"SFZero, a community of gamers who were transforming their day-to-day environment into one large playing field. They were getting out into their cities, meeting one another, and using social software as a means to engage with and support one another with actions that shape their actual relationship to their city. Here, through the web, I discovered something clearly different from the ‘virtual’ world offered by online realities such as Second Life. Rather than a simulated space for developing relationships situated within a fantasy world, the device of fantasy, games and networked tools were facilitating relationships and encounters in local live space. Rather than a parallel universe, this was a collision of social realities. Not alternate, not underground, but complicated and integrated.
This was what Guy Debord had written about years ago when he called upon people to “detourn” their spectacular lives. In Society of the Spectacle DeBord decried the mediated existence of modern citizens – passive and docile to the manipulative strategies of industrial regimentation. The Situationists issued a manifesto to all beings of agency, to take to the streets and to recaptures one’s own sense of active expression in daily life, through the disruption of routine with self-invented games and play.
The self-generated games at SFZero, offered players exactly this type of Situationist intervention. And yet the best part was it didn’t seem as contrived and mannered as an ‘art project’ nor separated and invisible, available only to an audience with an art historical context, knowingly nodding within a gallery while viewing historical documentation: people as actors in their lives, ongoing, publicly, engaged and creating meaning through relationships, not because experts and media dictated for them to follow, but for themselves and each other."
-- Alice Planas
"The city spreads out before you. Rushing from point to point, lit by the slow strobe of fluorescent buses and dark streets. Stumbling into situations for a stranger's signature. Fleeing unknown pursuers, breathing hard, admiring the landscape and the multitude of worlds hidden in it.
We made this text-based multi-user space modeled on Chicago under Helen Chanam's identity and got it accepted into Rhizome, a virtual museum! For further description, see the text below:
"I remember the MUD landscape I designed, where it was always the winter of the broken twig, the summer of heated abjection; there was the cooling sea where Clara might go, smeared with shit, piss, and cum, mixing with the tepid waters; there was the neophyte Alan, hysterically picking up coins and menses in any combination, delving into tunnels, falling into the vaginal opening in the floor, labial opening in the wall, the clock bleeding second after second. Nothing happened that couldn't be corrected by prayer as Death and Tiffany fucked murderously, returning the unstable world to where it used to be. There were Man to be fought in this world where everyone is naked, crawling, where the Pub offered female and male cum, as well as piss to drink, where delirium is the order of the night. I could fight with Honey there, and violated I could die piecemeal. I never programmed the eating of corpses, but the possibility was there, running ragged through the body of the other in the midst of bodies. Everyone sexed everyone else, every hole offered itself, the mazes crashed against impossible topologies, and there were prisons from which it was impossible to escape, ever, before the shutdown-closure of the world. But most of all I remember wandering within all of this, things dripping, stumbling about at the debris of my own creation built upon the structure of a clean economy, clean game, with foreclosed though wounded bodies. Here one slid with every hole filled with fingers and other proturberances, with burbling or mewling mouths, with insatiable hungers for bodies among bodies. I remember returning in my dreams to dissolute programming, walking along the path strewn with feces, the two of us covered in menstrual blood, the blood-red sun crashed hard against horizon of the text. Build one yourself she said, motion begets motion."
(source: http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/sondheim__internet_text/an.txt)
