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.

The Gomba’s life video (2007) by Kei Houraku illustrates very well this saturation of the Self in video games. In Super Mario games, the screen always follows the hero, making him the centre of the universe; we find it ‘natural’. His enemies, the Gombas, don’t offer any meaningful Otherness. By choosing to lock the screen to two Gombas, Kei Houraku’s artwork exposes the hyperactivity and egocentrism of Super Mario; it ‘denaturalizes’ it for us.

A Gomba’s life, Kei Houraku, 2007

KarmaPhysics < Elvis (2004) by Brody Condon is a “modification of the bloody science fiction first-person-shooter computer game Unreal 2003. [...] The convulsions of Elvis are controlled by the original game’s Karma Ragdoll real-time physics system, generally used to simulate the physical dynamics of game character death”. The application of this death algorithm to the avatars of Elvis is disturbing, despites its banality in Unreal 2003 and similar games. Our empathy for Elvis could be partly due to the absence of any interactivity, or of any avatars standing between us and him…

KarmaPhysics < Elvis, Brody Condon, 2004

Did you ever experience empathy in a video game? And if you feel sometimes that life is like a giant game, does it imply that you can’t feel empathy for others?

Next theme: Magic Circle in video games

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9

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.

Best…flame war…Ever (2007) by Eddo Stern is a conversation recorded on a forum of the EverQuest video game. It is rendered using digital masks inspired by the universe of the game. The conversation and its staging, using an epic soundtrack and digital masks, blur the frontier between the universe of EverQuest and the ‘outside’ world.

Best…flame war…Ever, Eddo Stern, 2007

The Ego-shooter installation (2008) by Sonja-Vanessa Schmitz mixes virtual and tactile reality. Its hand-made game-suit looks more virtual than those in first-person-shooter games. Interior and decorative elements are layered with a 3D replicated environment so that it becomes difficult to differentiate the two universes. Here, lived space is a by-product of digital space.

Ego-shooter, Sonja-Vanessa Schmitz, 2008

What is your reaction to this blurring between digital and material spaces? Do you embrace it and take both the positive and negative aspects, or do you instead resist it by defining clear delimitations between games and the rest of your life?

See also the annex discussion by Gabriele Ferri, Question Blocks: How to make two worlds collide?

Next theme: Chronology in video games

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9

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.

The real-time audio/video Mountain (2009), made by the artist duo Depart at the occasion of their Chukwa’s Approach performance, feels like a video game. Time is counted and flying objects are targeted. The comparison with video games might be far stretched, but they both share an obsession of the targeting. It is the cognitive process that most video games use to engage players with the objects of the game.

The Chukwa’s Approach 1 – The Mountain, artist duo Depart, 2009

The Carmageddon data-bending (2005) by Tim Drage (Cementimental) is a journey to chaos, where objectification and pragmatic net of objects can’t exist anymore. The machinima messes with the objects of the Carmageddon video game, “the player car is mutated into a jagged mass of mangled polygons which fill almost the whole screen, and becomes a moving virtual abstract sculpture.” The experiment is accompanied by the harsh noise of Cementimental, the combination give us a feel of what virtual worlds could look like if their creators didn’t restrict game representations to what we humans can apprehend.

Carmageddon data-bending, Tim Drage (Cementimental), 2005

Are pragmatic nets of object the only conditions of intelligibility in video games? What else do you need to make sense of a game?

See also the annex discussion by Dario Compagno What is a game world? Doors, keys and… good legs.

Next theme: Rules in video games

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9

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.

“Concentration” (soundscape by hanstimm), see description here.

I have been inspired to work on the subject of verticality while reading the book ‘La poétique de l’Espace’ (The poetics of Space) by Gaston Bachelard, and more specifically this translated quotation:

“In addition to the lack of vertical intimate values, one needs to add the lack of cosmology in the houses of big cities. Houses are not there in nature anymore. Relations between home and space become tacit. Everything thereby becomes machine and private life leaks from everywhere.”

Houses and their phenomenology have been studied for a long time. Apartments and vertical buildings are more recent. They still have this image of being the second option, not the ‘real’ home. Reality from Hong Kong looks quite different. What is the imaginary of verticality?

My intuition was to start from the lift: a key component that differentiates vertical buildings from horizontal ones. The small room mediates verticality for its guests and is where its negotiation occurs. I could also have chosen the escalator, another important mediator of verticality in contemporary buildings. But its affiliation with stairs makes it somehow a less original feature, even though many things could be said about its cultural function. The lift has no precedent and reigns in spaces of verticality.

