[Worldview is an urban installation for tourists that enables them to record their experience with both an instant-print postcard and a video clip and look through realtime windows into public spaces in other cities.] Fitting in with the surveillance theme in the last few posts but also some older work discussed here (World Bench, Miroir Aux Silhouettes, Intimate Transactions and the work of Paul Sermon), Worldview (by Haque Design) allows users to engage with both the spaces around them, subsequent users to the installation and users interacting with a similar installation elsewhere. Continue reading

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[Image: Operation Urban Terrain (OUT): 2004-6 by Anne Marie Schleiner] “Due to its marginal existence in relation to the oppressive reality of work, play is often regarded as fictitious. But the work of the Situationists is precisely the preparation of ludic possibilities to come.” Guy Debord (Contribution to Situationist Definition of Play, Internationale Situationniste #1, June 1958)

In recent years, commentators on game culture and ludology have undertaken the task of analyzing and structuring play. Such work has been strongly influenced by the Dutch researcher Johan Huizinga’s 1938 study of play, Homo Ludens and Roger Callois’s later structuralist elaborations of Huizinga’s research. Continue reading

How do you find the spirit and play of exploration in an optimized geography?

In the idiom of maps and cartography, the tendency is to thoroughly identify as many attributes of the physical world and coordinate them to geographic, you know…coordinates, typically using latitude and longitude. Those attributes are usually other instrumental and worldly markers, like street addresses, nearly immovable physical markers like, you know…landmarks, buildings, franchise stores, and so on. The database tables fill in with this information, sorted, sifted, refined. Some deletes and updates. Continue reading

Homo Ludens Ludens - Locating Play in Contemporary Culture and Society :: Exhibition: April 18 - September 22, 2008 :: Symposium: April 19 - 20, 2008 :: LABoral Centre for Art and Creative Industries, Los Prados, 121, 33394 Gijón (Asturias) Spain.

Homo Ludens Ludens is an international exhibition and symposium exploring games as a critical element in our daily lives and a speculation on the emergence of the “Homo Ludens Ludens”: the contemporary playing man. What does it mean “to play” and to be “a player”? The goal of this Symposium, organised jointly with The Planetary Collegium, is to provide the framework for contemporary play, to highlight its interdisciplinary nature, and to show the multifaceted reality of our present-day entertainment society. Continue reading

Amagatana and Fula by Yuichiro Katsumoto [via]

The latest issue of Artnodes Journal, the UOC’s e-journal on art, science and technology is now online. Gameplay: Art, Videogames and Culture is dedicated to exploring the relationships between art, videogames and culture, focusing on the idea of gameplay as the common thread to the monograph. In the study of play as a cultural phenomenon, there are a number of important milestones, such as the book Homo Ludens written by Johan Huizinga in 1938 or Man, Play and Games written in 1958 by Roger Caillois, which established a clear link between play and culture, where games are not merely an element in culture but an element of culture. Continue reading

“Video games are the first stage in a plan for machines to help the human race, the only plan that offers a future for intelligence. For the moment, the insufferable philosophy of our time is contained in the Pac-Man. I didn’t know, when I was sacrificing all my coins to him, that he was going to conquer the world. Perhaps because he is the most graphic metaphor of Man’s Fate. He puts into true perspective the balance of power between the individual and the environment, and he tells us soberly that though there may be honor in carrying out the greatest number of victorious attacks, it always comes a cropper.” - Chris Marker, ‘Sunless’

Truncated, repetitive, coin-operated nihilism. To a point. The ‘insufferable philosophy of our time’ is not a single object or symbol, but the array of signs and symbols placed at odds with each other, made to wage a type of war we aren’t told how to engage with. Continue reading

The following text complements the exhibition An 8-bit Moment in Gameplay: [giantJoystick], currently on view at gallery@calit2, Calit2, University of California at San Diego.

Mary Flanagan Interview: Social Change, Video Games and the Visual Arts by Eduardo Navas: Mary Flanagan is an artist and media theorist invested in developing games for social change and performance/action installations. Based on her interests Flanagan produced [giantJoystick] in 2006, and gallery@calit2 is proud to present this working large-scale game-interface from February 4 to March 17 of 2008. [giantJoystick] brings together Flanagan’s diverse interests as a cultural producer. Continue reading

Natural Capital: An interactive Tree of Concern - A plush textured surface under feet sets the immersive scene for ENESS’ latest digital ecopade on the banks of the Yarra River near Melbourne’s Fed Square. Artificial illumination reigns to produce a sublime environment that works diligently to interact with a spectrum of human senses. An exploration of the space will tap into personal theories relating to natural capital and our worldview in relation to climate change – a term that is embedded with infinite meaning and consequence.

A projected tree, with a purpose to retrieve vital information, matures organically in response to a metaphorical fertilizer – insert a leaf and observe immediate evolution, an engrossing possibility for eco-systems of the world in need of nurturing. Continue reading