Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

Video games have been used increasingly in recent years in contexts of educational practices, mainly due to their interaction and active participation features. The cultural and audiovisual digital landscapes have evolved in ubiquitous ways, reflecting contemporary aspects of the new digitality, introducing not only digital identities (McLuhan 1960) but also a brand-new language with expressive and dynamic abilities, while the game space is transformed into a multi-operational and multi-modal terrain. This presentation explores the educational practices followed in the Department of Architecture of the University of Thessaly, focusing on the contribution of game engines and their use to architectural design, spatial synthesis, and the production of expanded uncanny ambiances.

In video games, the players become nomads of the space, through their ability to control and diversify the game process due to the interaction, improvisation and engagement characteristics of the medium (Malone & Lepper, 1987). As the quality of graphics is improving and technologies are evolving, video games can introduce the users and include them in an augmented environment, providing the condition of immersion. In this context of abundant dynamics of tactics, strategy options and multi-linear narrations, the digital spaces are reorganized independently of the limits of physical space-time, creating a mixed and digitally mediated projective reality (Cooper, 2007). Video games operate in a hybrid conscious state that includes individual embodied experiences and spatiotemporal data. The simulation of these environments appears as unique and indivisible experiences occurring simultaneously and sedately. (Papadopoulos et al., 2013).

In architectural design, using game engines introduces the factor of malleable surroundings. The perception of space-time does not simply depend on the aesthetics or the form, but rather it operates above all that it is perceived (Fraser, 2011). It is a new moldable medium of design, through an experiential triptych: i) active observation, ii) free willing movement iii) disruptive interaction. In turn, these experiences are translated during the educational process in three different directions: a) understanding of the conditions of the digital environment; b) the spatiotemporal narration; and c) the possibility of constructing new places of design and creation. Thus, the use of video engines enhances a new perceptual and aesthetic experience. Students, through this practice, are landscapers within the digital space; they have the potential to reduce the distance between themselves and the project, enriching their capacity for architectural perception and re-occupying the physical space with the use of augmented reality. Through exploration and virtual movement, they discover, reveal, and interpret spatiotemporal correlations in ingenious negotiations, as fantasies (Vanolo, 2017) that can be about associations/disassociations, stereotypes/anti-types and more generally, connections of places – familiar or uncanny.

Architectural design, under these premises, could be described as an embodied experimental practice. In this sense, the instrumentalization of game engines constitutes a genre of commercialization of the space, detaching it from the conventional world and inducing the students to the perfection of their world (Wigley, 2007:484-487)  Digital landscape design is not limited to the simple representation of space, but involves at the same time a process of narrative construction that has as a central element the conquest of the territory and ultimately the habitation of space (Newman, 2004:113). This embodied unnatural, malleable dimension of the digital moving landscape is the new component of digital space-time, which acts and reacts as part of its continuous flow, producing an innovative nature that bounces everyday objects as landscape elements.

In this sense, the role of representation is particularly important in the formation of a digital or virtual cultural identity of a place. According to Hall (1996: 612) identities can be formalized or transformed within and concerning their representation. Through the game's cultural symbols and narrative, players shape their identity, and by engaging with and controlling the digital environment, they transform it into a meaningful space, thereby reconstructing their cultural identity. The narrative is ultimately subjective, as consciousand designed practice of representation and signification (Firat &Venkatesh, 1993:246), with the purpose of planning and projecting the image of a place, in other words, the creation of an impression of themselves (Backe, 2020).

Students transition from passive viewers of a static vision to dynamic participants within the digital landscape, equipped to recognize emerging conditions and hidden dynamics. They create spaces imbued with diverse spatiotemporal characteristics. Through the integration of game engines, coding, and gamification into architectural education, students gain knowledge via an immersive embodied experiential learning process. This approach allows them to navigate and investigate the novel digital genesis, topogenesis, mirroring the cultural essence of our era's uncanny atmospheres.