Personnal Cinema – Banoptikon

Personnal Cinema
Banoptikon
Video game, 2010 – 2013
Visit the project

We are facing the melting point between bodies in move on one hand and digital technologies of control on the other. A situation where the body becomes data, and thus becomes subject of control, but at the same time the data are materialised and become bodies.

The game simulates different urban or non-urban environments, such as the city center, the harbor, the detention camp or the border zone and presents their interconnection. The player is invited to experience this fluid yet intense reality while interacting within the game and viewing videos, sound recordings, web pages, images and texts that have been integrated in the environment.

The game is based on a (non linear) storyline, connecting various migrant movements. It demonstrates in a visual manner the experiences that migrants encounter as Europe’s non citizens, while also emphasizing how these movements may have a positive effect on European societies – transforming power hierarchies of gender, nation, race and class.
It also searches and examines different aspects of current migrational politics and the issues that are generated from the power relations between migrants, “locals” and authorities, which are weaving and constructing the European canvas of this new struggle field. The central axis of this struggle concerns the digitalisation process of migration flows and, consequently, the transformations that occur to the different actors and the urban territories.

A major issue of debate in the social/political struggle field is the digitalisation of the mechanisms of control and surveillance (Border Crossing, Social Movements, Intercultural Conflict and Dialogue). And though these mechanisms are based on machines and devices, they appear -mostly- “invisible” and “immaterial” to those they are applied on.
The videogame Banoptikon, aspires to render these mechanisms visible and to simulate social and political situations referring to migration flow, which take place inside cities, networks, rural areas and above all to human bodies.

Because bodies are the subjects on which old and new technologies are applied and therefore bodies remain the basic topos of the battlefield.

Personal Cinema is a network active in the field of media arts. It plans and organizes projects and activities that encourage the critical stance toward the new forms of production, presentation and distribution of audiovisual products; the forms that at the very end, define the kind of social, cultural and political conditions, which in their turn, connect the multitude to the power structures.

Personal Cinema anticipates cooperation with social and artistic networks, groups and individuals that take a similar stance and consider necessary the creation of a visible space of debate. The collective connects people who are engaged in constant inventions to render explicit and clear the ‘signal’ from ‘noise’, that is to say, the two unequal parts that compose the current pseudo-dialectic of information.