The Semiotics of Video Games is an art miscellany that investigates the production of meaning in video games. The project was presented at the 3rd video games cultures conference, organized by the Inter-Disciplinary network and held at the Mansfield College (July 2011, University of Oxford, UK).
The art miscellany is organised in seven themes inspired by the essays of the Computer Games between Text and Practice online publication, edited in 2009 by Dario Compagno and Patrick J. Coppock from the Associazione Italiana di Studi Semiotici. The themes are conveyed using works of art that have been selected internationally and across various media: photography, video and video games.
By exposing a wide range of semiotic interrogations and artistic assertions, the miscellany wants to uncover the ambiguous interdependence that exists between our everyday cultural reality and the rhetoric manifesting itself in video games. We attend at what seems to be an aggregation of the two realms, and the viewers of the online exhibition will need to make up their own minds on what still characterizes both. Do video games get closer to our perception of reality, or is our perception of reality getting closer to video games?
Also, please check the Semiotics of Video Games facebook group, initially created for this project. The group is all about the production of meaning in video games: how does it work, what is the message, how does it relate to our everyday cultural reality?
Participants
Online exhibition curated by Christophe Bruchansky and Mathias Jansson, from the essays Computer Games between Text and Practice, edited by Dario Compagno and Patrick J. Coppock with whom we collaborated on this project.
Christophe Bruchansky, curator of the online exhibition.
Dario Compagno (Italy) is Ph.D. in Semiotics at the University of Siena.
Patrick J. Coppock (Italy) is adjunct professor of philosophy and theory of languages at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, and founding member of the international gamephilosophy.org network.
Gabriele Ferri is a PhD student in Semiotics at the University of Bologna, Italy.
Mathias Jansson (Sweden) is an art critic, cultural journalist and web editor.
