Can we feel empathy in a video game? In his essay Adamant Bodies. The Avatar-Body and the Problem of Autoempathy, Adriano D’Aloia argues that we hardly can because of the relationship we need to maintain with our game avatar. The player is foremost busy in dealing with his intra-subjectivity, “the mediation between the actual user’s Self and the virtual avatar’s Self”. There is a lack of Otherness. The player’s hyperactivity, at the same time enunciator, character and spectator, makes it even more difficult for him to establish an empathic relation with the characters of the video game. Paradoxically, passivity allows the spectator to fully mirror the emotions coming from a movie, which is very different from the kind of involvement required by video games.
Where does the video game end and the real life begin? With the arrival of simulators, augmented reality and social networking games, frontiers becomes harder to define. And so is the magic circle that separates the fantasy world from the outside world. But is there really a real, outside world that would be exempt of any fantasies? And could video games be completely isolated from their cultural context? Is the concept of magic circle not outdated? In his essay Spatial Typologies of Games, Alex Wade suggests instead to locate video games using the three spaces of Henri Lefebvre: perceived space (how we interpret space), conceived space (space of science and rationality) and lived space (the space where we live). He adds another dimension, digital space. Video games are multidimensional in his model, and need to be situated on the four axes.
How can we make sense of a video game? In his essay, Manic Miner under the Shadow of the Colussus: a Semiotic Analysis of the Spatial Dimension in Platform Video Games, Joaquin Siabra-Fraile argues it is thanks to “pragmatic net of objects”. What can be done with objects of a video game determine the logical space of actions. The regularity of that logical space, or system, enables meaning. Immersion is the acceptation by the player of that net of logical conditions; it is the only way for him to make sense of the goal and to complete the video game.
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:
Tools to better understand the identity of a place or an area (in the context of an ethnographic study for example).
The Welcome to My Place project is launched! Check out the first contributions here and please feel free to add your own videos.
The aim of the project is to encourage people to film the places that matter to them. Workshops will be organised to better understand the meaning of ‘places’ through the usage of videos. Please contact me if you would like to collaborate. I’m looking for artist cartographers, communities, professionals and academics interested in the study of places and their subjective relations.
What means Progress nowadays? Who defines it? What is our verdict on past and present visions of the future? After having believed in so many utopias, and having been so close to so many dystopias, do we still want to imagine an ideal future? Can we? The Dreams of Progress exhibition intends to introduce the visitor to these questions by screening eleven videos from corporations and artists.
To New Horizons, Handy (Jam) Organization, USA, 1940 – 23 min.
“Definitive document of pre-World War II futuristic utopian thinking, as envisioned by General Motors. Documents the ‘Futurama’ exhibit in GM’s ‘Highways and Horizons’ pavilion at the World’s Fair, which looks ahead to the ‘wonder world of 1960.’”
