Another lockdown; shops closed, museums closed, bars closed, cafés closed, restaurants closed.
You turn to escapist media, in another attempt to climb the inner walls of a deflating castle.
All that is left is the city in its rawest form and the people inhabiting its shut down structures.
Where can you go if everything is closed? What could you encounter along the way?
Locked within the walls of a comatose town, you are missing direction. If the city is your new playground, who are the players and what is the objective?
Special Issue #14 from Piet Zwart Institute's Master of Experimental Publishing is born from the never-realised seventh issue of The Situationist Times, a magazine edited and published by the Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong from 1962 to 1964. We began by delving into the material De Jong had gathered for the prospective issue, which revolved around pinball machines and their female player.
With this in mind, "I Don't Know Where We're Going, But" intends to explore these themes by situating our emerging experiments in a more contemporary medium: hyper-stimulating video games. We took a deep dive into their history throughout the years and, (from this,) started making prototypes of retro arcade games. The result is an exploration of video game mechanics as a tool for narration. To anchor our digital games into the reality of the city, we felt it was appropriate to lean into the method of dérive, a term coined by The Situationists that refers to the wandering of the city without a set destination. The notion of going against predetermined structures resonated with our theoretical research on feminism, socialism & counter play. In the spirit of Situationism, we are stepping into psychogeographic methods of publishing, encouraging the exploration of urban environments through playfulness and dérive.
Find new trajectories or get lost within the many paths of this coordinate-based Special Issue, and discover the hidden signals we are sending out to you all across town. Bounce within a spontaneous rearrangement of situations and nodes, as the only way to experience the local network-based publication. In a battle of chance and control, let your personal path unravel an ensemble of concrete and fictitious publishing environments, where the shared notion of network is flipped-out.
You receive coordinates in the city of Den Haag. On arrival at the given location, you log into a local wifi network with your mobile phone. This gives you access to parts of the content of this Issue, only to be directed to the next location. This game is playable within a day or spread out over days, as it will be running for the month of April. We hope that the content you will gather on your devices during your escape will last you for longer than that.
A short note on the interface: The sounds you are hearing were recorded at the location of the hotspots that you need to find.
Colophon
Conceptualised, designed, created, edited, produced, published and distributed by XPUB1 class of 2020.
Kendal Beynon, Martin Foucaut, Camilo García A., Clara Gradel, Nami Kim, Euna Lee, Jacopo Lega, Federico Poni, Louisa Teichmann, Floor van Meeuwen
Tutors: Manetta Berends, Aymeric Mansoux, Michael Murtaugh, Lídia Pereira, Steve Rushton, Marloes de Valk
Special thanks to: Sébastien Tien , Ola Vasiljeva,Jacqueline de Jong
and all the great people we met along the way: Kishonna Gray, Ellef Prestsæter, David Maroto, Anne-Marie Schleiner, Jamie Woodcock
Thanks to: Anesca and colleagues Hanny, Vincent and Wim Kenny.The Seafood service for hosting our hotspots.
Typeface: Apfel Grotezk, TINY
Rotterdam, NL
Spring, 2021
Published by the Master Experimental Publishing at Piet Zwart Institute and Page Not Found
All deformation, reproduction, modification, derivation and transformation of the "I Don't Know Where We're Going, But..." is permitted. This refers to all the games, images, texts, and videos created for this local network city quest.
This license does not apply to the materials that were created by third party creators. Third party materials will be marked with a symbol.
