My creative fellowship is taking place in partnership with The Playful University. As best as I can describe from the time I have had to get to know it, the Playful University is a virtual entity – a kind of phantom institution haunting the bureaucracy of the official university, creating spaces of playfulness and compassion within its apparatus of learning. It hosts game nights and game mornings, encourages lecturers to consider how they might create opportunities for play within their teaching, and explores other opportunities for play to infiltrate the everyday life of the university.

At times I have worried that my engagement with Exeter University as been so abstracted by the pandemic that it is hard to hold on to the idea of it as a physical place of brick and mortar filled with students and teachers with blood spinning round in their bodies.

And yet it is also a time when the university has more need of playfulness and compassion than at possibly any time in its history. And perhaps the thing I have enjoyed most so far is getting to know Maarten Koeners, who leads the Playful University, and seeing the incredible amount of care and compassion that he puts into considering the pastoral wellbeing of all the students at the university – not as a complement to the University’s educational aims, but as an essential part of them. I’ve also enjoyed the extent to which Maarten’s own family form part of his teaching and his involvement in the playful university. Each month at one of his early morning events, anyone affiliated with the university can play games conceived and hosted by Maarten’s young sons who are as important a part of the Playful University as any of the rest of us.

It has been incredibly exciting seeing the ways in which Maarten is undertaking the same blurring of art and life, of work and family, of the pastoral and the professional, in his own work, however wildly different that work is to my own.

This concern with blurring the official machinery of Exeter University and the more boundless space of the Playful University is the direction that I think my fellowship will continue to travel in 2021. I am already making plans for ways in which I can slip into the physical and virtual architecture of the university – through rogue slides inserted into teachers’ PowerPoint presentations and imaginary lectures taking place in otherwise empty lecture theatres. In doing so I want to explore the new relationship that we are all developing with absence and virtuality, as students, as teachers, as ordinary people walking around in a world where human contact is suddenly a profound threat to our health and that of the people around us.

How can we inhabit this absence, and can we inhabit it together? If a lecture happens in a theatre, but no one is there to hear it, is there anything it can still teach us?

Discover more about Andy's Creative Fellowship here.