utopia

Video games are mirrors to our contemporary reality that reflect our society's philosophies, rhetoric, and more. Published in 2013, BioShock: Infinite offered a glimpse into the reality of a Utopian America ruled by conservative far-right identity politics. In 2016, Donald Trump's election as the 45th President of the United States brought to the forefront of America what is often ignored. In this essay, I argue what Utopia is to the far-right by analyzing the society of Columbia, the use of media in the state, and more. Overall, I argue that politics and ideas of Utopia can be simulated into video games to understand far-right narratives of Trumpian politics better.

Addressing conference themes of platform utopias, determinisms, identities, collaborations and modes, this conversational presentation discusses ways that concepts of time, space and narrative are expanded in The Key To Time https://unknownterritories.org/keytotime/. The Key To Time is a surreal and lyrical work for immersive, cinematic art experiences such as domes and 360 degree cinemas as well as for individual viewing on head-mounted virtual reality devices. Bridging 1920's silent film and virtual reality, the surface story draws viewers into a playful exploration of genre, identity and desire. In doing so, the work unravels narrative underpinnings of myths, genres, and technological constructs of time. 

The Key To Time is created by media artist/filmmaker Roderick Coover (FR/US) and composer Krzysztof Wołek (PL) as part of a program designed to build cross-cultural, composer-artist collaborations. The dreamlike story follows a scientist who is trapped in the future due to a time-travel experiment gone wrong. His only hope to escape his predicament is to travel through dreams. His dreams, however, are troubled by anxieties, fears and anger. As the scientist travels through time, aesthetics change from those of silent film of the early 20th century to those of VR and a future cinema. There is also slippage between these times, with figures from memories walking into color settings as black and white figures or cartoon ones, and visual references draw upon early cinematic works like Louis Lumiere's Arrival of a Train at Ciotat (1895) and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927). 

Through montage and collage, a mix color and black and white images, animation, intertitles, and sudden changes in dimension and perspective, The Key To Time toys with conventions and expectations. Song and dialog combine with layered and collaged imagery filmed in greenbox studio settings and natural settings. As with works like Guy Maddin's The Forbidden Room (2015) and David Blair's Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991), this experimental artwork plays with the ways differing visual technologies shape consciousness, language and narrative forms. 

Whereas in many films, sound composition comes after the film is written, shot and edited, in this case the music was part of the process of invention rather than an afterthought done only in post-production. Five songs were at the center of design. The songs hold essential roles in the movement of the story, which is driven my emotional tensions and unseen forces rather than rational thought. Second, we decided to record the script in advance of shooting the film. This decision enhanced a creative freedom and allowed for lots of play between dialog, images and sounds. The result disconnect between voice and image is evocative of early film and radio drama, and the approach is also similar to a workflow frequently used in animation; in this way too, the platform stimulated news ways of thinking about the collaboration and the creative process.

Framed by the theme of the 2015 ELO conference, the paper will examine several interwoven kinds of ends concerning Latin American electronic literature. In this case, the theme is particularly appealing when we consider specific aesthetic/political ends frequently pursued in Latin American contexts and when we situate this thought from “the end of the world”. In fact, being at one of the edges of the world, metaphorically and/or literally, drives one to specific aesthetic/political responses that take position in relation to hegemonic global imaginaries of technological modernisation. We could even establish as a hypothesis that in this respect, and because its location in terms of economic underdevelopment, interculturalism and glocalisation, Latin American electronic literature tautens an imaginary string called “technological modernization” whose ends are, on the one side, experimentation as a form of non critic technological fascination and, on the other side, experimentation as a form of posing new meanings of utopian intercultural community, which works within digital culture in order not to fascinate or to be fascinated, but to open imagination to a change – though mediated – of sensitivity and materiality, the latter meaning the material conditions of life of millions of people to whom global technological developments don’t necessarily imply an improvement.

To illustrate this metaphoric and even literal position of the “end of the world”, we can recall that, for instance, the Argentinean city of Ushuaia is the most southern city of the world, and the place chosen for the first three editions of the “Biennial of The End of the World” to take place. This is a nomadic biennial of contemporary arts in the South Cone of America, whose motto says: “To think in the end of the world, that another world is possible”. In the context of the 1st Biennial in 2007, the installation of electronic literature IP Poetry, by Gustavo Romano with programming by Milton Läufer, was exhibited. As IP Poetry has been exhibited in different places around the world –namely Buenos Aires, Beijing, New York, Badajoz or Ushuaia, among others – we will analyse to what extent the work changes due to these different contexts and what aesthectic/political ends it could convey.

This will be the point of departure for a more expanded interrogation on Latin American electronic literature and its own ends, of course not a “secret agenda” but a particular way of grasping the mere idea of producing/reading electronic literature in contexts of third world glocalisation. In that sense, the ultimate aim of the paper will be to present a summarised map of contemporary Latin American electronic literature, based on its aesthetic/political search.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

This talk introduces Golden Days, Silver Nights, a new steampunk-themed, alternate-history locative adventure game designed to provoke critical thinking about political history and social progress. The game is designed around the life and writings of William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925), celebrated orator, infamous crusader against commercial monopolies, and the alleged inspiration for L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz. Bryan first ran for U.S. President in 1896 as the candidate for the fused Democratic and Populist parties, inspired in part by the socialist vision of Edward Bellamy's fabulously popular utopian fiction, Looking Backward (1888). But if Bryan began his career a progressive, he ended it a militant reactionary and notorious anti-Darwinian. By some accounts, his campaign permanently derailed the American progressive movement, and with it, the hopes and dreams of utopian socialists. Taking its cue from alternate histories by Robert Heinlein and others, Golden Days, Silver Nights begins with the counter-factual premise that Bryan won the 1896 election and went on to reshape America's destiny, though not in the image of Bellamy's technologically utopian socialist future. The game is built with our proprietary StoryTrek locative authorware, which allows authors to build location-specific narratives by layering multimedia assets over Google maps. As players explore the real space around them with a mobile device in hand, the story provides text, images, audio and video that gradually reveal the mysterious back-story of the game world. By unearthing a series of verbal and visual rebuses strewn about their physical landscape, players gradually sketch the hidden contours of a future-past based in the contradictions of Bryan's politics: an avowedly anti-plutocratic, anti-imperialist America that has in fact sacrificed racial and class equality for a false populism couched in xenophobic jingoism, idyllic pieties, and millenarian warnings against the transhumanist dangers of evolutionary science. While researchers at Carleton's Hyperlab have used StoryTrek to create everything from open-air museum exhibits to zombie survival horror games, the system's novel form of spatial play lends itself particularly well to the authoring of utopian and dystopian narratives. Utopia has traditionally been understood as the "good place" that is "no place." But where conventional literary utopias depict fictional elsewheres far removed from the world, Golden Days, Silver Nights unfolds only as readers navigate through the real world, continually forcing them to toggle attention between their actual and fictional contexts. A "diminished reality" interface, a.k.a. the "genoscope," strips away the user's actual surroundings to reveal the fin-de-siècle intolerances at work behind the facade of present-day reality, alongside lingering traces of utopian dreamworlds that never came to be. By providing a dialectical interface that taps into new embodied understandings of literary space, Golden Days, Silver Nights enables critical thinking around the legacies of American industrialism and imperialism in order to hint that the world not only could have been otherwise, but might still be so.

The book's name in English:

Electro Utopia: Mystics and Artists in Cyberspace