Nordic Larp Talks is a series of short, entertaining, thought-provoking and mind-boggling lectures about projects and ideas from the Nordic tradition of live action roleplaying games.
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For questions, contact Petter Karlsson at petter.karlsson@gmail.com or Andie Nordgren at andie.nordgren@gmail.com
All presentations from Nordic Larps Talks Helsinki 2012 are now available on the site.
Watch the presentations
How to become a god - Mike Pohjola
From preforming arts to larp - Johanna MacDonald
The interplay between player and man in the street - JP Kaljonen
Experimental Larp Design - Jesper Bruun
Playing in Graveyards: Terror collides with larp - Lizzie Stark
Bonus: States of Play - Solmukohta 2012 book presentation - Juhana Petterson
Photo: Jakob la Cour www.jakoblacour.dk
Lizzie Stark is a freelance journalist and author of the narrative nonfiction book Leaving Mundania, which explores larp from a variety of angles in the US and Nordic countries. Her writing has appeared on The Today Show website, io9. and in The Daily Beast. She holds a masters journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in fiction writing from Emerson College and is the founder and editor-in-chief of the online literary journal Fringe, which is dedicated to political and experimental literature.
Site: elizabethrstark.com
Twitter: @lizziestark
Photo: Jakob la Cour www.jakoblacour.dk
Jesper Bruun (Cand. Scient) is a science education researcher who has made contributions to the Nordic larp scene by writing academic articles and developing innovative games. His current interest in larp revolves around using non-traditional ways of communication in larps and using pre-larp workshops for teaching participants to play games. Both interests are represented in the tango roleplay In Fair Verona.
Site: Jesper Bruun at University of Copenhagen
Twitter: @jbruun
Photo: Jakob la Cour www.jakoblacour.dk
Played around with larp and roleplaying all your life? Want to make so good use of all the experience gained after entering all kinds of strange worlds? Well, at least Mikko Rautalahti and Andie Nordgren has done just that and are now employed at the video game studios Remedy Entertainmet (Alan Wake, Max Payne) and CCP Games (Eve Online, World of Darkness). Here interviewed by Johanna Koljonen about their thoughts about their work today and it’s connections to their roleplaying background.
Site: funpastimes.com
Twitter: @MikkiRMD
Site: log.andie.se
Twitter: @nordgren
Johanna Koljonen is a writer, Radio and TV host, critic, and a popular lecturer on larp and related topics. Her groundbreaking larp criticism, in essays like “Eye-Witness to the Illusion: The Impossibility of 360° Role-Playing” and “The Dragon Was the Least of it: Larp As Ephemera and Ruin” are widely quoted in the field. She is a co-founder of the TV, radio and web production company Rundfunk Media AB and has a BA in literature. She has hosted several popular radio shows such as “P3 Kultur – Nördorama med Johanna Koljonen” and “Jättestora frågor med Johanna Koljonen” on Swedish national radio and writes columns for Dagens Nyheter and Fokus. She is the scriptwriter of the Oblivion High series of graphic novels and the co-author of the book-length larp autopsy Dragonbane – The Legacy. She also won the innovator category of the The Swedish Grand Journalism Prize of 2011.
Site: johannakoljonen.com
Twitter: @jocxy
Photo: Jakob la Cour www.jakoblacour.dk
JP Kaljonen is a Helsinki based visual artist. He works in the fields of social- and participatory art dealing with themes related to cultural interaction. His works are based on societal grounds and vary from video or photography to projects in public space. Kaljonen has realized his projects in different parts of Asia and Europe, and his works have been presented in group- and solo exhibitions in Finland and abroad. Recent shows include Backlight International Photo Festival, Finland 2011, Finnish Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma URB11-Festival, Finland 2011 and Porapara Art Space Public Art Exhibition at Patenga Sea Beach, Bangladesh 2012. He organized and developed the larp Dublin2 (Helsinki, 2011) together with artists Johanna Raekallio and Haidi Motola. The second production of the larp is organized together with Johanna Raekallio and Nordic cooperatives in Stockholm 2012.
Site: kaljonen.com
Photo: Jakob la Cour www.jakoblacour.dk
The term gamification has been a buzzword the latest years in the sense that games are slowly making their way into new parts of society. That is now happening with larp and Claus calls it larpification.
Claus Raasted has been a professional larper for a decade, is the author of 8 books on larp and splits his time between being editor-in-chief of the national Danish roleplaying magazine ROLLE|SPIL and doing larp stuff for a variety of different institutions and people. He also has his own weapons factory, but who hasn’t, these days?
Site: clausraasted.dk
Photo: Jakob la Cour www.jakoblacour.dk
Johanna MacDonald is a transnational Finnish-Canadian artist in theatre, performance art, stand-up comedy, drag performance, punk music, writing, video, and larp. She started out in Toronto with a fairly traditional education in drama-based theatre as an actor and director, but then moved to Finland, where she couldn’t make heads or tails of the language. This move catalyzed an interest in physical theatre and dance, which is where Johanna focused intensively for the next half-decade, training in about half a dozen well-known theatrical methodologies from butoh to biomechanics. Together with Aarni Korpela, Johanna is the creator of Walkabout, a long-term crossover project between larp, theatre, and performance art. Their latest project, The Lovers’ Matchmaking Agency, will be run in Oslo, Copenhagen, and Helsinki in the summer of 2012.
Site: walkabout.happeningfish.com
Twitter: @happeningfish
Photo: Jakob la Cour www.jakoblacour.dk
Mike Pohjola is a writer, a game designer, an entrepeneur and an activist. He has written two novels, three table-top roleplaying games, a manifesto, several theatre plays, larps at art festivals and for fun, some short films, digital games, interactive projects, and lots of other stuff. He has founded two award-winning companies, that together have won an International Emmy Award for Best Interactive TV Service (The Truth About Marika), two Interactive Rockies (Conspiracy For Good) and a Prix Europa (The Forest of Babel). He’s currently working on his third novel 1827 – Inferno about the Great Fire of Turku.
Site: mikepohjola.com
Blog: mikepohjola.wordpress.com
Twitter: @mikepohjola
My presentation, How To Become A God, deals with the history of drama from Dionysian rituals to reality television, and beyond, and how all of this relates to roleplaying. While doing that, I’ll also answer a puzzling point in Aristotle’s Poetics that’s been bugging theatre scholars for three thousand years.
Nordic Larp Talks and State of Play
Photo: Jakob la Cour www.jakoblacour.dk
Bjarke Pedersen runs the Copenhagen based company Odyssé which focuses on interactive storytelling, larping and participatory events. He also works together International artist Brody Condon on interactive performances in Europe and the States. He has played, designed and organised larps since the late nineties. He has made everything from children-larps for the Royal Danish Theatre to an elaborate simulation of life aboard a Soviet submarine.
Johanna Koljonen is a writer, Radio and TV host, critic, and a popular lecturer on larp and related topics. Her groundbreaking larp criticism, in essays like “Eye-Witness to the Illusion: The Impossibility of 360° Role-Playing” and “The Dragon Was the Least of it: Larp As Ephemera and Ruin” are widely quoted in the field. She is a co-founder of the TV, radio and web production company Rundfunk Media AB and has a BA in literature. She has hosted several popular radio shows such as “P3 Kultur – Nördorama med Johanna Koljonen” and “Jättestora frågor med Johanna Koljonen” on Swedish national radio and writes columns for Dagens Nyheter and Fokus. She is the scriptwriter of the Oblivion High series of graphic novels and the co-author of the book-length larp autopsy Dragonbane – The Legacy.
Site: johannakoljonen.com
Twitter: jocxy
