This talk traces the collaborative work of architect Nathalie Pozzi and game designer Eric Zimmerman – and how their large-scale installations have gradually shifted away from building and from games. Along the way, they will discuss their design process, cultural influences, and how they design “things” that are meant to be bent, broken, and misused.
Over the last several years, Nathalie and Eric have designed a series of large-scale installations that are part architectural sculpture and part interactive performance. These include Sixteen Tons, Starry Heavens, Interference, and their building-sized project Waiting Rooms. Their collaborations have appeared at events and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, as well as in Paris, Dublin, Moscow, and Los Angeles.
Over the last several years, Nathalie and Eric have designed a series of large-scale game installations that are part architectural sculpture and part interactive performance. Their collaborations have appeared at events and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, as well as in Paris, Dublin, Moscow, and Los Angeles.
Nathalie Pozzi is an Italian-licensed architect and the principal of Nakworks, an interdisciplinary design studio based in New York that explores the critical intersection of space, material and culture. Nakworks often collaborates with architects, artists, choreographers and others who work with space. As an artists’ consultant, Nakworks has supervised the installation of large-scale artworks in Brazil, Japan (Yokohama Triennale of Art), Italy (Florence Biennale) and the UK (Royal Academy of London). Nathalie has taught classes and workshops at Berlin University of the Arts, Parsons School of Design in New York City, University of Southern California in Los Angeles and Zurich University of the Arts.
Eric Zimmerman is a game designer and Arts Professor at the NYU Game Center. He designs games on and off the computer that invent new forms of play. A three decade veteran of the game industry, Eric was the co-founder of Gamelab, a studio that created hit games like Diner Dash. Eric was also the co-founder of the Institute of Play, a non-profit that created schools based on games and play as the model for learning across the curriculum. Recent projects include Dear Reader, a game published by Apple that uses classic literature as the basis for word puzzles, and The Green Games Guide, an industry initiative to design and manufacture environmentally sustainable tabletop games. Eric is the co-author of Rules of Play with Katie Salen and more recently The Rules We Break, a book full of the ways he uses games and play to teach design.
https://www.nakworks.com/
https://ericzimmerman.com/
https://theruleswebreak.com/