THE VISIBLE CITY / THE CITY AT PLAY

Description

The city is built in many ways. Through material manipulation but also through languages ​​and constructions of symbolic worlds that operate and shape it. Different artifacts and technologies amplify this effect. Our entire relationship with reality is technologically mediated and if there is one technology - and one language - that has become the spearhead of this interaction, it is clearly the video game.

It is possible today to understand the video game as a laboratory for the construction of citizenship, and as a communication language capable of establishing a distance dialogue between the actors who inhabit urban, material and virtual spaces. The interactive nature of digital games and the representation of the city in them encourages the development of a collective intelligence that, in a living way, recursively imagines and writes the present and future of urban spaces.

With this exhibition we propose a look at the video game from its potential to reflect and transform the city, proposing a journey through different interventions, projects and experiments that show how the urban is represented and constructed through this medium.

Video games form a unique relationship between city designs, architecture and urban planning, allowing new ways of understanding the creation of inhabited spaces, physical or virtual. Game environments, and their technologies, can teach us about architecture and the role it plays in society. Virtual worlds allow us to explore and travel through imagined spaces as well as interact and explore existing places from our home, allowing new ways of relating spatially.

In the two poles of utopian or dystopian future imaginaries, video games are, on the one hand, a tool for the subtle manipulation of our behavior through playful or gamified dynamics that increasingly mediate the ways of living, traveling and interacting with the city. and its inhabitants and, on the other, spaces from which to experience joint decision-making about our cities so that they are more sustainable, ecological and inclusive.

Through a set of national and international projects that use different compositional and aesthetic techniques, from photography to sculpture through installation and video games, this exhibition proposes an open route articulated in different transversal axes. Presenting different artistic works and recreational interventions, it aims to share with visitors a critical perspective that broadens the vision of the video game beyond a mere object of consumption and pointing to the transformative function of the ludus , the game, as a space for creation and collective reflection in around the city.

ArsGames has been promoting social transformation with technology for more than a decade, combining art, pedagogy, philosophy and political action. Its co-directors Luca Carrubba and Eurídice Cabañes are doctors, professors at several universities, and have more than 70 publications and 150 conferences. They are responsible for some of the most successful video game exhibitions that have been seen in our country. Video games: the two sides of the screen (Fundación Telefónica), with 105,000 visitors in Madrid in 2019, which toured different art and culture centers in Mexico, such as the Spanish Culture Center, the Multimedia Center, and the Science Center from Sinaloa, where it exceeded 250,000 visitors. And the exhibition Homo Ludens: video games to understand the present (La Caixa Foundation), which reached more than 140,000 visitors in the different CaixaForums in the state.

Graphic design: Colectivo Buenu
Museum design: Meritxell Ahicart
Architectural design: Paz Artiagoitia, Maximiliano Aguayo

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