ART GAME: AAA COLLECTIVE'S UTOPIAS: NAVIGATING WITHOUT COORDINATES" (2020)
Utopias: Navigating Without Coordinates is a videogame network comprising nine different worlds, each one developed by a member of Berlin-based AAA collective.As they explain on their website,
Each world in Utopias is a site of crystallization where our ideas and how we work as a group have gathered and grown. The process of creating Utopias was a collective deep dive into things like group decision-making, the economics of care (for oneself and others), the sharing of resources and information, generating and maintaining sustainable momentum and examining personal wounds left from living in a hyper-individualized economy of scarcity. A major motivation for our collaboration is to find alternative methods for making video games while avoiding the exploitative and creatively stultifying software industry. We think CGI should be taken out of the hands of the industry - culture should be made by people, not just companies. By pooling individual skills, we enable collective members with differing levels of technical ability to make video games collaboratively. We work without designated roles or tasks and no-one's technical or creative vision is considered more important than another's. Although we created a series of individual utopian visions, each of us worked on each other’s world, helping one another to realize them. This is our attempt to roleplay our way to utopia.
Active in Berlin, the AAA Collective comprises an eclectic cohort of artists, designers, and creators from all over the world. Its founding members are Merle Leufgen, a software artist, curator and independent researcher, Gabriel Helfenstein, a French transmedia artist, curator, and writer, Troy Duguid, and Australian artist working with game engines, and Jessica Palmer, a Canadian multimedia artist interested in neuroscience. Other members are Chloê Langford, Fedya Balashov, Jack Perkins, Matias Brunacci, Nick Morrison, and Tristan Neu.
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