Introduction|
TRASH THIS CITY is the debut exhibition of Nirmala Shome in conjunction with All of the Above. It purports to be a simulation exploring the paradigms behind urban life. It seeks to set up a dialogue between the urban space and those that inhabit it. This is a project exploring notions of simulation, virtuality and play within the urban. Drawing its major aesthetic and theme from the Maxis Studio game SimCity2000 the project involves the construction, real-time modification and destruction of a modelled city. The aim of the piece is to set up a simulated virtual environment based on the game SimCity2000, essentially allowing people to physically enter a previously mediate game space, rather than it being mediated via a keyboard and screen. It also seeks to express a broader metonym of how the urban life has become a game like interface that we engage in. This project situates itself as a kind of paidia game by construct as simulation of a virtual environment with no defined goals and using play as a primary tool for exploring urbanism.

Curated by Nirmala Shome, it takes an interdisciplinary approach borrowing from a variety of field including digital art, installation art, performance art and involves architectural logistics. This project falls into the broad genre of conceptual art as a hybrid of performance, installation, and game art, and fundamentally seeks to position itself at a piece of Gesamkunstwerk - total art. All of the Above is a collective workspace culminating in a retail space, design studio, gallery, fashion house and screen printing studio and was designed to showcase the production process.

TRASH THIS CITY will invite the active participation of the audience given its status as a simulation. Artistic expression in this context is mediated through the audience's play within the environment. It hopes to provoke engagement with the social dynamics involved in the urban lifestyle, whilst reinforcing the power of the urban in today's society, and our own role in validating its authority as a lifestyle.


This booklet briefly discuss where TRASH THIS CITYsituates itself as an art work in the field of digital art and game art, and how TRASH THIS CITY is a hybrid artform between digital, game, installation and performance art. I will then examine the paradigm of the urban and its correlation to a game space. Also examine the logistics of virtuality and telepresence which TRASH THIS CITY seeks to create in real space – 'a simulation of a simulation'. The choice to display this project in a gallery was a conscious one and I will also discuss the galleries necessity as a medium to exemplify not only its status as art, but also its status as a simulated virtual reality.

The New Lively Art|

Brandon Taylor in his book Art Today examining 'new art' begins with the statement: 'In the Western nations during the last thirty or so years art objects have come to exist  that bear no resemblance to the art of former time, presenting experiences of puzzlement, disorder…'(Taylor, 2004: 9) This is not only true of art since the 1960's that diverted from the traditional art object, but speaks closely of digital art.

Christiane Paul is the Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the director of Intelligent Agent, a service organization and information resource dedicated to digital art

In her book Digital Art, Paul surveys the developments of digital art from its emergence in the 1980s up to the present day, and further moves to examine the prospective evolution within this field. For Paul:
'Digital technology has revolutionised the way we produce and experience art today… What in fact is new is that digital technology has now reached such a stage of development that it offers entirely new possibilities for the creations and experience of art.' (Paul 2003: 3)

The rhetoric available to describe digital art is still evolving, and so the genre of 'digital art' becomes attached to a plethora of new experimental art forms that incorporate new media technologies in process of production and/ or presentation.

Essentially, much of digital art explores the interactive experience. Audience involvement has been explored in performance art, but new media arts confront the audience with complex possibilities of remote and immediate intervention and is best communicated through virtual simulation environments. In the context of simulation, the artist provides the tools and space for the creation of the 'art' - which is predominantly left to the audience: 'without input, a work of art may literally consist of a blank screen.'(Paul 2003:17) There is a shift in the process of art production from primarily handled by the artist, to being shared with the audience. So, one single new media art installation can potential generate endless amounts of subjective art products.

One branch of new media art that takes on the digital as its medium of expression Paul describe is digital art installations. One commonality across digital installation artworks is their aim to create 'environments'. When new media installation art is placed in the gallery, curators are no longer exhibiting tangible objects, but spaces to house subjective experiences.

'Art-making' was once accepted to be 'a more or less solitary and product-producing activity.' (Stallabrass). Within new media art production occurs in social interaction, and the 'art-product' takes form in consciousness as an experience rather than any kind of material matter.  The relocation of art to the intangible realm of experience eliminates 'exclusivity and ownership' (Stallabrass). When art no longer takes on a physical form, it challenges the basic operations of the art industry to sell and collect art. New media art is a process, not a product and so is much harder to translate into a monetary value. Any definition of art or artefact alludes to human agency and workmanship. The automated character of new media technologies that minimise, and sometime cancels human involvement makes it difficult to produce artefacts of a technoetic culture.
 
