When

Where

Science Gallery Melbourne
Grattan St, Parkville

More info

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DISTRACTION plugs into the streaming torrent of content and the places our brains go when we want to focus on anything but the thing. You know, the thing you're supposed to be doing right now?

Your distraction of choice might be scrolling, daydreaming or exploring a digital universe. Where are we escaping to? What are we missing in the process? Confusion reigns, disinformation spreads and the truth is called into question. Attention becomes profit-driven, and it is hard to know who is really in control.

Yet we are creative and connective creatures, alive with an incalculable capacity to surprise. Look through a playful lens at the ways we devote our time and find space for ourselves in an increasingly nonsensical world. When we are bouncing around the whirring, flashing, pinball machine of existence, is our wayward attention a way of coping with the chaos?

This free exhibition features an experimental arcade in partnership with Freeplay, the world's longest-running indie games festival.

Play custom-built games by local developers on bespoke arcade machines, dive into interactive student-designed games from Science Gallery's STEM program, and test your wits against AI in creativity-challenging works like Deviation Game. Whether you're drawing, button-mashing or triggering cat vision, there's plenty here to pull your focus.

Through local and international experimental projects - some developed in conversation with scientists and researchers - you are invited to participate in your own way.

The time here is yours, what do you want to do with it?