URBAN TECHNIQUE IV / Gaming 2008-2010
Everybody knows the fascination of looking down from an airplane traveling at cruising altitude at night, wondering where the different patterns of light below come from. Removed into the clarity of almost pure representational space an underlying logic of what one sees seems self evident, but not quite. Were roads built in order to connect settlements or did settlements spring up because there were roads? What was the game?
Wolf D. Prix / John McMorrough / Reiner Zettl / Andrea Börner
Guests: Petra Blaisse, Jeffrey Kipnis, Sanford Kwinter, Mejin Yoon
Teaching: Armin Hess, Jörg Hugo, Quirin Krumbholz, Walter Mayrhofer, Robert Neumayr, Rainer Pirker, Max Rieder, Szolt Salvari
Gaming
Everybody knows the fascination of looking down from an airplane travelling at cruising altitude at night, wondering where the different patterns of light below come from. Removed into the clarity of almost pure representational space an underlying logic of what one sees seems self evident, but not quite. Were roads built in order to connect settlements or did settlements spring up because there were roads? What was the game?
Grids are ordering devices in abstract map space, but on the ground they are clearly connected to our body as, for example, in the measurement of a day´s work in the field. Agricultural grids transform into urban grids with a change of rules, cultivation is transformed into production and consumption stops being only local, which brings us back to roads.
It seems that until now the big changes in cities came from transportation or construction and that is clearly visible in the new patterns that evolved in the wake of the industrial revolution. These new game-boards, as we might call them, were wired with material connnections for communication. Railway lines, as well as power lines and telephone cables make the movement of people and information possible but gives them a certain location and establish hierarchies. The democratic impulse of modernism sought to evenly distribute these wires and create an isotropic field of services.
But it was not until the sixties that this vision was fully realized in the grided planes of radical architecture where, 10 years before the game Tron, people moved on a board only according to their social rules, unhindered by any irregularity of service or architectural obstacle.
During a good part of the 20th century architectural discourse tried to define itself through a relationship between space and program and now technology has given program unlimited reach and space had became a social relation.
The course in Urban Strategies called Gaming will use this as a background and try to find out what game and play can contribute to our understanding of the contemporary city which is primarily shaped by new software and personal tools of communication as well as new types of mapping data onto physical space (mixed reality).
Games give us new spaces of possibility that consist of a seemingly infinite multitude of configurations the player might construct. We explore this space when we play and the better we are, the larger the space becomes, comparable to a good chess player who can connect more combinations with any given situation on the board. We learn to understand the processes inscribed in the system and the implications of this space of possibilities can serve as a powerful critique of existing social structures. Playful interaction can very effectively disrupt conventional ways of using the city.
By studying games we learn how rule based systems perform and understand how the city can be designed without actually designing its individual buildings. We should also consider the case that if there is a total lack of rules and no board any more there are still characters to effect meaningful connections as either story or architectural relationships.