The lost art of urban codemaking

Abstract

If you have played a game then you have been to Ludea. It is that space you go to when you are ‘in-game’, in the ‘zone’, or otherwise immersed in play. For the Ludeans, this state is the basis of their culture, their language, their way of life. Patterns and logic of the game become their way of seeing the entire world. The ontology of the game world is the ontology of their reality. Reality is game. Urban codemaking is their process for decoding cities. Cities have been made of codes for centuries; ubiquitous media increase the flow and feedback of the systems that operate these codes so that the city itself becomes a machine, an algorithm. These codes are social, institutional, spatial, digital, commercial, and cultural; some are part of the city’s history and infrastructure, others are traces left by the traversal of humans and their devices through space. To decode this complex set of relations we can consider Lévy’s processes of realisation: the hardening of urban codes in the fabric of the city; potentialisation: messy interventions and non-authorised modifications of the city; actualisation: actions of players in the city and the sharing of outcomes generated by these; and virtualisation: presentation of possible actions and events via augmented layers of information such as locative media. Xawthorn was a game that transformed Hawthorn into an alternate reality to model and simulate these processes asking players to choose a clan to revert, renew, or remake the city. Searching in and around the streets of Hawthorn, a suburb of Melbourne, they found and collected codes that enabled them to own and rename more territory. In this way they ‘played the city’ to give them insight into what it is to be ‘in Ludea’, and engage in the lost art of urban codemaking.

Keywords:

• pervasive games
• urban codemaking
• media ecologies
• mixed realities

Acknowledgements

This paper is a version of the 2014 ANZCA conference keynote address upon invitation from Diana Bossio.

Xawthorn was produced with the support of ANZCA and Swinburne University of Technology.

Thank you to Neil Stafford for his contribution to Xawthorn in researching and authoring micronarratives for each of the clans.

We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land we all currently occupy in Hawthorn, the Wurundjeri people, and pay respect to Elders past and present, including those from other clans who now reside on Wurundjeri land.

Thank you to all the volunteers and players without whom we would not have had a game.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Troy Innocent

Troy Innocent explores the multiplicity of codes in the contemporary mediascape, particularly connections between language and reality. His work invites people to play in worlds that emerge from transmedia ecologies – complex systems of virtual and actual signs and entities. He has developed a unique aesthetic vocabulary that spans a hybrid practice that traverses interaction, design, code, sculpture, animation, sound, and installation.

Innocent co-founded the digital arts collective Cyber Dada in 1989 and through pioneering works such as Idea-ON>! (1992) contributed to the Australian new media arts practice during the 1990s. He has exhibited and participated in international festivals, exhibitions, and symposia including Ars Electronica in 1992 and 2004.

Innocent’s recent public art practice manifests in mixed realities, such as an interactive sculpture garden entitled Colony (2008), Urban Codemakers (2010), and noemaflux, an ongoing work that has appeared on the streets of Ogaki, Instanbul, and Adelaide. Innocent is represented by Hugo Michell Gallery.