The lift is typically a small room in which guests cannot do anything else than to press on numbered buttons. It never has any seats and is thus not a place to stay; relaxing background music is sometimes played though. The lift might celebrate its own movement, and by extension the verticality of its building, by having large windows giving to its outside. But it denies most often its mobility and doesn’t feature any window. Which doesn’t prevent the image of the long and dark vertically corridor to appear mentally in the passenger’s mind (see the imaginary of the Disney’s Tower of Terror ride for example). The lift feels at the same time a private place, having mirrors that guests can use to check their appearance, and public, with surveillance cameras and the knowledge that everyone on the outside can check the lift’s movement. The ambiguity leads to well known sexual fantasies, breaking also the predictive and functional role of the room.

Through evolution of technology, the lift reduced to the maximum freedom of its passengers. They need to accept its rules if they don’t want to use the stairs. The lift decides who is next, when to open and close the doors, to go either up or down. This generates a lot of frustration and contempt, along with angry insults when the lift is slow to act on passengers requests. They generally accept the rules though because they believe that the lift has been programmed for the best of their interests. Even if they might sometimes doubt that it is intelligent enough to achieve the task.

The lift, and vertical buildings, can be perceived in three different ways closely related to social practices.

Lift as a teletransporter – verticality is a multi-dimensional space

The lift is a teletransporter. It connects a particular location on the ground to a space where people live in the same habitation at the same time, but without knowing the existence of one another. This is what I tried to convey in the following video that was made at my apartment building in Mong Kok, the area with the highest population density in the world (see here a map of teletransporters around the Olympic station, not far from Mong Kok).

“Antechamber” (soundscape by Geography)

This imaginary can only remain if habitants of the building have no significant contacts between one another. If they had, vertical distances between one another’s floor would break the multidimensional representation of space. They are living in the building because they greatly value the location of its entrance, not their neighbours. It might be justified and I don’t necessary make of neighbouring a virtue.

Another interesting aspect of this subjective representation is the emphasis on the ground location and not the verticality of the building, as illustrated in the “Concentration” video. What is the most fascinating in a skyscraper? Is it its height? Or is it the importance given to its location? Why thousands of people would want to be teleported everyday at the entrance door of a single building? While there are so many other geographical coordinates to choose from on earth? The massive appearance of a skyscraper is the material expression of the importance of its location. My video suggests that such a disproportionate interest in specific locations is due to a phenomenon of concentration, a door becomes highly desirable because of the importance given to doors next door. This remains true even when the original singularity becomes anecdotic, and when concentration in itself becomes the significance. The harbour of Hong Kong brought in financial institutions, employees, consumers and finally advertisers.

Lift as a carriage – verticality works just like horizontality

In this representation, the lift is a vertical carriage that goes from one door to another in a long vertical corridor. It doesn’t differ substantially from a horizontal corridor. The vertical building is one that is turned 90 degrees. A sense of proximity with neighbours is possible in this configuration, and all being in one single corridor provides a feeling of equality. But maybe vertically is not the best configuration then. The lift becomes an inconvenient means compared to simply walking to see a neighbour for example. Other considerations are at play: the ones explained in the previous and next chapters, and maybe additional benefits that verticality can bring to the community, such as wider park area (see the Unité d’habitation from Le Corbusier in Marseilles, a ‘vertical village’).

Escalators offer a compromise in a vertical place that doesn’t want to be. Take the huge Langham Place vertical shopping mall in Hong Kong. Its extensive use of escalators, some of the longest around, smoothes the visit that doesn’t need to be interrupted by lifts. The escalators make the place feel more like a horizontal one, more adapted to wandering and temptations.

Lift as a cable car – power in verticality

The lift is a cable car that makes it easy to climb distances sometimes higher than of mounts. Vertical buildings are inspired by human verticality. They allow an overview of a territory and its control. The higher you can see the more power you can exercise on the territory and its people. I’m not a big supporter of analogies between skyscrapers and the phallus; I think sexuality is the mirror of life and not the inverse. Human verticality and the desire of power are in my opinion better justification for vertical buildings.

