Pub Date : 2023-12-19DOI: 10.30687/mag/2724-3923/2023/02/003
Paolo Berti
The essay aims to propose the diagrammatic structure of the megadungeon as a metaphor to represent the complexity, interconnectedness, and multi-layered nature of the current media scenario, including its active branches such as new media art and Digital Humanities. The reference is drawn from the concept of the dungeon, which has been successfully introduced into the realm of role-playing games since the 1970s. Conventionally, a dungeon refers to a complex, multi-level maze of corridors, tunnels, rooms, and hidden chambers. The nature of dungeons is to be theoretically infinite floor plans that game designers have learned to produce algorithmically: when they cross a certain size threshold, they are known as megadungeons. In this article, I propose the megadungeon as a productive topological model that intersects different sociotechnical aspects of digital media, drawing on shared characteristics such as a layered structure, labyrinthine exploration, game-derived grammar, and an affinity with computational domain. Additionally, the essay proposes comparisons with similar representation models that challenge outdated cartographic metaphors and addresses specific connections between new media and the concepts of verticality and stratification
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Pub Date : 2023-12-19DOI: 10.30687/mag/2724-3923/2023/02/002
Asa Roast
The dungeon and megadungeon are imagined spaces of a complex and interconnected network that emerged in fantasy tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) from the 1970s. As a space distinctive to early TTRPGs it is characterised by asymmetry between the dungeon as an object of design, and the dungeon as a practice of play. The discourse of games manuals, independent publications and blogs emerging from the TTRPG scene tracks the origins and evolution of these procedural and labyrinthine spaces, and the distinct spatiality of the megadungeon as a geographical object. The space of the megadungeon can be mapped onto a Lefebvrian triad of spatial production: it exists as a representation of space produced by a dungeon master or algorithmic generation that forms an infrastructure of play; it exists as a spatial practice emerging out of the unique experience of players traversing the megadungeon; and it forms a space of representation by seeking to imagine the megadungeon as a living fictional world, intersecting with the assumptions about spatial norms and relations originating in tropes of fantasy fiction. Surveying these trends in conversation with recent insights from human geography illustrates the distinct spatiality of the megadungeon that is derived from its origins in TTRPG play. This brings forward important questions for the utility of the megadungeon as a metaphor for digital media ecologies, and asks whether the metaphor could be extended to enrich conceptual debates in human geography.
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Pub Date : 2023-12-19DOI: 10.30687/mag/2724-3923/2023/02/007
Rebekah Rhodes
Over 500 years after it was created, Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights continues to intrigue viewers. It has inspired contemporary artwork across diverse media including experimental film, digital animation and video games, as well as providing stimuli for curators, critics and collectors. This article maps present-day approaches to The Garden of Earthly Delights and links the enduring appeal of this painting to its interactive, multi-layered structure in which countless narrative vignettes play out simultaneously. Contemporary artworks that reference Bosch’s triptych are examined, with a special focus on digital creations by SMACK, Miao Xiaochun, Michael Bielicky and Kamila B. Richter. The exhibition The Garden of Earthly Delights Through the Artworks of Colección SOLO is also analyzed to illustrate how an understanding of Bosch’s work as interactive art informed the exhibition discourse, publication and architecture.
希罗尼穆斯-博斯（Hieronymus Bosch）的《世外桃源》问世 500 多年后，仍然吸引着观众。它启发了包括实验电影、数字动画和视频游戏在内的各种媒体的当代艺术作品，也为策展人、评论家和收藏家提供了灵感。这篇文章描绘了当今对《世外桃源》的研究方法，并将这幅画的持久魅力与其互动式、多层次的结构联系起来，在这种结构中，无数的叙事小故事同时上演。文章对参考博世三联画的当代艺术作品进行了研究，并特别关注了 SMACK、缪晓春、迈克尔-比利奇和卡米拉-B-里希特的数字创作。此外，还分析了 "通过 SOLO 美术馆的艺术作品看世外桃源 "展览，以说明对博世作品作为互动艺术的理解是如何影响展览的论述、出版和建筑的。
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Pub Date : 2023-12-19DOI: 10.30687/mag/2724-3923/2023/02/004
G. de Seta
Counter commonplace associations with superficial mediation and networked flatness, the digital seems to have its own peculiar depths, which range from the infrastructural (deep sea cables, deep packet inspection, crawl depth) to the metaphorical (Deep Web, deep learning, deepfakes). This article reviews recent discussions of digital depth and argues that this concept is central to understanding multiple aspects of digital media ranging from folk theorizations to technical expertise. What is digital depth? What is deep about digital media? How does this depth interface with volumes and scales beyond the digital? Through this effort, depth emerges as an underlying feature of deeply mediatized societies.
