Ludic Cartopgrahies

As the video game industry grows and the number of players increases, people spend an ever greater share of their time in virtual worlds. These spaces have borders and laws of their own and frequently simulate only fragments of reality. No wonder, then, that they often reflect the prevailing social order and the political dynamics at play, which is precisely why they demand to be mapped and analysed.

An interesting aspect of gaming in order to make artistic and historical sense of these territories is machinima (“machine” and “cinema”): films shot inside video games or created with game engines. This practice often takes on a documentary quality, capturing digital landscapes along with the processes and events that unfold there. On the other hand, machinima allows filmmakers to recreate places that are hard to access or no longer exist in real life.

The programme “Ludic Cartographies” guides us through the politics and poetics of such spaces. The films touch upon different issues of alternative history and media archaeology, or military conflicts and territorial disputes, but all of them are united by the particular tension between a lived experience of the world and the way it appears to us in video games.