----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
On 24/3/2013 11:14 PM, Claudia Pederson wrote:
----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
With Anne-Marie joining the conversation shortly, and after going
through internet games (Paolo), ARGs (Ken), and other brief mentions
of games operating in virtual and real spaces (Anna), I would like to
pick up on the thread of urban games/urban interventions/mixed reality
as yet another strategy of intervention that I find particularly
exciting. Anne-Marie, as you share your work with us, would you please
also reference games in this 'genre' that you find compelling?
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Sorry I think the first version of this got cut off by my dying laptop
battery on send--anyway this version has links: To respond a bit more
directly to Claudia's question about mixed reality and urban games, my
own game art performance projects with a kind of proto mixed reality
started from an activist thread in my work---which has for some time ran
in parallel to a more game design thread. After Velvet-Strike, which was
a collaborative set of anti-war digital graffiti and virtual actions
inside online military shooter games (mostly Counter-Strike) I thought
it would be apt to take similar kinds of counter-gaming and ludic
activism from the web back to the actual street and experiment with
mobile projections on different facades/neighborhoods, combining
electronic protest with more old fashioned street activism. As an
intervention in the 2004 Republican Convention in New York City, I
organized a project called O.U.T. (Operation Urban Terrain)
http://www.opensorcery.net/OUT/, with a set of talented collaborators
like Chris Birke (former Counter-strike mod development team) and Pierre
Rahola (anti-war player active on French Team fortress games), and Elke
Marhoefer (Berlin based artist I had met at residency in Germany) and
others talented game creators.
The story of this project, all the participants, the M.O.U.T. military
operational urban tactics style of militainment games that it intervened
in, and footage of the massive street protests at that time in NY, is on
a homemade video documentary I made distributed through the Video Data
Bank (and the performance was produced by Creative Time). The live
street performance took place at three locations in NY including Harlem
(each matched to a corresponding location/building in Americas Army)
where we had kids spontaneously come and "play dead" with the projection
of the game, in Midtown where a police car drove up and watched a while
but luckily---unlike many other activists and artists in NY at that time
--we didn't get arrested for not good reason, and finally in Brooklyn
where two enemy game soldiers dancing to Michael Jackson were projected
large screen onto the Manhatten Bridge.
This was before widespread mobile social media coverage of protests so
even though there were so many people from all over the world protesting
in NY then the mainstream media presented very little coverage of what
was a very intense moment for everybody in post 911 NY. This was also
just before mobile projectors became available and one of us, of the two
women team consisting of me and Elke, had to truck around a big
projector connected to a kind car battery on her back while the other
played the game controls on a laptop. (and we were wirelessly connected
to 5 other players around the country).
Later I developed another project along similar lines (two woman mobile
game urban intervention) in collaboration with
fabric/performance/installation artist Talice Lee, who designed soft
protective "riot gear" clothing for us to wear while rollerskating. In
this project we had with a small lighter projector on our head and
portable playstations running machinima stories about police violence
against immigrants. The topic this project took on (Riot Gear for
Rollartista) was the lack of protection and rights for immigrants and
increased police powers since the War on Terror---particulariy in
Europe---and was inspired by a group of young Morrocan boys (male
prostitutes?) I had seen in a line up being inspected by police in a
courtyard Barcelona Spain in June 2004.. Each machinima video of the 3
in Riot Gear for Rollartista is dedicated to different real life
immigrant victim of the police in Europe or the UK.
We performed this twice, once on streets of the small city of Castellon
Spain at the occasion of a cyberfeminist exhibit and another time in
Manchester, UK at a show curated by Kathy Rae Huffman then at
Cornerhouse gallery ...this project although successful in some ways was
not so good at getting its message across---although we did a workshop
with some teenagers in Manchester, out on the street we tended to
attract young kids who just were wowed by the portable game aspect of it
(too young to talk about the police/immigrant issue)..and the blog never
seemed to get much attention. Plus a city wide ban on rollerskating in
Manchester meant our performances were late night and clandestine, and
also the bumpy cobblestones got in the way of our tricks we had
practiced (I had been practicing in a park in Mexico City )---why in
Manchester do they bother banning skating when they have cobblestones
anyway?:-))
http://rollartista.blogspot.sg/2006/10/rollerskating-practice-in-mexico-city.html
So anyway this has been my own experience with urban play and mixed
reality, via a particular performance art and ludic activist thread in
my former art practice. The mixed reality game part was sort of
proto---I tried to pick settings in the games to project onto buildings
that blended together interestingly and design our look so that we
looked sort of like game characters walking around in real life. The
Japanese near future science fiction series I mentioned in my earlier
post, Dennoi Coil, is more of a proper mixed reality technology, in a
way that is very similar to Nintendo 3ds or Google's AR googles that
superimposes virtual elements onto a photographic view of the environment.
I always liked the UK group Blast Theory's urban games
http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/index.php but most recent mixed reality
games are fairly empty experiences even when evaluated aas pure
entertainment, more about the wow AR or mixed reality factor, though the
Iphone Zombies Run game app, https://www.zombiesrungame.com/which I have
never played (not an Iphone person) sounds interesting in in that it may
provide a more intense immersive experience somewhat similar to Blast
Theories early chase game, "Can you see me now?"
Cheers,
Anne-Marie
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