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.
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.
“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”.
“The mass media do not transit ideologies, they are themselves an ideology. It doesn’t matter what you say when the recipient is surrounded by a series of communications. The nature of the all disparate information is of scant insignificance.”
“The world exhibitions glorify the exchange value of commodities. They create a framework in which commodities’ intrinsic value is eclipsed. The objects are not desired in themselves, every wish is gone and what remains is pure amusement and excitement. In a contemporary exposition, a country no longer says ‘Look what I produce’ but ‘Look how I am presenting what I produce’.”
