Urbanism and Ludology
"We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That's lost. We know how to read every promise in faces--the latest stage of morphology. The poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards, the latest state of humor and poetry"
-Ivan Chtcheglov, Formulary for a New Urbanism
One reason I prefer
urban environments is their interactivity and their level of participation with their occupants. I like physical spaces where information takes the front seat and “speaks”, where it has no choice but to manifest in bright symbols in order to penetrate our brain’s coding and “play” with us. Picture, for instance, vast deserts, plateus. A radiant sun, heat beating on the skin, waves and waves of heat curling the horizon. With “organic” and “natural” environments like this,
information engages the body infrequently and with a lower resolution. There is less variation of experience, but more of it. Visually, the sand is glasslike and frozen, ceaseless and formless, without ruptures to allow enunciation, without differences to mark information. The subject relies on his own symbolic codes to read into the environment, creating it from the inside out. If your reaction is “this is fucking beautiful”, the subject projects the emotion of poetic fulfillment, which it arbitrarily corresponds with vast, ceaseless visual tedium. Grains of sand communicate with our skin, gradient and metered; they endlessly signify nothing but presence. Sliding between your toes in a tactile feast, it is admittedly a rich and falsely exaggerated presence. Therefore, all sand has to say is “I am really, really here!” We can not play with the sand—we mold it and project onto it, we build castles from the sand, or vast Egyptian statues that emerge erotically and ostentatiously, declaring their
infinite presence until
Percy Shelleycomes along and makes fun of us for it. Ozymandias is the masturbatory splitting of the Self, Narcissus stares into the pond and sees his own reflection, then promptly wanks off into it.
In the density of man made urban environments, physical spaces are forced to engage and co-author our adventures, giving back to us as much as we give to them. A city is ready to
play, streetsigns and traffic signals can not be invisible or indistinguishable, they must be highly charged with specific and definitive meanings, even if the only message is “stop” and “go”. They have at their disposal a near endless spectrum of colors but the only ones that reach us are the most dynamic and recognizable, blues and reds, blinking on and off, endless clicks and whirrs. Like the 0 and 1 of binary code, I believe a streetsign can say anything if only we give it enough time to speak.
Urban environments, intensely populated with people and their signs, create a space whose only useful tropes are found in ludology—the study of play in human behavior. So filled with crevices and crawlspaces, with paths that intersect and reconnect in long since forgotten ways, the city breaks down and creates itself again restructuring like an artificially intelligent dance partner. Brooklyn comes at me like a Nintendo game, platforms constructed, hovering dangerously around me specifically for me to jump across them. Adventures pre-coded that I can move through, Brooklyn can make you feel like a superhero.
"The principal activity of the inhabitants will be the CONTINUOUS DÉRIVE. The changing of landscapes from one hour to the next will result in complete disorientation...."
On the other side of my fence is an unfinished home, three stories tall, it has not been worked on in months. Plywood covers the floors, a plank allows you to enter the house, bricks and ladders let you climb to the higher floors. In its state of becoming, this space is more engaging than it will be when it is a finished and habitable residence. The hollowed out building stands in between homes with large, barking dogs. It's standing alone like a haunted mansion. I'm reminded of Cory Archangel's art piece in which he hacks a super mario bros. cartridge and eliminates everything but the clouds. (The instructions to which can be found
here) Strange, haunting and peaceful, the clouds fly by endlessly, like a separate reality where video game characters retreat to after the end of a game.
