Abstract
Surveying a planet fraught with climatic, biodiversity, governance and social crises, this lecture series aims to understand how 'gaming' as the supreme medium of our time invites engagement with questions related to systems-designing, that in effect, provides tools for orienting and working through our catastrophe-laden imaginary. We reflect upon whether games themselves can accompany how we engineer strategies aligned with models of adaptive intelligence, to interface and 'melt' into designing counter-worlds against the lock-in of futural disintegration.
Through an examination of the role of logistics operating as the arteries of our world economy, we probe into how 'walking simulators' and 'management games' compel engagement with our 'infrastructural unconscious' and provide templates for 'rafting-with' the realities of supply-chain breakdown, displaced migrations, and a form of 'bricolaging' our way through adverse environments. These adverse environments are specifically rendered through the competing imaginaries of how our future 'landscapes' will transform and how their depiction further comes to anticipate what we will inherit and inhabit in the course of a world either with us or without us.
Thus, how do gaming 'landscapes' involve players and particularly how are their depicted alternation whether through the contours of the 'virtual' or 'talons of the real' come to converge and gradually enmesh as an 'actual world' we come to traverse through our interfaces. Through the extension beyond the 'mouse-eye-finger' coordination complex, how does the constellation of other interfaces also encompass and extend the role of the body and its need to become 'immersed' in our Real and Virtual ruinous landscapes.
Here, with the concept of 'navigating through data sets' interwoven with VR, AR, MR interfaces, can we envision how an 'embodied choreography' generated by specific games can serve as incubators to prepare and actively rebuild our landscapes and our infrastructural rewiring in the throes of catastrophe.