October 12, 2005
Breaking the Game
Gaming in Relationship to Designing, Building, Navigating and Experiencing Cities
Workspace Unlimited is currently organizing Breaking the Game, a series of interdisciplinary workshops and online symposium that bring together competing theorists and practitioners to build, debate and reflect on virtual worlds, computer gaming, immersive technologies, and new possibilities for artistic practice and experience. Taking place both online and offline, the workshops will open up the art of game modification to the contingencies of everyday life, where virtual technologies increasingly mediate physical spaces and human movements in very complex and dynamic ways.
Networked across multiple cities, the symposium will be organized around three core themes: "Hybridity", "Overclocking the City" and "The Virtual as Interface to Self and Society." Participants will consider gaming and other virtual technologies in relationship to building and designing cities, navigating and experiencing urban life, constructing identities, and creating and maintaining social interaction.
Architects, visual artists, filmmakers, choreographers, anthropologists and curators will consider how these technologies and associated audio/visual cultures impact the work and ideas of their disciplines. For example, how might anthropological fieldwork and ethnography change if its practitioners had to create a 3D virtual world rather than an essay or a book; if anthropology's disciplinary object was an updatable, media-rich, networked, and navigable space, rather than a text? How might online gaming and modification continue to challenge and expand the boundaries of filmmaking and public performance? How could the design and implementation of a "real" building have an ongoing relationship to its networked and virtual double? Can a public's social interactions, exchanges, and modifications inside a virtual building impact the meaning, form, and function of the same building in real space? Breaking the Game hopes to inform and newly challenge the efforts of a growing community of artists and designers who mine the resources, code, and aesthetics of video games.
Finally, Breaking the Game will ask: How might the symposium itself become re-mediated as a 3D networked virtual world? How can we play with, think about, and continue to debate the workshops' themes inside this space, using the language, tools, protocols, software, and interactive possibilities of gaming culture and technology? In order to accomplish this, select participants will be encouraged to explore their ideas in other media (a webpage, movie, animation, performance, a piece of software, or a series of digitally recorded interviews). Workspace Unlimited will integrate these digital artifacts into a new virtual world, created in collaboration with a core team of students and practitioners. As a final challenge, the team will lead the last workshop session inside a 3D world, networked across several cities with participants from Rotterdam, Belgium, New York, Seattle, and elsewhere.
About Workspace Unlimited
Workspace Unlimited, founded in 2002 by Thomas Soetens and Kora Van den Bulcke, explores the creative potential of multiplayer game technology in relation to digital art and architecture. The collective focuses mainly on immersive environments, experience design, hybrid space, information architecture and networks. Their main project, Virtual World of Art (VWA), is a series of networked virtual environments connected to different new media centers in Europe and North America: the Society for Art & Technology in Montreal, the V2_Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam and the Vooruit Kunstencentrum in Ghent.
Workspace Unlimited has invited New York curator Wayne Ashley to collaborate on and help organize Breaking the Game. Previously he was the Programs Director and Curator at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and from 1999 to 2001 was Brooklyn Academy of Music's (BAM) first Manager of New Media.
To find out more about the ongoing work of Workspace Unlimited please visit: http://www.workspace-unlimited.org
Posted by jo at October 12, 2005 11:16 AM
