Japan roundup

I’m coming to the end of what has been a really intense 4 week trip to Japan working on various projects. This has been my first opportunity to sit down and try and summarise it and, of course, there’s too much to fit into one blog post! Here are some random recollections and photos.

Our main focus was to do Call and Return workshops in Kyoto and Yokohama and then to pull it all together for Igfest.

I found the workshops immensely valuable and learned a lot from the game weekend to – thanks to everyone who took part.

An extra bonus to doing the workshop in Kyoto was finally getting a chance to meet some of the hanare community and get a feel for how they work together. Awesome. What they’ve built from a combination of limited resources and what must be a huge reservoir of determination and enthusiasm was very, very impressive indeed.

We also got to hook up with Markuz who not only translated a lot for us at hanare, but shared a lot of his thoughts on participation in general and gave us a night-time tour of Kyoto – including revisiting a certain canal!

This last week is being filled with visiting exhibitions, hopefully checking out some art events in Yokohama, visiting Joshibi University and generally catching up with as many friends as possible (hopefully getting some of them blogging too!).

Meanwhile, the reason for today’s down-time is that I’m currently sat in the studio I’m currently staying at, waiting for my birthday party to arrive… :)