At the difference of the mounts altitude that has been set once for all by nature, there are no limits for skyscrapers and engineering. You might think you are at the top, but you soon realise that it was only the top of one social group or class, and then new heights are being built every day. Higher standards for wealth and social status are being set, which paradoxically don’t increase the number of people who can see the uninterrupted horizon. In a funny argumentative twist, horizontal space becomes more valuable than vertical space: only matters the uninterrupted horizon you can see from your eyes, not what is below and above you.

I had the idea to incorporate video game elements in the next video after reading Gamer Theory by McKenzie Wark, and more specifically this quotation:

“A higher level is essentially more than a lower level. And so there’s nowhere to go but to more, and more, until there is no more, and the gamer, like the character, is left with nothing.”

The video narrative also strangely reminds me the 80s animated series Cocoshaker by Jean-Charles Meunier, except that the next coconut palm is always higher!

“Elevation”

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.

Transition Finsbury park, part of the Transition Towns Network, “intends to find ways of living that are based on localised food production, sustainable energy sources, lively local economies and an enlivened sense of community, rather than cheap and polluting oil”. The volunteer group is relatively new in the Finsbury Park area and was looking for new ways to engage with local communities. The Welcome to My Place project that was recently launched fit with that purpose and this is how we started to collaborate. We should also mention the great support we received from the Finsbury Park Homeless Families project, the Green Lens Studios and the Faith, Football and Falafel project.

The N4 area in London welcomes one of the most diverse set of communities in the UK: natives, Moroccans, Kurds, Somalis, Italians, artists, office workers, evangelists, Muslims, musicians and many more. Each of these communities has a different perception of what sustainability is about. Instead of hammering green vocabulary and precepts, the Transition Finsbury park association wanted to first listen to what local communities had to say about their direct environment. As they rightly pointed out, the idea of ‘sustainability’ is a pretty abstract concept – but growing vegetables in a garden speaks much more to people. The solution needs to start from them and be stated in their own words. Following the Welcome to My Place general concept, we asked people to film the places that matter to them in the N4 neighbourhood and to welcome the viewers to the places of their choice. We collected around 24 videos (visible here) that we used in a workshop held at Green Lens Studio’s. We screened the videos and draw subjective maps of the area as a way to reflect on the inhabitants’ perception of the neighbourhood.

Here are step-by-step manuals for those who would be interested in applying the same method in their area. From personal experience, this exercise gave us the opportunity to explore an urban area in a way we have never done before. Working with other people we discovered a rich and multi-layered environment which we might have struggled to imagine on our own. We would recommend anyone to take the time to go through a similar process in their vicinity.

Welcome to Finsbury Park: Review and Conclusions

By Christophe Bruchansky and James Thomson

1.     Meeting the people

It may be a nerve racking experience, but the best way to discover the places important that are important to people in the neighbourhood is to go up to them and ask them. It was not the most efficient method perhaps, in terms of the number of videos we collected, but it was the one that opened our perceptions up the most. We took a map of the N4 area and split it up into several parts for each volunteer to explore. Walking in the streets armed with leaflets, wondering who to get video contributions from – really forces you to look and explore what is around you and find out who your neighbours are.

To provide a perspective of the Finsbury Park area we have the Haringey artist community and the Florentina clothing village near Hermitage road, the Turkish restaurants on Green Lanes, the ubiquitous barber shops, the wealthy Crouch Hill streets, the Jewish community near the reservoirs, the mentally impaired centre, the schools, the churches, the Muslim community, the pubs, the Algerian café’s, library goers and so on. We tried to engage with these communities and discovered an area filled with different interests and preoccupations.

We contacted communities on the Internet too, where many forums focussing on the Finsbury Park area already exist: http://finsburypark.wordpress.com/, http://www.finsburyparkpeople.co.uk, http://www.stroudgreen.org. Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Vimeo are other online hubs where we found people having an interest in the vicinity.

Using the local connections that the members of the Transition Finsbury Park association had already established turned out to be a very productive way of getting video contributions. We would like to point out however that even though most of the people we met didn’t participate in this specific project; meeting with them for the first time was one of the most valuable outcomes. Both in terms of shaping a more holistic perception of the area and in building new relationships, invaluable in the long term for different community groups hoping to work together in the future.

We have learnt how significant local community organisations can be to making projects like ours really happen.  If we wanted to convince individuals to participate, it was essential to first gain the support leaders in the community. Three of them responded enthusiastically to our call and greatly helped us throughout the project: The Finsbury Park Homeless Families project (see the Children chapter), the Faith, Football and Falafel project (see below) and Green Lens Studios (see the chapter on the mapping workshop).