{"title":"Digital Depth: A Volumetric Speculation","authors":"G. de Seta","doi":"10.30687/mag/2724-3923/2023/02/004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30687/mag/2724-3923/2023/02/004","url":null,"abstract":"Counter commonplace associations with superficial mediation and networked flatness, the digital seems to have its own peculiar depths, which range from the infrastructural (deep sea cables, deep packet inspection, crawl depth) to the metaphorical (Deep Web, deep learning, deepfakes). This article reviews recent discussions of digital depth and argues that this concept is central to understanding multiple aspects of digital media ranging from folk theorizations to technical expertise. What is digital depth? What is deep about digital media? How does this depth interface with volumes and scales beyond the digital? Through this effort, depth emerges as an underlying feature of deeply mediatized societies.","PeriodicalId":506971,"journal":{"name":"MEGADUNGEON","volume":"84 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139172664","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-19DOI: 10.30687/mag/2724-3923/2023/02/005
Nicolas Nova
Relying on a comparison between the complex spatial organization of our current digital ecosystem and the ones from dungeons in role-playing games, this article analyzes the multiple entities that populate our computers, smartphones and video game consoles. Trolls, bugs, worms, conversational AI agents, NPCs, daemons, ghosts, Trojan horses and others are presented and discussed with a focus on their different degree of agency, ranging from human-controlled to having a certain degree of autonomy. By addressing how we coexist with such beings, this paper contributes to the nascent field of digital folklore.
{"title":"Mapping Our Digital Menagerie: A Monster Manual for the Megadungeon","authors":"Nicolas Nova","doi":"10.30687/mag/2724-3923/2023/02/005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30687/mag/2724-3923/2023/02/005","url":null,"abstract":"Relying on a comparison between the complex spatial organization of our current digital ecosystem and the ones from dungeons in role-playing games, this article analyzes the multiple entities that populate our computers, smartphones and video game consoles. Trolls, bugs, worms, conversational AI agents, NPCs, daemons, ghosts, Trojan horses and others are presented and discussed with a focus on their different degree of agency, ranging from human-controlled to having a certain degree of autonomy. By addressing how we coexist with such beings, this paper contributes to the nascent field of digital folklore.","PeriodicalId":506971,"journal":{"name":"MEGADUNGEON","volume":"122 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139171748","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-19DOI: 10.30687/mag/2724-3923/2023/02/008
Carolina Fernández-Castrillo
Almost one century after Walter Benjamin’s dissertation on the value of the work of art under the impact of its technological reproduction on the roots of globalization and mass media society, the current research aims to provide some coordinates to approach the influence of AI co-creative processes in the artistic field. From a media archaeological approach, we will map the collaborative practices that emerge in the Generative Art landscape to understand the creative possibilities of interaction between humans and machine-driven artistic goals. By conceiving the Web 3.0 as an expansive megadungeon, we find an increasing number of projects based on participative dynamics where online communities join forces with AI decentralized artists to reshape the current state of the art. We will take as an example the Botto Project, a community-driven creator conceived by Mario Klingemann, a pioneer of AI artworks who employs machine learning methods to revolutionize the blockchain and crypto art market. This case study leads us to reconsider the (wo)man-machine co-creation as the base of the auratic experience of the work of art in the age of AI co-creativity.
沃尔特-本雅明（Walter Benjamin）在其论文中论述了艺术作品在技术复制对全球化和大众传媒社会根源的影响下的价值，时隔将近一个世纪，当前的研究旨在提供一些坐标，以接近人工智能共同创造过程在艺术领域的影响。从媒体考古学的角度出发，我们将绘制生成艺术景观中出现的合作实践，以了解人类与机器驱动的艺术目标之间互动的创造可能性。通过将 Web 3.0 视为一个广阔的巨型地下城，我们发现越来越多的项目以参与式动态为基础，在线社区与人工智能去中心化艺术家联手重塑艺术现状。我们将以Botto项目为例，这是一个由马里奥-克林格曼（Mario Klingemann）构想的社区驱动型创作者，他是人工智能艺术作品的先驱，采用机器学习方法彻底改变了区块链和加密艺术市场。这一案例研究引导我们重新考虑（人）机共创作为人工智能共创时代艺术作品灵光体验的基础。
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Pub Date : 2023-12-19DOI: 10.30687/mag/2724-3923/2023/02/006
Luigi Monteanni
This paper sheds light on the connections between musical undergrounds and the global emergence of ‘goblin mode’ as a political aesthetic. In March 2022 The Guardian published an article discussing the popularity of a new locution emerging on social media: ‘goblin mode’. Characterized by a 'complete lack of aesthetic' and vaguely pointing towards ‘the opposite of trying to better oneself’, ‘goblin mode’ was linked to embracing dishevelment, rejecting societal expectations, and giving in to the heavy consumption of junk food and digital content in reaction to the pandemic obsession for domestic and personal improvement.
{"title":"Year of the Goblin Tracing New Developments of Digital Folklore and Urban Modes of Living in Online Music Subcultures","authors":"Luigi Monteanni","doi":"10.30687/mag/2724-3923/2023/02/006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30687/mag/2724-3923/2023/02/006","url":null,"abstract":"This paper sheds light on the connections between musical undergrounds and the global emergence of ‘goblin mode’ as a political aesthetic. In March 2022 The Guardian published an article discussing the popularity of a new locution emerging on social media: ‘goblin mode’. Characterized by a 'complete lack of aesthetic' and vaguely pointing towards ‘the opposite of trying to better oneself’, ‘goblin mode’ was linked to embracing dishevelment, rejecting societal expectations, and giving in to the heavy consumption of junk food and digital content in reaction to the pandemic obsession for domestic and personal improvement.","PeriodicalId":506971,"journal":{"name":"MEGADUNGEON","volume":"156 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139172246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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