by Gabriele Ferri, PhD student in Semiotics at the University of Bologna, Italy
This is the introduction of an annex discussion to the Semiotics of Video Games exhibition. It was lead by Gabriele Ferri on facebook in September 2010. Please visit the discussion page to see the reactions, and don’t hesitate to post yours.
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.
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”.
Citations from the short and very interesting book written by Marc Augé in1995 (contemporary philosophy and anthropology):
“If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place. Supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which do not integrate the earlier places: instead these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of ‘places of memory’, and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position.”