Art forms that move outside the frame, into continuous space mediated through digital technologies exemplify the concept of 'the drama of display'. (Oliviera, Oxley, Patry, Archer). A situation emerges where 'Meaning is no longer given, residing in the object until discerned by the perceptive viewer, it is something that is made in the encounter' (Oliviera, Oxley, Patry, Archer).

Opera composer Richard Wager's concept Gesamtkunstwerk, or "total design," provides a useful paradigm for new media installations as it contends the designing of every detail of a whole so it becomes, in a sense, greater than the sum of its parts.


Game Art |
It has long been contested whether the video game can be classified as art. For Henry Jenkins:

'Games represent a new lively art, one as appropriate for the digital age as those earlier media were for the machine age. They open up new aesthetic experiences and transform the computer screen into a realm of experimentation and innovation that is broadly accessible. And games have been embraced by a public that has otherwise been unimpressed by much of what passes as digital art.' (2005: 313)

In his essay GameBoy, Peter Lunenfeld acknowledges that game art developed longer before the video game: 'Artists have long been open to games, play, and even sport: think of Marchel Duchamp's obsession with chess; the Surrealist's Exquisite Corpse: the extruded board games that were the Situationist' psychol-geographical mappings of Paris; the algorithmic play of Oupeinpo.' (Lunenfeld,  2005: 59-60)

For Matteo Bittanti, 'Game Art is any art which digital games played a significant role in the creation' (2006: 9)The field of Game Art is widely dispersed across various other art disciplines. Several theorists have attempted to broadly define prerequisites for game art. Art Games are videogames specifically created for artistic ( i.e., not commercial purposes). According to Tiffany Holmes (2003) an art game is "an interactive work, usually humorous, but a visual artist that does one or more of the following: challenges cultural stereotypes, offers meaningful social or historical critique, or tells a story in a novel manner.

Holmes continued to list two defining components of Game art 'a defined way to win or experience success in a mental challenge, passage through a series of levels (that may or may not be hierarchical), or a central character or icon that represents the players.' (2003)

Rebecca Cannon (2003) provides another definition: 'Art Games may be made in a variety of media, sometimes from scratch without the use of a prior existing game. They always comprise an entire, (to some degree) playable game…Art Games are always interactive – and that interactivity is based on the needs of competing… Although both forms follow the linage of Fine Art and computer games. Art Games explore the game format primarily as a new mode for structuring narrative, cultural critique. Challenges, levels and the central character are all employed as toold for exploring the game theme within the context of competition-based play.

Kristine Ploug (2005) 'it can all be boiled down to the intention behind them': suggesting that if something is constructed as art or exhibited in an art space it justifiably an art piece. Ploug adds that in most cases the Art Games are neither addictive  nor meant to be played over and over, but merely shorter comments [...] The games always have interaction, but this interaction doesn't always have an effect on what goes on in the game.
Broadly we can surmise that Game Art is any art that draws on digital games as a basis for creation, production, and/or display of the art work. The resulting artwork can exist as a game, painting, photograph, sound, animation, video, performance or gallery installation.
Meanwhile "Art was trying to make reality play a game which was different to the game that art itself way playing. In other words, there was a time indeed when art way always trying to force reality…today this is no longer the great game that art is playing. All the art forms are now playing the game at the level of the simulation of reality."

In the gallery|
Essentially we are constructing a virtual space, it is not a real but a simulation of a simulation of reality. , it is a representation of a representation. It's enclosure in a the 'white cube' gallery space serves to isolate it from reality and reinforce its artificiality.

It will also make use of the powerful medium the gallery offers. Galleries are often viewed as a kind of 'nationalistic temple of culture'. (Hooper-Greenhill 1992:1) From its early beginnings in the 19th century when private collections of art, antiques and other historical artefacts passed into the public domain, the gallery has been a depository of national cultural history. Art becomes the 'physical embodiment of a nation's history' (Fry 1972: 104). Their main functions include the collection, preservation and exhibition of cultural histories. However, the gallery also operates at a profound social level as an educational institution specialising in displaying the culture embedded in the visual. 'the post-aristocratic art museum functioned not only as an esthetic repository, but also an educations and mythological reminder of the national heritage.'(Fry 1972: 104-105)

The gallery is a medium, a physical interface that shapes perspectives and opinions on cultural history. It takes on a gate-keeping role similar to newspaper editorial teams, what is allowed into the gallery space is legitimised as art.

