
The city is constructed in many ways—not only through the manipulation of material but also through language and the creation of symbolic worlds that operate and mold it.
Gaming environments and their technologies can teach us about architecture and the role it plays in society. Virtual worlds allow us to explore and navigate imagined spaces, as well as interact with and explore existing places from our homes, enabling new forms of spatial interaction.
Within the two poles of utopian or dystopian future imaginaries, video games are, on one hand, a tool for the subtle manipulation of our behavior through playful or gamified dynamics that increasingly mediate how we inhabit, move through, and interact with the city and its inhabitants. On the other hand, they are spaces from which to experiment with collective decision-making about our cities to make them more sustainable, ecological, and inclusive.
It is possible today to understand video games as a laboratory for building citizenship and as a language of communication capable of establishing a dialogue from a distance between the actors who inhabit urban spaces, both material and virtual. The interactive nature of digital games and their representation of the city encourage the development of a collective intelligence that, in a dynamic way, recursively imagines and writes the present and future of urban spaces.
With this exhibition, we propose a perspective on video games that focuses on their potential to reflect upon and transform the city. We present a journey through various interventions, projects, and experiments that demonstrate how this medium represents and constructs the urban realm.
Recent itinerancies
ITINERANCIES
CIVE 2022 – ARTE, CIUDAD Y VIDEOJUEGOS – Universidad de Valencia.
Espai Societat Oberta, Barcelona, 2023.
Temporals de la Xarxa de Centres Cívics de Barcelona (CC. Guinardó, CC. Cotxeres-Casinet y CC. Convent de Sant Agustí), 2023.
CentroCentro Madrid, 2024.
Euskadiko Arkitektura, Gipuzkoa, 2024.
CREDITS
Curators
Eurídice Cabañes y Luca Carrubba
Museography
Meritxel Ahicart
Artists Aida Navarro, Mathias Klenner, Sofía Balbontín y Joan Lavandeira, Santiago Bustamante, Fundación Cotec, María Ignacia Ibarra, Gianluca Saporito, Dinosaur Polo Club, Leo Sang, Elise Aubisse, Pablo Garrido Martinez, Outconsumer – Roc Massague, Agustina Isidori, Jose Sanchez, Carlos Padial, Keiichi Matsuda, Mónica Rikić, Dimopoulos, K., Gerber, A., & Götz, U., Navarro Redón, A., Shaw, J., Tan, E., José Tono Martínez, Zemos98, Gira Zapatista y Gall Negre.


