Play.Work is a creative-reality lab working across media art, emerging technology and commerce, bringing together creators, technologists and researchers in China and the United States. We capture real spaces, people and objects in three dimensions and re-stage them through interaction, real-time engines and artificial intelligence — delivered as brand films, music videos, XR experiences, immersive installations and multimedia projection: worlds that can be entered and acted inside.
Our name is the division of labour. In Play we set the question ourselves — research, development and prototypes, made because they deserve to exist. In Work a brand, an artist or an institution brings a question of its own, and we answer it with the same method. Neither half is the senior one: what we find in one is where the other begins.
Every story needs somewhere to happen.
Our method is parafiction: a world built with evidence enough to be believed, and anomaly enough to be worth questioning. A melting iceberg wrapped in plastic. A supermarket that exists in two realities at once. The medium changes with the project — film, installation, extended reality, or a machine trained to dream — the method does not.
Our work has won the CGarchitect 3D Awards and was selected for the MIT AI Filmmaking Hackathon, and has been exhibited at the World Trade Center in New York, and in Los Angeles, Liverpool, Beijing, Suzhou and Shanghai.
Clients and artists include Burberry, Mercedes-Benz, Dodge Challenger, Bosie, London Fashion Week, NYLON, Polestar, Wallpaper*, WhatWorld Club, Miss Grit, Ni Ni, Re-TROS, Chris Lee and Victor Ma.
Research and academic collaborations include the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Harvard CAMLab, the MIT Media Lab, Harvard XR, Testa & Weiser, the SCI-Arc Robot Lab and the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture.
The team includes new-media artists, directors, architects, programmers and algorithm engineers.