The concept of space as a medium is also surfaces in Brian O'Doherty's work on the 'white cube' gallery space. Many perceive the white wall to be a neutral zone: 'a no-man's land on which [artists can] project their concept' (O'Doherty 1999: 27). But on deeper reflection it becomes apparent that the white wall is imbued with the ability to 'artify'(O'Doherty 1999: 29) an object. Surrounding spatial qualities have definitive implications for the contents of its boundaries. The gallery is one such space, which operates not only to house art, but a defining agent is the classification of what constitutes 'art'; 'things become art in a space where powerful ideas about art focus them.' (O'Doherty, 1999: 14)

For American Art critic Clement Greenberg, 'Modernist art was that it should be viewed silently, and with the eyes alone, against a neutral white gallery wall, once more bracketing off the social environment and even the viewer's own gendered body in order to intensify the works's effects, to release its aesthetic value.' (cited in Taylor) Interior whiteness and uncluttered, finely articulated space have be the presiding motifs of art – museum and architecture since its inception in the heyday of the Modern Movement – in the 1920s and 1930s.


There is a symbiotic relationship between the white walls and art in it, which allows both to define themselves; as art and as art space. O'Doherty uses an analogy between the art institution and religious institution to illustrate the authority of the gallery. 'Some of the sanctity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, the mystique of the experimental laboratory joins with chic design to produce a unique chamber of esthetics. So powerful are the perceptual fields of forms within this chamber that, once outside it, art can lapse into secular status.' (O'Doherty, 1999: 14) The cultural artefacts displayed in galleries, become markers for the historical paradigms galleries cultivate and promote.

Sim City History|
SimCity was released at a time when pacifist gameplay offered by Pong gave way to the 8-bit violence of Space Invaders, Asteroids, Defender and their brethren, creating a trend in gaming that continues to this day.
The original SimCity was met with bewilderment and scepticism. Wright's game emphasised creation rather than destruction. Play time was indefinite, during a period when most games were designed to last mere minutes. Similarly games took on roles as fighter pilots, spaceship commanders or some other hero. SimCity was concerned with the not so heroic role of  Mayor and asked to manage the growth and planning of a simulated metropolis. Today, millions of copies of the SimCity games have been sold over the years, and SimCity has arguably formed the cornerstone of a genre in itself - God Games, also known as System Simulation Games. The Sims has now spawned a whole series of games based around its premise of simulation.

Bittanti's writing for Ludigco (2004) marks the 15th anniversary of Will Wright's SimCity. For Bittanti the virtual landscape of the game has affected our way of imagining the urban and he argues that new media and videogames are redesigning urban landscapes. He views The Sims as a 'meta-game, a political and (v)ideological site, a narrative laboratory, and as the last frontier of product placement. '(Bittanti, 2004: 5)

'Videogames are more than just another medium of expression, another way of constructing worlds or generating stories, and they are more than just a new source of material for the imagination… Like film and television in the days of Warhol, videogames have generated new collective legends, new icons which have entered the iconographic repertoire of artists.'(Quaranta 2006: 300)

Urbanism|

Urbanism is the study of cities - their economic, political, social and cultural environment, and the imprint of all these forces on the built environment. In addition Urbanism is also the practice of creating human communities for living, work, and play; covering the more human aspects of urban planning. Urbanism assumes that there is such an entity as the "urban" with its characteristic high population density, and that it can be clearly distinguished from the "rural".

Scholars have studied cities from several dimensions: the internalist perspectives which looked at spatial and social order within a city, externalist perspectives which viewed cities as stable points or nodes in the wider globalizing space of networks and flows, and the interstitial perspective which attempted to reconcile the two perspectives: by trying to understand how globalizing flows and external forces influence, and are influenced by, the social, temporal and spatial ordering of a city. Amin and Graham (1997) argue in The Ordinary City that the urbanscape can best be understood as a site of co-presence of multiple spaces, multiple times and multiple webs of relations, tying local sites, subjects and fragments into globalizing networks of economic, social and cultural change. Allowing this simulation to be collectively played transforms it into a socio-cultural experiment on how social dynamics are imprinted on the urban landscape.

TRASH THIS CITY also make a broader comment on the urban lifestyle. The city engulfs human beings and in a sense we are sucked into a game of urban play, governed by rules of economy, politics and culture. The urban lifestyle come with rules and codes of conduct that must be followed/ adherence to these rules is required to continue our play in this city. This is a play we engage with 24 hours a day, even our 'non-working' hours are bound up in the mechanics of this game. Shopping for more products, constantly competing to stay ahead of other contestants. As Janet Murray describes: 'In a postmodern world…everyday experience has come to seem increasingly gamelike, and we are aware of the constructed nature of all our narratives.'(pp3) We train for years to be injected into this environment. What ultimately delineates a game such as sim city, or other Multi-user domains from the urban lifestyle? Capitalist society had entered us into an urban game in which we engage everyday. The Urban play environment becomes the diegesis for the game of life. Most of us spend our time level grinding in the urban game. Seeking to accumulate points- or money and assets. So immersive is this environment, rarely do we get to step outside its diegetic. Adherence to the rules of play will allow you to climb certain ladders, and reach higher levels, whether it be social, economic or political. We fashion our avatars within the framework provided by the rules of play.
 
