The notion of differences in degree is crucial to my understanding and production of maze and architecture games. Different parts along the uneven edges of one structure may exhibit different porosity with different accessibility, but in a maze there should be differences in degree, in order to create spatial and mnemonic myopia. In an animated architecture, the temporal differences are a gradient of transformations in which any two adjacent frames look logically and visually similar. Simple transformations of identical parts, or merging in-between states between different parts, are not only a self-reference but a system of potentials. In the process of design and play, the maze represents a new mode of architecture that challenges the traditional mastermind notions of design, rule compliance, and space. Virtual architecture is not simply a matter of digital representations of physical buildings, but rather an experiment in creating new spatial logic with emphasis on space as a production, rather than a product. Spatial production is the dynamic interplay among multiple agents, including designer, occupant and other architectural parts, in an evolving sequence. Virtual architecture has the potential to create not only new forms, new ways of interaction, but also new thought and cultural meanings. the architecture of the game
In Ludius Loci, player of places, loci is a pun with double meanings. It signifies that this project seeks to establish an architecture of three loci, loci of emergence, loci of circular time, and loci of computational heterogeneity. Emergence resonates with a continuity of before and after, with expanding complexities unfolding in a modularisation of architectural parts. The model of becoming, according to Bergson and Deleuze, involves dispersion, where an entity is in a different place-time than it originally was by a movement of complication. The crossword maze is a dispersion space, and player on the other hand, their movement, if frozen in solid, will show a dispersion pattern in space. The player and the maze become connected again by their shared gaming properties. In Borges’ retelling of the myth of Minotaur, House of Asterion , Minotaur narrates how the bodies of the sacrificed youth, when they lie down still, turn into markers of his infinitely intricate home maze. Ludius Loci is my spatial play in which I have been a player. It is the immaterial legacy of my obsession with mazes. It is an archive of my dreams of mazes, my practice of fulfilling the duty in the Borgesian prophecy of maze makers in the world. As a bag of digital games, it is an interface where my maze- making obsession can be shared by others, designers and non-designers alike. All three parts of Ludius Loci , player of games, in very different ways speculate how a maze is conceived as an agential aggregation of tectonics of mobility, where the occupant is treated as a curious discoverer, and where space, in turn, is in a state of becoming. £
Yiou Wang
Liquid Sand, still from Ludius Loci
YIOU WANG is a multidisciplinary artist and architect working in the field of new media, encompassing CGI, game, immersive and interactive storytelling. Yiou holds a Harvard GSD MArch; her thesis, Ludius Loci , a series of single- player adventure games of architectonics, can be found at Yiou Wang’s itch.io
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on site review 44 : play
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