Towards a Ludic reading of Contemporary Urban Public Domains: Mapping & Interpreting Hong Kong protests' interventions as Urban Circles of Play

2019年持续一年的抗议活动在香港公共领域催生了令人着迷的颠覆性艺术，为建筑师提供了难得的机会，将城市景观解构和重新解释为游戏空间。随着香港居民争先恐后地在这座城市寻找新的反霸权表达形式，一种有趣的颠覆性街头干预的类型迅速出现，并淹没了每条街道的角落。它们不受控制的扩散部分归因于政府令人反感的对言论自由的压制，部分归因于当代数字时代大规模视觉复制的便利。香港的公众视觉境界变成了一个分散的表达空间。更准确地说，它已经变成了一个巨大的游乐场，在原本平淡无奇的街道立面或交通立交上，戏剧性的挪用。在公共视觉领域的转变中，可以看到一种滑稽的游戏性，让人想起视频游戏的逻辑、感知模式、视觉文化和讲故事的手段。嬉戏的抗议文物挑战现有的城市观看、公共表演和社会互动模式，寻求新的自由表达方式。他们暂时创造了Johan Huizinga所说的魔术游戏圈(Huizinga，1998)，在那里，城市压迫性的机械发条被暂停，取而代之的是颠覆性的狂欢式社会习俗，使政治言论自由和分歧再次成为可能。任何在城市游戏化碎片附近的人都会暂时受到一套改变了的城市游戏规则的影响。在某种程度上，2019年的反引渡抗议活动不仅是香港人的一次政治觉醒，也是一场城市视觉空间表达、消费和竞争模式的革命，带来了城市景观新的音乐和戏剧潜力。以香港游戏化的抗议活动和他们的卢迪式干预为出发点，我打算根据游戏和数字游戏的理论，对香港进行建筑/城市解读。其目的是进行一项结构化的研究，研究玩耍的抗议干预如何暂停城市的时间性和空间性，将城市重塑为玩耍表达、城市戏剧和表演的新颖手段的场所。该项目还试图测试视频游戏媒体作为空间和城市分析工具的作用。通过视频游戏实时模拟选择、编写游戏规则和可视化环境的能力，我假设视频游戏媒介可以提供另一种有效的手段来理解、解构和捕捉城市抗议活动的空间和时间维度。它将让我们以不同的视角看待城市，而不是以旧的基于时间的电影媒介。通过在视频游戏引擎上构建2019年抗议活动的模拟，我计划评估这样的假设，并比较其中的差异。这项研究涉及通过媒体考古、档案研究和目击者采访恢复抗议图像、新闻片段和证词，以尽可能准确地重建抗议场景。利用虚拟现实/游戏媒介作为城市测绘和空间分析的实验方法，香港历史悠久的抗议景观将被探索为空间竞争、政治抵抗和自由表达的“游乐场”。在更广泛的历史文化保护、人权倡导和对抗香港现代虚荣篝火的范围内，这项研究努力为记录香港的民主斗争和记录警察暴行做出贡献。

A year of sustained protests in 2019 has given birth to a mesmerizing blossom of subversive arts in the public realm of Hong Kong, offering rare opportunities for architects to deconstruct and reinterpret cityscapes as spaces of play. A typology of playful subversive street interventions rapidly populated and overwhelmed every street's corner, as residents of Hong Kong scramble to find new forms of anti-hegemonic expressions in the city. Their uncontrolled proliferation owes partly to the government's repugnant suppression of freedom of speech and partly to the ease of mass visual reproductions in the contemporary digital age. The public visual realm of Hong Kong is transformed into a decentralized space for expression. More precisely, it has turned into a mega playground for playful theatrical appropriations of otherwise mundane street facades or transit interchanges. A comical playfulness, reminiscent of videogame logics, perceptions patterns, visual cultures and means of storytelling can be discerned in the transformation of the public visual realm. Playful protests artifacts challenge existing urban modes of spectatorship, public performance and social interactions to seek new methods of free expression. They create temporarily, what Johan Huizinga called Magic Circles of Play (Huizinga, 1998), where the oppressive mechanistic clockwork of the city is suspended and replaced by subversive carnivalesque social conventions that make free political expression and dissension once again possible. Anyone within the proximity of gamified fragments of the city is subjected temporally to an altered set of urban game rules. In a way, the 2019 anti-extradition protest is not only a political awakening for the people of Hong Kong but also a revolution in urban modes of visual-spatial expressions, consumptions, and contestations that brought out new ludic and theatrical potentials of the cityscape. Using Hong Kong's gamified protests and their ludic interventions as a departure point, I intend to formulate an architectural/urban interpretation of Hong Kong, based on a theory of play and digital gaming. The intent is to conduct a structured study on how playful protest interventions suspend urban temporality and spatiality to reinvent the city into sites for novelmeans of playful expression, urban theatrics, and performances. The project also seeks to test the video game medium as a tool for spatial and urban analysis. With the videogame capability to simulate choices, script game rules and visualize environments in real-time, I hypothesize that the video game medium could provide an alternate and effective means of understanding, deconstructing and capturing urban protest's spatial and temporal dimensions. It would allow us to see cities in different light to the older time-based medium of film. By building a simulacrum of the 2019 protest on a videogame engine, I plan to evaluate such a hypothesize and compare the differences. The research involves recovering protest images, news footage and testimonies through media archaeology, archival studies and witness interviews, to reconstruct scenarios of protests as accurately as possible. Using the virtual reality/game medium as an experimental method of urban mapping and spatial analysis, the historic Hong Kong protest-scape would be probed as a "playground" for spatial contestation, political resistance and free expressions. In the wider scope of history and culture preservation, human rights advocacy and countering the city's modern Bonfire of the vanities, the research endeavours to contribute to the archival of Hong Kong's pro-democracy struggles and documenting police brutalities.