The Marxist concept of reification is inherent in all games. Reification essential describes a process of abstraction, where human labour is abstracted and translated into material things. Video games consistently operate on reification. The players time and involvement in the game is measured in arbitrary point systems that the inherently in capable of measuring the emotions involved in play. The success of the multiplayer games somewhat personalises the reification process. In SIM|SIM however, there is no points system or defined goal, thus aligning it with other paidia games.
Iconoclasm|
The destruction of art is often seen as a crime against culture. This highlights the power of art of conserve and solidify certain aspects of culture in tangible, collectible form. SIM|SIM is not an Marxist iconoclasm against Capitalism, but is used in this project to demonstrate the power play affords its participants and thus in itself the iconoclasm of TRASH THIS CITY the expression of the artists intention. Destruction simulates the ludic experience only truly possible in the virtual game world.
In Byzanitum the period from 726 to 843 when there was an imperial ban on religious images. The destroyers of images were known as iconoclasts. The modern day iconoclasm is powerful anti-patriot message of flag burning. Similarly the destruction of city speaks of a broad destruction and power over the urban landscape. Removal from the diegesis, end its existence. And when products are encoded with culture the destruction of them inherently involves symbolic anarchy against cultures. The ability to destroy is power. Destruction fundamentally subverts even the powers of ownership which are held sacred in today's world. The power of iconoclasm, the destruction of religious icons, highlights how culture is embedded in the simulacra – the system of signs the filter meaning for individuals. The Byzantine emperor who sought to destroy a culture through the destruction of its icons exemplifies the how society manifests itself in its environment.
Simulation |
The simulation is a system (Salen, Zimmerman, 2003) The city is a system, and SIM|SIM asks whether by derivation can the city also be seen to be a simulation. In a computer game, a space of possible representational events is typically enabled through a simulation. The simulations is a procedural representation, representing rules, not event.
In a strategy game like Sim City, the simulation establishes a characteristic analogy between the player-machine-relation and the player-world-relation: balancing parameters is like rational management of a city. According to A Handbook of Game Design the simulation is "an operating representation of central features of reality". (Eddington, Addinall, Percival, 1982:10). This definition identifies two central features that must both exist for a simulation; it must represent an actual simulation of some sort – either a situation drawn directly from real life; it must be operational, or constitute an on-going process. This component of the definition describes the systemic character of simulations. A simulation is a dynamic system: a set of parts that interrelate to form a whole. A simulation is therefore a procedural representation, one achieved through an ongoing process. In the case of games, the ongoing process is play. Making a simulation is a process of abstracting – of selecting which entities and which properties from a complex real phenomena to use in the simulation program. A simulation is an experiment run as a model of reality. Is an artificial situation or environment. As a system, it requires input to generate output. So in this sense the interactive component is necessary to artistic expression. Much like the nature of many digital art works – the art becomes detached from a material product to find existence in processes.

TRASH THIS CITY

There will be two key components of TRASH THIS CITY; its real time modification and finally its destruction. On the night of the exhibition, the urban landscape does not remain a static structure. Rather it becomes malleable across the social dynamics of the exhibition night. All the pieces in the city can be moved and shaped. Participants can also tag and graffiti on streets, alleys and buildings, redefining the urban space in real-time. The third and final part will involve the destruction of the city. Just as in the game SimCity players are provided with tools to not only aid in the construction of the city, but they also shape its demise at the hands of various catastrophes. Destruction within the context of TRASH THIS CITY is an expression on the players power and bespeaks a correlation to paradigms of urbanism that asserts that the urban space is an imprint of social dynamics and whilst it often engulfs us, the diegetic world it represents is the product of society. It's exists as an entity that we have build and will continue to redefine. The destruction of the city is not only an iconoclasm attempting to redefine the city as a play space.
The city will cover the entire floor space of All of the Above, forcing the user to interact with the work, stepping through it will be unavoidable. 
The city will be built using cardboard so it is easy to break and move around. Throughout the city we will set up several cameras that will relay footage onto the wall space. This serves to conjure a sense of telepresence. Participants will move between a birds eye view of the city, and feeling as though within the city through the large projections on the wall, as if there are giant walking around them.
Three key Rules of play:
-    Players can move and edit the urban grid
-    Players can tag and graffiti
-    Players can destroy the city only using there hands, feet and other body parts – no burning

Simulation is a powerful tool, and has become one of the dominant models of learning and experience in today's culture, exemplified in video games. TRASH THIS CITY relies on the creative participation of the audience, designed specifically for intuitive, exploratory and open-ended engagement. The onus fall to participants to act as contributors and catalysts in the creative process of simulation.