What?

Urban Art Games is an educational program that offers its patrons the necessary skills to produce effective and engaging stories: integrating multiple visual and audiovisual formats (suitable for an ever growing digital environment).

It has been conceived as a game of collective artistic creation: with the Melbourne metropolitan area as its background and subject.

(Click here to learn about the project’s origins)

(Game example: The Mythologies of my Local)

Why?

This program is designed to respond to a number of crises (and contradictions) affecting both the media landscape and the education of humanities and the arts in the first half of the twenty-first century:

• Following up on Walter Benjamin’s premise (published almost a century ago), there is an increasing importance for contemporary (and future) professionals to develop a new kind of literacy, involving visual and audiovisual forms of communication. Nonetheless, due to recent economic and political factors: including the Covid-19 outbreak (and in particular the effect it has had on the entire sector of tertiary education) and the Federal Government’s decision to increase tuition fees for humanity subjects, the achievement of this type of literacy seems to have been neglected or, at the very least, downgraded within the Australian educational system.

• The events mentioned in the previous paragraph have fallen upon a media environment that, for the past two decades, has been struggling to adapt to the economic and technological changes related to the growing influence of digital networks. The now stereotypical use of terms like “fake news” or “filter bubble” are a logical consequence of the loss of hundreds of independent and mostly local media outlets and of thousands of jobs in the editorial and journalistic industries.

(Examples of media/formats covered by the UAG program: photography, compositing, digital illustration)

So…?

Urban Art Games’ response is to:

• Offer the basic skills* for our patrons to begin the process of becoming a successful multimedia storyteller [and acquire what Walter Benjamin understood would be a basic need for the generations of the twenty-first century].

• To develop a new (and experimental) public sphere**, based on a grassroots celebration and exploration of Melbourne’s local scene(s).

* for more information see: program

** for more information see: author

(Examples of media/formats covered by the UAG program: video editing, animation)

Call to artists: the UAG is always looking for partnerships across all art forms, starting with the soundscape of the video above.

video under CC BY license (see: Terms and Conditions)