Video essay: John Wilson's The Road to Magnasanti (2017)
"In 2010, an obsessed gamer designed the perfect game of Sim City that he mysteriously titled “Magnasanti.” Achieved through a repeating pattern of clustered high rises, “Magnasanti” exposes the hellish consequences of top-down civic design. In “Films from Magnasanti,” documentarian John Wilson curates a program of short films inspired by the ethos of this fictional metropolis, culminating in the director’s newest work-in-progress that explores the way “Magnasanti”s philosophy manifests itself in New York City." (John Wilson)
John Wilson's latest documentary was selected for the New York Film Festival 2017 and it was made possible with a generous grant from Rooftop Films. Wilson is a lo-fi documentarian based in Brooklyn. His short films are narrated collages of street life shot on disposable media.
Read McKenzie Wark excellent essay on Magnasanti, originally presented at Transmediale 2015, subsequently published in The Avery Review and translated in Italian here. Killer snippet:
It seems we all now live in a Magnasanti whose governing algorithm is to capture all work and play and turn them not only into commodities but also into data, and to subordinate all praxis to the rule of exchange. Any data that undermines the premise that this can go on and on for 50,000 years, has to be turned into non-data. If there’s work and play to be done, then, it’s inside the gamespace that is now the world. Is there a way that this gamespace could be the material with which to build another one? (McKenzie Wark)