When we presented our project to the North London Central Mosque, they directly thought of introducing us to the people from the Faith, Football and Falafel project; who had organized video workshops with members of the Muslim community to promote grass roots cultural dialogue. They are also behind the Vaudeville Court TV project, a socially engaged appropriation of the seemingly uncharacteristic Vaudeville Court building. The video below illustrates how much the representation of a place, and an entire neighbourhood, can be subverted and reshaped unexpectedly by its inhabitants, for example using Wi-Fi.

The same participants of the Faith, Football and Falafel project filmed cafés and restaurants in the Finsbury Park area. The videos give a true sense of the identity of these places. We were interested to hear that ‘cosmopolitan’ was included in at least two of the videos.

The N4 area is certainly cosmopolitan and highly transient in its population. Many people commute to and from The City during the week whilst at weekends a home game at the Emirates football stadium can completely change the areas dynamics. This makes the process of building a consistent identity quite a difficult one at least – but not impossible. One of us is also a ‘foreigner in transit’ and it’s quite rare to meet a person that was originally brought up in the borough.

In our interpretation the presence of this transient population has in many ways lead to a neighbourhood that is not as socially connected as it could be. In terms of identity, a number of local communities tend to stay in spaces where they can build their own references to identity. The area has its fair baggage of history though and we were fortunate to meet some of its story tellers. But there did seem to be a lack motivation or desire for staking claim to a piece of the areas identity. For an urban area loaded with identity and diversity, this attitude might not be such a bad thing for a population wanting to get on with business-as-usual in the short term. But it doesn’t help an association like Transition Finsbury Park to articulate a message based on the revalorisation of the locale. By motivating people to speak before the camera about place, there is a hope that a collective local identity can be galvanized in the near future.

2.     The many facets of Finsbury Park

In the middle of this non-negotiated facet landscape, the iconic Finsbury Park seemed to catalyse the beginnings of our dialogue. Despite its rich history (see Wikipedia), Finsbury Park may appear to lack a particular identity, and be viewed as a place of pure recreational functionality, ‘a green place in the middle of the traffic’. On the other hand, this is also a place whose identity has been shaped by the people that inhabit it and the stories and relationships which have been built upon it.

Finsbury Park inspires common feelings associated with most inner city green places: old-fashioned, made to be enjoyed with friends and family.

Timely events are organised in the park, like the Kurdish New Year celebrations in the middle of March. As suggested in this related paper, the park could be treated as a “non-place” in order to allow these types of events the expressive freedom they require.

These events play an important role in the vicinity. They offer one of the rare opportunities for interaction between local communities, and for practical discussions that are necessary in the organisation of the events. It could be said however that in their willingness to pacify space, local authorities erase the need for local communities to enter into real dialogue, which prevents any negotiation of public space.

What seems like a completely natural feature of the park, its birds for example, are taken care of by a warden officer. It is people like Les Pope who has lived in the area for over 20 years – who could take a leading role in the identity building process from within the park. However – because the service he provides is maintained by the local council, his fountain of knowledge appears lost to the local population.

3.     Children using the parks and playgrounds

It was great to have the opportunity to work with children on this project thanks to the support of the staff at the Finsbury Park Homeless Families project and the Parkwood primary school. A thorough and detailed outlay of the workshop can be found in our video workshop manual.

Children are well known for their inspiring and often pertinent contributions and so we were half expecting them to show us new and original places in the N4 area. But when asking the children which were the most important places for them, they nearly all replied saying that it was the playground and the two nearby parks: Finsbury Park and Clissold Park. While longer sessions may have lead to more original locations, green open space seemed to be the most natural answer. So, we took them to the parks and the playgrounds. We filmed what they had to show us. Afterwards we invited them to draw their places and we added the drawings in the videos

Their choice to film playgrounds and parks seems characteristic of the relationship people have with the N4 area. Beyond the numerous coffee shops, restaurants, bars and religious centres – the rest of public space is apparently perceived as purely a place of transit. Children are generally not allowed to explore the streets on by themselves and are kept in dedicated recreational spaces. These places appear to become something of a micro-neighbourhood for them. We both wondered what the result might have been if we had facilitated the same workshop in a rural environment – where children are possibly freer to explore their surroundings.

