians and users, both local and foreign, thus generating connections between a “real” physical plaza and a “virtual” one.; between the local and the global.

Other elements, like the digital facade, will support this activity to visualize the routes and actions of the skaters.

Temporary Babel3D

This project is a construction simulation network game, tower-shaped, that evolves from the flows of movement thanks to multiple real and virtual players. Temporary Babel3D is an interactive game for building the tower of Babel: a space where time and space oscillate and perspective changes; where real and virtual movement flows generated by users sculpt the dynamics of construction and destruction and transform them into the construction of a community-built game.

This project works on the idea of ​​archaeologically reconstructing the Tower of Babel, and how community movements model temporary virtual architectures in a simple and engaging playful environment.

El Prado Gardening Guerrilla

This is a mixed reality tactical game that takes place in the city of Madrid and can last for days., weeks or even months, as players plant seedlings in various places around the city and move plants from rival teams to add them to their own spaces.

Plants are marked with QR codes, and your GPS coordinates are transmitted to a server on the Medialab-Prado digital façade, showing an abstract view of the game state (while keeping the location of the plant a secret).

While the game focuses on espionage and team tactics, Playing with plants opens new unexpected experiences in the perception of the city. Besides, Players are encouraged to treat plants and the environment with the utmost respect. Prado Gardening Guerrilla is the first city-wide adaptation of the Gardening Guerrilla games concept., and integrates the digital façade as a game board and meeting place between players.

Urban Spirits

The objective of this project-game is to promote ecological behavior, creative and aggregative in the urban neighborhood environment. The game makes use of the innovative sensors of the Smart City and its urban spaces, especially interactive urban furniture and digital facades, with which players can interact through their smartphones or directly with street furniture.

Urban Spirits, based on the metaphor of the same name, receives data on the situation of the urban district through environmental sensors, and with this information dynamically changes the game environment. The purpose is to appease the little spirits through interaction with the environment, and each interaction is a small exercise aimed at reinforcing social involvement, creativity and ecological awareness in the participants.

Besides, Medialab-Prado participates together with ten other institutions in the European Urban Media Network for Connecting Cities initiative, whose objective is the creation of a network of media facades and urban screens for the circulation of artistic and social content.

The initiative is financed by the Culture Program of the European Union and is configured as a network for the exchange of experience and knowledge in which to generate a debate forum around urban media facades and screens., as well as in project development, events, calls, etc.