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

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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.