That being said, the children we worked with managed to symbolically recompose the outside, with its legends, quests and stories (read Christophe’s research here on how narrative elements play an important role in that process). The youth we worked with seemed to do this very well given the obstacles that seemed to stand between them and their local environment.

This analysis is closely related to movements that advocate the re-appropriation of public space (see this video created by the think tank Demos for example).

4.     Workshop

At the end of our call for video contributions, we organised a workshop at the Green Lens Studios, a photographic studio and project space that aims to connect creativity and sustainability. At this workshop we screened all of the films to provide local perspective and context. We then asked the eleven participants, all somehow related to the local area, to draw a series of ‘subjective maps’ of their neighbourhood. This was fun.

We used a series of techniques to facilitate the exercise – including rolling a dice to determine whose turn it was to draw a piece of the map – explained in our subjective maps workshop manual. They worked pretty well, and just like the creating the videos, the most interesting element of the process were the conversation between the participants.

We noticed quite soon into the workshop that the blank piece of paper we had provided the participants was less a source of confrontation than we had expected it to be. Instead the exercise turned out to be more about discovery and sharing of ideas. Participants didn’t know one another, nor did they recognise many of the places discussed by each other. There were some landmarks which emerged with consistency however, such as parks, streets and churches, but each seeming to tell their own subjective stories by way of graphical interpretation. It seemed useful for participants to exchange these stories, either to discover aspects of the area they didn’t know, or to confirm perceptions of places they had never had the occasion to express in a group.

Map 1: Finsbury Park Area: 23/03/2010

The resulting subjective maps look more like a mythological tale than of a contested space. A strange sense of place quickly emerged, parks populated by mythological animals contrast local shops and supermarkets – identified by their staple consumer products. A mythology made of dark secrets such as the street of the second-hand phone accessories (Blackstock Road) and the needles that once littered Finsbury Park before it’s clean up in the 90s. Looking at these maps you get the feeling that a at least a couple decades have been etched into these creations, punctuated here and there by the closing down and reopening of buildings – new and old identities overlaid.

Likewise the visual representation of ‘smell’ came as something of a shock – thick charcoal smog emanating from the underground tube network fills the park, London’s body odour. Also worthy of note is the considerable influence memorable events, specific to the area, played upon the subjective landscapes illustrated. Like the time the police heavy-handedly invaded black stock road – for better or worse – shown in Map 2. The map making process equally demonstrated our ability to define things that aren’t physically tangible. For example, the appearance of mythological labyrinths beneath the Finsbury Park Lake – perhaps representing ‘escape routes’ or gateways out of the city towards the romantic English Countryside. And while these maps are evidently effective in recording historical truths – they also show themselves to be revealing in their predictions of how the future may look in the local area. Map 1 demonstrates this well – showing the agricultural cultivation of local parks for food, and inner-city wind turbines painted purple. A tree also protrudes out of the roof of the Vaudeville Court housing terrace.

It is surprising to say that in creating the maps there were almost no disagreements within the two groups, when they did occur they were more about the geographical location of places than their actual presence or representation. Without an i-phone or ordnance survey map to hand though, our local geography did seem to suffer a little bit however – but most participants were quick to let go of their preconceived notions of accuracy. In fact this seemed to enable them to become more focused on their personal, subjective experience of the vicinity, rather than the coordinates which have attempted to define their own neighbourhoods in recent years.

Map 1: Finsbury Park Area: 23/03/2010

5.     Conclusions

Catalysing neighbourhood dialogue has remained at the heart of this project from the start, from collaborating to produce the first videos of the N4 area through to the creation of subjective maps. Commuter lifestyle, constant flux of populations, and pacification of the area by local authorities all made community dialogue almost non relevant it would seem. Cohabitation remains peaceful and everyone seems contempt to make sense of their own private space the way they want. But much of public space appears in the shape of ‘non-place’ transit functionality, that even children can’t or don’t take the time to discover. While the area is filled with pockets of rich cultural identity – it took considerable effort to open some of these doors to the rest of the community. We have the local charities and volunteer organisations in Finsbury Park to thank for the solid ground work which enabled that to happen.

As very well explained on the website of the Transition Town Network, many of the global challenges that are likely to affect us all in the near future need to be resolved locally. If cultural corridors remain as closed as they are, future strains on local resources over the next decade (such as our dependence on cheap oil for food production) may lead to insurmountable challenges. Mapping activities certainly seem to provide the individual and group alike, a sense of empowerment towards achieving these types of goals – many of which are being promoted by local grassroots organisation like Transition Finsbury Park.

