[-empyre-] Locative Games in Urban Spaces

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"Knowing how to orient yourself through a city does not mean much. 
However, loose yourself in a city, like someone looses itself in a 
forest, requires instruction" -- Walter Benjamin in "Tiergarten" 
(fragment from "Childhood in Berlin")

proposal for a remix on the context of the running discussion:
"Having devices to locate yourself through a city does not mean much. 
However, distribute yourself throughout the city via devices, like 
information distributes itself in air, requires instruction"
Margarete Jahrmann wrote:
> Dear Kerrie-Dee,
>
> yes the urban space as play zone is "semper et ubique" - ubiquitous, in
> cultural terms. I use this dogma of the catholic pope, which he spells I
> think exactly at THIS moment at his Easter-talk in Rome ;)
>
> Alberto Lacovoni even talks about "Extending the Game Zone" in
> architectural theory, already in 97. Let me ludicly interpret this:
> "Real Gaming", like PACmanhattan, http://pacmanhattan.com/ or like the
> incorporation of Tetris in real life with boxes in a supermarket,
> constitutes further more a sustainable prolongation of the play zone. In
> fact such actions go beyond gaming and regain and reclaim the city. The
> reason is not so much the planned political activity, but the
> architecture itself. The actual city is no more built for living - but
> for playing!!
> In march 2007 the Social Hacking project by the collective kurator.org
> in England caused a series of local flashes.
> http://www.kurator.org/wiki/main/read/Hack+Commissions
> Please let me explain why I recommend these sort of play practice in the
> following (excusez mois, if I speak this time about personal works).
>
> CARS:
> Some people - and architectural theories, as expressed in "Learning from
> Las Vegas" - might say modern cities are built for cars. Yes sure, BUT
> these days we see that there is another reason why especially suburbs
> are built like this: It's called Gaming!
> If one looks at Banlieus (suburbs) of Paris, as we did in November 2005
> with the inter passive game-video clip "Parcour Jump", which showed the
> parcour jumpers, who climb walls like Super Mario in Real Life!
>
> For them it was for the fun of play, for me it looked like a moving
> pattern out of a video-game. The life-risking action is a
> counter-revolutionary Ludic statement of the appropriation of the city
> as public territory. I got some scenes from parking-houses, where
> players jumped from one deck to the other- the garage is built to jump -
> GoApe! Download Issue #2:
> http://www.ludic-society.net/issue/LS_issue2_feb06_min.pdf
>
> That was the first time for European public media to wake up from an
> somnambulist state concerning the situation of the Secondos, the second
> generation of children of "Gast-Arbeiters" in the suburbs.
> They burned some cars- yes this is Grand Theft Auto in real life
> - not for criminal reasons, but for the reason to gain public awareness.
> We do know the burning of cars from the demonstrations around G7 in
> Davos (this was the first time, when I personally did see fully burned
> out cars on the clean streets of Zurich - so I decided to come over here
> from Vienna for some time. there seemed to be some revolutionary
> potential in town ;)
> The Secondos even developed their own language Verlan, which is a slang
> version of French. Such an Lingo and elements of HOW to move through
> urban space indicate the political effects of REAL PLAY!
>
> CARS REAL PLAY:
> >From a ludic point of view the car plays an important role in urban
> games. I see it as anachronist vehicle shaping the city of the 20th
> century. So may be you also check out the "Plymouth for Plymouth",
> http://www.ludic-society.net/tagged/ - when dockyard worker Billy, his
> boyz, certain Tag-teams of the LS drove through Plymouth in England with
> some Plymouth Roadster cars. They were equipped with aether refreshing
> electronic Wunderbäumchens (special little trees hanging in the cars)!
> The local car tuning and racing community tuned into the game. We did
> not succeed with the reverse gear race (may be next time, at a town with
> some good roundabouts - if You know one, please mail) - but they fully
> Tagged the city with RFID markers... as indicated on google maps. The
> satellite map served as game HUD. In the end it was fully overwritten by
> the flash mob like movements by cars. Imagine the scene: a car stops
> very shortly at ANY location in town, somebody jumps out of the car,
> glues or zaps an RFID tag somewhere, in a shop or at any other location,
> runs out and drives away in high-speed...
>
>
> In contrast to that futile machinery park rolling in urban space,
> classical situationist walks still can be adapted! In November 07 The
> Ludic Blitz Play, http://www.ludic-society.net/blitz/ did work just by
> walking, but by distributing RFID tags to by-passers with the
> mission-statement: "Each wall is Your game console!" The game turned out
> as war chalking game. Those players, who inserted a home-brew software
> cartridge and clicked a homebuilt-RFID reader into the SM Standard Model
> game console slot, did take part in a 10 minutes LIVE CONCERT in the
> streets of Bergen, Norway - reading the war chalk TAGs on the walls,
> which caused sounds, according to each RFID number- the base line was
> the wave-lan cloud indicated by the Sniff function of the NDS....
> futility is resistance!
>
> full throttle
> easy ride Dérive and Detournement
> margarete
>
>
>
> Kerrie-Dee Johns schrieb:
>   
>> Hi,
>>
>> Sorry to butt in... but I am interested in the (brief) history of locative games in urban spaces for a project I am curating for the Next Wave Festival in Melbourne called Stranger of the Month. I was wondering if any of you could recommend any games (artistic or not) that have operated like a flash mobs and have involved a group of anonymous others interacting in an urban setting?
>>
>> I imagine it this would be an interesting example of where the real city collides with the virtual?
>>
>> Please reply via my email address or the list - whatever you wish.
>>
>> Thank-you,
>>
>> Kerrie-Dee
>>
>> ________________________________
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>>
>>     
>
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