Game Art: Chris Howlett's "Metropolis I-II-III" (2009-2011)

"Metropolis I, II & III" uses the game SimCity Societies to construct three imaginary and psychological zones in order to create a meditative space for reflection, seduction and poetic, apocalyptic reverie. Abstraction, repetition, the grid, and architecture all play their part throughout the world in "real" cities town planning strategies in order to produce territory and the modern civilization. The recent Chilean and Haitian earthquake, South-Pacific islands devastated by tsunamis, apocalyptic meteorites and the dire predictions associated with climate change, overshadow the construction of these three different, yet strangely familiar virtual sites that all strive to undermine both the logic of the game and our own safe, hygienically controlled lifestyles. In "Metropolis I, II & III", dystopian, authoritarian and sublime, gated estates merge and dissolve into one another conjuring up disturbing comparisons between our real, lived experience and our day-to-day mediated trauma, represented elsewhere in our fantasies or across the electric spectacle of the global, media screen." (Chris Howlett)

"In Metropolis: Part I–III, Howlett uses these intentional communities to explore homogenous psychological zones rather than visionary architectural solutions. The crosshatching of streets and boulevards produces a cyclical grid of intersections forcing cars to aimlessly drive around the gated perimeters, while the cities are filled with isolated avatars. Following the unspoken rules of the game, individual subjectivity is given over to collective action and mood, and balloons float atop the avatars' heads advertising the symbolism via sad, sallow faces. These figures simply meander through their daily lives unaware of impending doom, cowering silently as meteorites crash into homes and earthquakes reduce the metropolis to uniform patches of rubble."(Jose Da Silva)

Link: Chris Howlett

Submitted by Matteo Bittanti