Ludictatorships

The artworks that make up Ludictatorships raise questions such as: who designs our cities? How are the ways we inhabit, live and assimilate the city shaped? A square with trees and benches invites play, conversation and enjoyment of the space. A poorly lit alley way, meanwhile, may generate fear, and wide streets with many lanes and narrow pavements suggest a city intended for car travel, which may dissuade us from walking.

The videogame Sola, by Agustina Isidori, invites us to inhabit the skin of a woman walking alone around the city at night, and to feel her fear. It shows us the systemic forms of violence, such as social violence, which are integrated into the urban landscape itself. Ultimately, it is the person drawing up the design who designs the way we interact with it.

If urban design shapes how we use the city, we now see a progressive digitalisation of public and private spaces, transforming this relationship in a more radical manner.

The ludo-dystopian vision of Keiichi Matsuda in Hyper-reality offers a reflection as to how videogames have not only since their earliest days shaped the ways that we can relate to technology, but also, and increasingly, the mechanics, aesthetics and strategies of videogames seep into other facets of our lives, through the imposition of gaming dynamics that subtly manipulate our behaviour and mediate the way we inhabit, traverse and interact with the city and its inhabitants.

Through this work, the designer and film-maker Keiichi Matsuda invites us to ask such questions as: How much do you play each day without realising? Who decides how you traverse the city: Google, Waze? Are we avatars of the algorithms of huge companies that point out where we should walk?

The exhibition invites a reflection on the aseptic, flattened planes that these ‘ludictatorships’ set out for us to inhabit the city. In the words of the curators, “the city loses thickness and depth, its affective aspect, the collective construction of space gives way to functionality, where getting there faster matters more than enjoying a more scenic route. Once we are aware that certain rules are imposed on us, we can begin to change them”.