Playing the Archive was an ambitious programme of research and cultural production, exploring the nature of play by bringing together archives, spaces and technologies of play, along with people who play, both old and young. Focused on the work and legacy of the archivists of children’s folklore, Iona and Peter Opie, the project addressed the ephemerality of practices and memories encoded in play through a programme of digitisation, ethnography, and re-mediation of historic and contemporary play practices through digital technology.

CASA’s role in the project, led by Dr Valerio Signorelli, was the creation of Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality experiences inspired by and in dialogue with the archival and ethnographic strands of the project. The most visible public-facing output of this work was the The Time Telephone, a Mixed Reality device consisiting of a replica phone box through which visitors to the V&A Museum of Childhood could ‘call’ the past to explore the Opie Archive.

Role

Co-Investigator

Collaborators

• Professor Andrew Burn (Principal Investigator)
• Dr Julia Bishop (Research Associate)
• Kate Cowan (Research Associate)
• Professor Andy Hudson-Smith (Co-Investigator)
• Professor Jakie Marsh (Co-Investigator)
• Dr John Potter (Co-Investigator)
• Dr Valerio Signorelli (Research Associate)
• Alison Somerset-Ward (Research Associate)
• Dr Helen Woolley (Co-Investigator)

Outputs

• The Time Telephone