Herald the End of Winter with a Celebration of Light & Play

QV Melbourne’s Laneway Series launches with Light / Play

First Australian work from Danish artist Tine Bech

25th August to 10th September

QV Melbourne is thrilled to announce the QV Laneway Series: a seasonal program of ongoing interactive outdoor events, festivals and activations in the QV Square and surrounding laneways.

To launch the series, QV has commissioned globally acclaimed Danish artist Tine Bech to complete her first Australian work, which will be the centrepiece of a new interactive program of events called Light / Play. The celebration of light and play will herald the end of winter from Friday 25 August – Sunday 10 September.

With a PhD in ‘Play’, Tine Bech is a multidisciplinary artist who creates innovative interactive art that encourages participation and most of all, play.

Tine’s new work, entitled Colour Me Beautiful, will create a playful new environment for social interaction, experienced for the very first time at QV Melbourne. Tine Bech will visit Melbourne to premiere the new artwork, and will engage with Melbourne audiences as they interact and respond to her work.

Featuring five colourful runways leading to a vivid landscape of images, Colour Me Beautiful invites the public to play and perform. The interactive installation will capture images of audience members on each runway; live posting them onto a 5.8 metre by 3.2 metre multicolour screen. The work invites Melburnians and visitors alike to walk the coloured grass runway, strike a pose and be captured in a bright maze of colour. Participants in the work will each receive a link to their images to share their experience with others. Tine’s intention for Colour Me Beautiful is to exemplify and extend the play inherent in human connection through social sharing.

Transforming both the environment and human behaviour through the creative possibilities of play making, Colour Me Beautiful will transform the open air QV Square into an interactive digital art playground.

What: Light Play: an end of winter program of interactive events at QV Melbourne. Escape the last cold days of winter with an innovative and playful celebration of light and play – where colour, art, performance, music and food come together. FREE.

Where: QV Square, Level 2, QV Melbourne, corner Swanston and Lonsdale Streets, Melbourne

When: 25 August to 10 September, 2017
Colour Me Beautiful is available for participation 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with other activities and event times varying.

For more information visit qv.com.au

 >#QVLightPlay
www.qv.com.au

Information & Images Courtesy of Rain Fuller/Fuller PR

Connie Lambeth – The Australia Times Gourmet News – Food/Wine/Hospitality/Events

Follow us on Instagram: @tatgourmetmag

READ ON FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, PICS and a Q&A with Danish Artist Tine Bech…

Danish artist Tine Bech’s work has been exhibited in public spaces, galleries and at major festivals, transforming urban landmarks in cities around the world. Some of Tine’s previous work includes interactive artworks at London Bridge Live Art Festival, Denmark’s On the Edge Digital Art Festival, Israel Museum, Los Angeles’ SIGGRAPH Art Gallery and a ‘playable city’ on water in Recife, Brazil.

“I don’t define play as being only for children. Our own evolution and survival as a species shows the centrality of play. We learn how to deal with risk through play – through exploration, testing, and thereby learning and adapting. I believe that play is integral to culture; it is part of our social fabric and lies at the core of social bonds,” says Tine.

Tine Bech’s artistic vision is to explore how culture, technology and play intersect to shape the future of our cities.

“I believe cities need creative collaborative spaces, in unexpected places, that inspire participation and communication. What we are doing at QV Melbourne is exactly that,” says Tine.

Light / Play will also feature a range of Melbourne art and culture happenings in a new converted shipping container in the QV Square, and throughout QV’s laneways.

“We are excited to launch our new Laneway Series in Melbourne. The eclectic program of events will provide diverse opportunities for play, thought provoking activities, surprising visual treats and exciting entertainment for city visitors and residents,” says Lisa Fleming, QV Melbourne’s Regional Centre Manager.

Worlds apart from other retail precincts in Melbourne, QV represents the quintessential Melbourne lifestyle. Intimate laneways in the urban precinct give visitors the freedom to wander and discover the eclectic mix of shops, cafes and restaurants at their own pace. Located on the corner of Lonsdale and Swanston Streets, QV has something for everyone with boutiques, enlightening entertainment and cosmopolitan bars and restaurants.

—————————————————————————————————————————————-

Tine Bech Interview

People, play, places and technology inspire me

Where does your creative inspiration come from?

A love of Play

I grew up in a family that played street, card and board games, and went into the woods and climbed trees. Playing was an end in itself. I hadn’t appreciated this fully until I began researching the idea (of play) and realised that the greatest gift that my parents gave me (especially my dad) was rooting play at the core of my being because it was the basis of discovering and exploring my creative potential.

A love of tech

I have memories of my brother soldering and testing his sensor’s range ‘early adaptor’. It helped me understand that technology could be adapted and subverted and be something that in turn could change the way you behave. It could also do things without being visible or present. It was a revelation.

A love of freedom

Denmark has a strong physical play and playground tradition. It was the first country to develop the outdoor adventure playground. There is a sense of freedom and individuality (enabled by a strong safety net) that allows exploration. This exploration and play is also reflected in the Scandanavian attitude to the body. The body is ‘more natural’ (not trapped in a puritanical or religious ideal) and most people would do physical sport and play activities. Like many people of my generation I was granted a great deal of creative and social freedom. I’ve been exploring the edges of that space since I was a teenager.

A love of independence

Pippi Longstocking was my hero. She was cool because she was different. She was strong (actually, she had superpowers of physical strength), unusual and independent – and she saw the world differently. She turned her world upside down, sleeping with her legs on the pillows of her bed, eating at the wrong times, questioning the things that adults take for granted. She was my permission to be me and to explore. Every time there was a dress up event I would be Pippi …or a pirate.

A love of people

Growing up in Denmark gave me a strong sense of the importance of community, people and place together with values of equality and fairness. This democratic, social impulse is the heartbeat of my work. We really all are in this (my work) together!

When did you become an artist?

The moment I realised that it was possible to create art from play was in my early 20’s. I was drawing on paper with pencils, colour and was making Miro-inspired drawings. It was liberating and rewarding to know that I could produce art but what I was making, though technically very good, was limited. It was only when I began to channel the fierce independence of my teenage years into the work that I started to establish my own voice. And the vocabulary of that voice came from play, game-making, adventure, the very things that defined my character and identity. As soon as I was conscious of this, my working practice was established. I was drawing on experience rather than received ideas. Making art was the way for me to be safe and take risks at the same time. It was a clear and obvious extension of my everyday creativity.

What makes you the artist you are today?

In 2009 I saw a TED talk by Stuart Brown, who is the founder of the National Institute for Play in California. Brown came to study play after examining something much more sombre: the lives of murderers. He found a

common thread to their life stories: a lack of play in their childhood. Since then he’s interviewed thousands of people about how and why they play. That talk reaffirmed something deep-rooted in me that I hadn’t properly articulated to that point. It’s that play is not only serious but also essential to any civilised society and we as artists have a special responsibility to give people, especially children and young people, the tools to help develop their powers of play in what is an increasingly complex and socially hazardous world. It was also a reminder that my work functions as more than something that is simply ‘playful’: it goes much deeper than that. I’m creating environments in which we can safely explore the codes and rituals, tropes and mores of our contemporary world.