Here and not here: Play and place

Theme: Play and Place

Context:

Humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan talks of being here and not here. During Melbourne's lockdown, I am bound to my apartment with a tether stretching only 5km, but the tether of my physical limitations means this is not much different to my pre-pandemic life. My roaming mind travels to lands strange and wondrous, places that are always open to me, places that form a refuge from the pains and worries of daily life. These travels, when I am here and not here, take me to familiar worlds inside the books I visit and revisit.

I was also influenced by the not-yet-published work of Kenna MacTavish at University of Melbourne who is exploring post-digital book culture where #bookstagram content congregate on the user-generated content platform Instagram. Posting this video on instagram is my contribution to the community of #bookstagram, and the way it connects the online places with our offline reading spots.

Method:

The method for this work is a video of me walking overlaid on a video shot of my bookcase. I started by playing with the tactile attributes of the physcial books, a form of paidic play. I used after effects rotoscoping which struggled to make sense of the messing background of my living room. I'd love to do this again against a green screen to get a better finish, because this imagery captures my favourite escape, disappearing into a good book. The books on the self were chosen to reflect some of the fictional, and non-fictional, places I like to escape to: Nick Earl's very Brisbane books, Isabelle Allende's swashbuckling playgrounds of Zorro, Unberto Eco's imaginary lands and this week's destination of Margaret Atwoods MadAdam trilogy.

Reflection:

While grappling with the myth of immersion (Zimmerman, 2003), I began to wonder about the way stories give us a place. Is this the appeal of McGonigal's alternate reality games (Mäyrä & Lankoski, 2009). My bookcase is an interactive, tactile experience of choosing a portal to another world. In this video, I am escaping into Margaret Atwood's fictional post-pandemic future where I imagine myself keeping bees in a rooftop garden as part of a gardener cult, pondering the wisdom of serpents. My experience of re-reading favourite books is akin to Tim Burton's Alice's falling into another world she starts to remember who she is (Burton, 2010). The emotional and psychological experience of playing in this fictional place (Salen & Zimmerman, 2003) is a discernable outcome of a calm emotional escape fed by the catharsis of my hero beekeeper surviving and thriving in a dystopian reality. Perhaps some of this positive meaning making can be attributed to the psychogeographical effect of exploring a familiar fictional landscape.

References:

Alice in Wonderland 2010, movie, Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainmnet, Burbank, CA, directed by Tim Burton.

Mäyrä, F, Lankoski P, 2009, 'Play in Hyper Reality: Alternative Approaches to Game Design', in A de Souz e Silva (ed.), Digitial cityscapes: merging digital and urban playspaces, Peter Lang.

Salen, K & Zimmerman, E 2003, Rules of play : game design fundamentals, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mas.

Yi-Fu Tuan 1971, 'Dear Colleague', Yi-Fu Tuan Blog, blog, viewed 26 August 2020, https://www.yifutuan.org/dear_colleague.htm.