Open - The Russian Federation Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale
ArchiJam x Molleindustria
2021
The Russian Federation Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale
Open — the Russian Federation Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, ArchiJam
2021
Curators:
Daria Nasonova, Dmitry Vesnin
Ksenia Kononenko, Kirill Makarov, Kirill Mitrukhov, Yaroslav Kravtsov, Daria Kamysheva, Polina Vasina, Ivan Shtyka, Konstantin Smirnov, Daniel Dyatchin, Daria Khitrykh, Ksenia Gorlanova, Victoria Volokitina, Valeria Kholmogorova
artists:
Open — the Russian Federation Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, together with the MARCH School of Architecture and the Scream School, invites interdisciplinary teams to participate in ArchiJam, a game jam at the intersection of video games and architecture.
Open is a multifaceted project that explores the public role and social relevance of cultural institutions in times of global crisis. One of the project’s dimensions investigates the blurring edge between physical and digital spaces and focuses on the digital gaming environments as quintessential social environments and as testing ground to experiment with more empathetic and meaningful forms of alliances and kinships. The Pavilion mobilizes the expertise of a diverse cohort of scholars and cultural practitioners to address the topic of “digital gaming environments” from multitude perspectives, including philosophy, architecture and sociology.
With the ArchiJam, we strive to broaden the cohort of voices and invite designers and thinkers to join this research and use video games as a medium to address the question posed by the curator of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, Hashim Sarkis: How will we live together?
ArchiJam builds on a tradition of game jams that stands on the pillars of intensive collaborative work within a short time constraint and experimentation with the tools and meanings. With no ties to a particular geography and skill set of participants, we hope that ArchiJam will contribute to the interdisciplinary cohesion of architects and game designers in Russia and beyond.
ArchiJam x Molleindustria
Imagine a Way Out
An overview of ArchiJam, a gamedev session that took place as a part of Open, the Russian project at the Venice Biennale of Architecture.
The 7-day session, co-organized by Open, the MARCH School of Architecture and the Scream School, was designed to develop projects at the intersection of video games and architecture that would address the central question of the Biennale, How will we live together?, while focusing on new ways of thinking about and acting within cultural institutions in physical and virtual realities. Interdisciplinary teams of architects, artists, and game designers met the brief with six projects questioning not only the existing institutional modes but also the larger issues at stake in the Biennale at large and the Russian pavilion specifically.
One of the highlights of ArchiJam was a public talk by the game designer and Molleindustria founder Paolo Pedercini. The recording of the presentation titled A Pattern Language for Game Spaces is available on this page. In his talk, Pedercini lays down a basic network of patterns that can inform expressive and critical world-building in games.
Dmitry Vesnin joined the curatorial team of Open and the ArchiJam jury in reviewing the submissions and revealing the themes, patterns, and aims common to all of them.
text by Dmitry Vesnin:
One of the most striking and unusual gameplays of ArchiJam, The Line invites the participants to read a poem composed of sculptural letters. There is no single vantage point offering a panorama of the entire text: instead, one has to find a route through a labyrinth, deciphering the poem from the first letter to the last. The towering letters are scattered in a way that in theory could allow shortcuts and alternative routes. But these solutions do not score: the players must respect the original artistic intention. Drawing on the ideas of Barthes and Nancy, the game postulates the authority of the text and issues a strong warning: this is no place for carefree wanderings and alternative routes. The game can easily be translated into a public art work with visitors resting inside the letters, reading other books, taking shortcuts and Instagrammable photos. This way, the poem would become a mere decoration. Referencing the title of Open, the game builds walls that are open enough to allow players through and provides additional restrictions that compromise the openness.
Links:
Walkthrough showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8g8ZGR2jDM
Download the Game: https://xenia-kononenko.itch.io/strochka
The line
text by Ksenia Kononenko:
Thinking about space in the limit means wondering why we put up walls. Is it a game of hide-and-seek, or the fear of being found? Purely symbolically, there is no absolute safety other than the mother's womb. Then we are left to search for each other by wading through our own fence of teeth, moving through the wall of language. We build our houses and our neighbourhoods, our cities, wanting to make movement as easy as possible. By planning spaces, by creating logical connections we still, in our human multitude, are in any case - each of us - doomed to a maze. No one is able to build a perfect, cosy and comprehensible world with pre-determined passageways, but the phantasm of the Demiurge has not yet left us to the end.
