Future Rewind # 2- Christy Dena

In the second interview of our series Future Rewind, we caught up with Christy Dena to revisit the past, take a look at the present and seek some advice from the future

Christy Dena is a writer, designer and director of cross-disciplinary and interactive projects in both the digital realm and the everyday. Her video game installation Magister Ludi was featured as part of Experimenta Recharge, 2014 -2016.

The power of play is undeniable. It boosts creativity, builds resilience, deepens problem-solving skills and for children, is vital to learning about the world and themselves.

So it’s perhaps strange that playing games is often overlooked as a way of facilitating important change in our lives or the world.

Unlocking this transformation potential is at the heart of the work of story maker, game designer and educator, Christy Dena. Her work looks to narrative design processes and techniques to go beyond the common structures to unlock deeper meaning and potential.

For the Experimenta Recharge national tour, her installation presented audiences with a vintage wooden school desk, the lid opening to reveal a screen inviting them to play Magister Ludi.

Christy describes Magister Ludi?as a “conceptual escape-the-room game where the only way to truly escape is to think differently?than the room you’re in.”

“So, the puzzles are less figuring out where the keys to unlock are, and more figuring out the oppressive nature of the room, and how you can emancipate yourself by thinking differently. When you do, it’s easier to leave than you first imagined.”

THE PAST> Reflecting on Magister Ludi

In 2014, while at QUT for a digital writing residency, Christy met Experimenta’s then-artistic director Jonathan Parsons who invited her to create a work for Experimenta’s next touring biennial of media art, Recharge.

The curatorial theme of the tour focused on artists whose work was inspired by and entangled with the past – recharging knowledge and meaning systems, and reinvigorating or radically transforming them.

While this appeal to ‘recharge the past’ was intriguing, Christy’s initial concern was much more practical – how to best approach a technical installation that would withstand the challenges of a three year tour across regional Australia.

?“I thought ‘okay, I’ll have a low-tech installation piece, but I’ll have an iPad within it and I’ll make an app that can go within the installation’,” she explains.

For the low-tech element, she searched vintage stores for something interesting, eventually coming across the old school desk. Immediately something clicked.

“There was that whole idea of being schooled and learning – and so I used that as a jumping off point.”

At the same time, the ‘escape room’ phenomenon that was dominating the popular landscape led to this idea of being locked in. Through the lens of the Recharge theme, this guided her back to a previous experience leaving an abusive relationship. It struck her that you don’t truly escape that experience until you have dealt with it internally. She recognised the “internal work that you need to do in order to not be there anymore – not get into that space anymore.”

This idea had parallels to Herman Hesse’s Nobel-prize-winning novel?The Glass Bead Game. Set in a world where the game is a way for people to sort through their understanding of themselves and their world, and once skilled in the game become a Magister Ludi – meaning master of the game.

With this, all three elements fell into place. Working with artist Marigold Bartlett , sound artist Trevor Dikes, and programmer Cameron Owen, she created a game using the escape room dynamics but in a very different way.? While the game was accessed via the iPad for exhibition installation, the game itself lives on and can still be played on the website or downloaded from the app store.....

Read the full article on the Experimenta website