Having gained a better understanding of the London N4 area after two months working on this project, we believe that in order to encourage people to think locally – you have to promote the value and cultural identity of the places in the vicinity. Perhaps the videos, drawings and maps that have been produced here could for example be exhibited publicly as part of a local celebration already planned. But crucial to this happening, it must be stressed, are the social figureheads and story tellers we have met on the way.

Mobilisation around environmental sustainability from all corners of Finsbury Park will not happen all of a sudden. Cultural corridors need to be actively prised open in due course. Creativity, play and self-expression could be the catalysts at the heart of these efforts.

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).
2. Introductions to a collective urban planning effort (e.g. design charrette) or in combination with a community mapping exercise (see for example http://www.mappingforchange.org.uk).
3. Introductions to video making and subjective maps.

Welcome to My Place – video workshop manual: This manual is based on the workshops organised in February 2010 for the Transition Finsbury Park association, and on individual contributions to the Welcome to My Place project. Participants are invited to choose places that are important to them, optionally within a defined perimeter, and to welcome viewers in videos no more than one minute long. Read here a review of how it went for us.

Welcome to My Place – subjective maps workshop manual: This manual is based on the March 2010 workshop organised for the Transition Finsbury Park association. Participants are invited to draw subjective maps of their neighbourhood and to discuss the area. Read here a review of how it went.

]]> http://curatedmatter.org/2010/05/09/welcome-to-my-place-workshop-manuals/feed/ 0 http://curatedmatter.org/2010/02/19/welcome-to-the-westminster-reference-library/ http://curatedmatter.org/2010/02/19/welcome-to-the-westminster-reference-library/#comments Fri, 19 Feb 2010 18:42:12 +0000 bruchansky http://curatedmatter.org/?p=568

Friends of the Westminster Reference Library welcome you to their place. Watch their videos and discover what is the life of a library today.

See more videos from the Welcome to My Place project.

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.

Foreword

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.

The first set of videos explore some of the utopias envisioned by corporations from the 40s until now. They offer an insight into the social values of their time: efficiency, order, technology, consumerism, knowledge, sustainability and globalisation to list only few of them. In their form, the videos are the natural descendants of utopian visions from authors such as  Thomas More and Aldous Huxley. However, they each offer a unique solution for the future, radically new or in continuity of past ideals.

The second set of videos are by emerging video artists from around the world. Some of artists describe their own vision of the future, others express their perspective on the ambivalent notion of Progress. Rather than reaching a consensus, their videos put forward a wide range of perspectives, from nostalgia to optimism, cynicism to embracement. The videos give a glimpse at how the current Western generation put in perspective ‘Progress’ since their childhood, and how they live it today.

Both sets are distributed on five screens with the intention of exploring the dialogue between the videos. The visitor is asked to make his own judgement on whether what he sees is propaganda lead by self interest, or a genuine proposition for a better future; if the videos advocate ‘Progress’ or instead distance themselves from such beliefs.

The exhibition does not provide any concrete answers, but instead intends to place the ideas of Utopia and Progress at the centre stage of the social debate. The world needs more than ever to meditate on its course, in what some describe as a profound global crisis, economical, environmental and ideological. Utopias and visionaries tend paradoxically to emerge in the least favourable circumstances. For some, they testify on the capacity that has humanity to  choose itself until its most unlikely destiny. For others, they are a chronicle disease.

• Videos part 1: Visions for the future
• Videos part 2: Microsoft productivity vision for 2019
• Videos part 3: Artistic views at the past
• Videos part 4: Discovery of Magnetic North
• Videos part 5: Artistic reactions to Progress

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.’”

Century 21 Calling, Fairbanks (Jerry) Productions, 1964 – 14 min.

“Romp through the futuristic landscape of the Seattle World’s Fair, centred in the Bell System pavilion.”

Future of Cities, Squint/opera, UK, 2007 – 4 min.

“The film was commissioned by The Danish Royal Academy of Architecture and is part of a publication outlining the outcome of the International Federation for Housing and Planning Congress that took place in Copenhagen in 2007. ‘Futures of Cities’ is a selection of contributions presented during the congress. These contributions consist of work from miscellaneous architectural practitioners, ten principles developed by ‘Monday Morning’ and competition entries from the student competition that took place as part of the event.”

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