In Stitch, the game is potentially divided into several worlds, in the prototype you can go into the first world - in the final version we're thinking of 7-8 worlds. Each of the worlds explores philosophical and mathematical aspects of space, time and cause-effect. The first level explores Life Together, or co-existence. By combining space and objects any map is in itself a walking around emptiness, an absence, and the game map is no exception. In our game, space, inhabited by poetic lines as architectural forms, at first acts as a pictorial backdrop but gradually becomes a central protagonist, a source of anxiety and hope. Labyrinth - the absence of entrance-exit. For the first world of exploration we have chosen the Labyrinth, and Winston Hugh Auden's poem, as a silent guide and clue for the player. Jean-Luc Nancy writes that All Being is only either co-existence or, quite simply, it is not. Objecting to the secondaryity of the 'other' implicitly assumed in the tradition of the notion of 'together' (the other is the one who goes along with me), Nancy insists on the primacy of together, 'togetherness', 'totality' being 'the first feature of being', 'an absolutely primordial structure'.
Experience An event, an experience, is the arrival of something new in the world, and this arrival is impossible without 'together'. We think of it together - in a place of Labyrinth, as a place of co-presence of the other, striking a balance between exploring the world and the puzzle. The Labyrinth, according to Roland Barthes, is the paradox of a closed space - because it is open. It symbolises the paradoxical effort through which the subject creates an obstacle to itself - the subject works for its conclusion by exerting a remarkable effort to find a way out. The labyrinth is similar to love, it is total autonomy, the strongest inner work in total uncertainty. Only for someone on the outside the exit is obvious and in the labyrinth the most distant is the closest and the most intimate is the unknown. We play on Lacan's proposed point of extimite, the point of extimacy for the subject - where the inside becomes the outside, using the poetic word as the experience of inventing personal meaning. In poetry, as in the visual arts, which include the art of making games, language plays a leading role in liberating and becoming the subjective truth about oneself, the world and the experience of Life Together, as Barthes understands it, for example. This unknowable realm is nevertheless subject to, indeed - must always - belong to the continuation and reinterpretation, the reconquista - the re-conquest of words. We imagine a game where the labyrinth becomes a clue and an answer.
(Further spoiler) Mechanics. In this system, in order to get out you have to stop "working for your own confinement" and start reading and, succumbing to the game itself rather than rebelling against it, find the leading thread in its absence.In the game this is the ability to guess, be able to read the poem and follow the meaning of the lines without falling for the open entries, loopholes and temptations of shortcuts, as this does not work here and you cannot pass the game in that case. The next part of the game (potentially, not the prototype) opens only if you've managed to get through the labyrinth by reading part of the poem. The collected words and lines add up to a story and the worlds expand, the puzzles expand as well.
By incorporating a labyrinth into the game, we would like to remind you of the great variety of labyrinths that already exist, those that have been completed and those that are yet to be completed. To give a piece of our attention to all that is present in the world as a matter of course - architecture, visual arts, poetry - and waiting for us to emerge from our personal mazes, to talk our way through them with each other, to find our own together and, of course, to remind us that they are waiting for us to learn how to create new ones.
Ksenia Kononenko
Cycle of Poems for the Project :
If you let the postal codes, the pointers, coincide,
then powered by prehistorical cockleshell or firebird’s feather
flesh’s imaginary grandeur will graduate from pink to ruddy purple
the difference between fish that facilitate childbirth and footlights
is almost imperceptible from such a flight.
beneath them and beneath me, apparently, the same stage,
namely, the lava, shakes and wobbles.
I don’t prevaricate, I only have my doubts,
I don’t know what gesture’s truth has to do with truth be told,
whether it has anything to do with the piece of fiction by the bench, where nobody asks anymore
how to get up, how to sit down, how the zero finger twitches
and how the vein walks around blue in a totally different part of town.
obviously:
the skin is the stage, the body is dressed,
and how rumpled the whole thing is, how battered and wrinkled,
how chilly how pointy how minty how nettlesome or something after all
Ksenia Kononenko
Translated, from the Russian, by Thomas H. Campbell