curated matter

We have two facebook groups for those interested in semiotics, contemporary art and video games:

• The Semiotics of Video Games facebook group, created at the occasion of this project. The group is all about the production of meaning in video games: how does it work, what is the message, how does it relate to our everyday cultural reality?
• The Game Art facebook group focuses on its part on contemporary art inspired by videogames.

The Welcome to My Place project was talked about in the following publications and events.

January 2011: Conversation with Kati Blom on the appropriation of space, from the International Society for the Philosophy of Architecture.

September 2010: Study on Verticality presented at the European Conference on Complex Systems (Lisbon, Portugal).

• Videogames open a new domain for persuasion: procedural rhetoric, “the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions”.
• “When we create videogames, we are making claims about processes in the human experience, which ones we celebrate, which ones we ignore, which ones we want to question.”
• “Videogame players develop procedural literacy though interacting with the abstract models of specific real or imagined processes presented in the games they play. Videogames teach biased perspectives about how things work. And the way they teach such perspectives is through procedural rhetorics, which players ‘read’ though direct engagement and criticism.”

In this paper, I will analyse some of the videos that were made at the occasion of the Welcome to My Place project, a collective video resource that started in February 2010 and where people can share the places that matter to them. In view of the videos and after some researches, I would like to propose a slightly different approach to the concept of non-place introduced by Marc Augé, and to the way places are appropriated. This paper is also intended to provide a short introduction to the philosophical notion of place and its main themes.

Here is a series of three artistic videos around the theme of verticality. I made them while I was in Hong Kong in May 2010 to complement the Welcome to My Place video collection and my researches on the philosophical concept of place. While I visited many cities in my life, Hong Kong is a particularly striking vertical experience, because of its density and uncompromising modernisation.

The Welcome to Finsbury Park project was co-organised with the Transition Finsbury Park association to engage the London N4 local communities with their neighbourhood. It consisted in a 2-month field investigation using videos and was concluded in March 2010 by a workshop and the co-creation of subjective maps (these two activities are documented in the following manuals). Here below is a review of the project and some conclusions, co-written by myself and James Thomson from the Transition Finsbury park association.

Here are step-by-step manuals documenting the workshops that have been organized as part of the Welcome to My Place activities. They are all free and under a Creative Commons License. Please check more details about the licenses inside each document.

These manuals can be used as:

1. Tools to better understand the identity of a place or an area (in the context of an ethnographic study for example).

This page is basically another way to introduce the activities organised as part of the Welcome to My Place project. They all involved at some point subjective maps. Subjective maps don’t have to be spatially accurate; they should communicate how a territory is perceived. They are a tool of critical cartography, “a set of mapping practices and theoretical critique grounded in critical theory. It differs from classical cartography in that it links geographic knowledge with power, and thus is political. Critical cartographers do not aim to invalidate maps; instead the critique is a careful analysis identifying maps attributes that are taken for granted” (Wikipedia).

The world as a gamespace:

• “There is no idle time in The Sims”.
• “Work becomes a gamespace, but no games are freely chosen anymore. Play becomes everything to which it was opposed. It is work, serious, morality, necessity”.
• “The utopian dream of liberating play from the game, of a pure play beyond the game, merely opened the way for the extension of gamespace into every aspect of everyday life”.

Algorithms:

• “What is distinctive about games is that they produce for the gamer an intuitive relation to the algorithm”.

• Five conceptual planes for the analysis of game spaces:
  • Rule-based (algorithm, hardware)
  • Mediated (what appears on the screen)
  • Fictional (what is in the head of the player)
  • Play (where the player is)
  • Social (other players).
• On narratives:
  • “A fundamental function of narrative is that of providing a way of comprehending space, time, and causality”.
  • “Narrative can be thought as systems of verbal or visual cues prompting their readers to spatialize storyworlds into evolving configurations of participants, objects and places”.