V&A Teams with Games Festival for Friday Late
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- V&A partnered with the London Games Festival for its Friday Late series to showcase independent video games and immersive interactive experiences, emphasizing play as performance.
- London Live Coding performed a live‑coding glitchy electronic music set in the museum’s grand entrance, with LED screens projecting code streams and pixelated visuals.
- Thank Goodness You’re Here! – a BAFTA‑winning comedy game – was projected on a giant screen beneath a 13th‑century spiral staircase for visitors to play.
- Sex With Friends – an erotic physics puzzler – was installed in the Prince Consort’s gallery, where groups played the game and the audience described the experience as “weirdly wholesome.”
- Jamie Brew led the “Robot Karaoke” performance, using an algorithm to remix classic pop songs with lyrics drawn from unexpected data sets, such as negative Glassdoor reviews.
- Volsing (senior curator) asserted that displaying video games alongside historic artifacts reframes them as serious cultural objects and creates communal, cross‑temporal experiences.
Why it matters: By framing video games as museum exhibits, the V&A gives visitors a tangible way to engage with digital culture, legitimizing games as serious artifacts and encouraging developers to explore communal, performative formats, while expanding the museum’s appeal to younger, tech‑savvy audiences.
Ask SkimNews
