Gaoyuan Chen
FCIPC，Film Game Performance ，2021-11
I organised an offline racing gaming competition in the panoramic map of my mobile map app. Players will control the movement of the "map car" by tapping the arrow keys on the screen in the panoramic map of the map app, and constantly break the limits of hand speed and internet speed to find the fastest way to victory.
I'm a bit of a nerd, I like to experience reality in the virtual, I used to fool around in panoramic maps when I was in junior high school, and I have a special affection for it.
Later on, I also saw some map-related works that I liked, such as a work called "Map Hacker" by German artist Simon Weckert, who pushed a cart loaded with 99 mobile phones to walk in the middle of the road, with all of them having Google Maps turned on, and succeeded in causing a virtual traffic jam.
Maps are a kind of abstract record of the objective world for human beings. Maps largely determine the way the world looks in our mind, and we can't live our daily life without interacting with maps, such as taking a taxi, renting an apartment, or swiping tinder, and the differences in maps caused by the power of mapping are constantly affecting the way we interact with the world.
So I'm going to create another video work about maps. The panoramic view of the mapping software is from the camera on the roof of the car, so it's hard not to think of a third-person racing game, and the way I click on the arrows to switch between images and move around also reminds me of the old game Mysterious Island.
A lot of people use panoramic maps to just look at the map, without feeling like they're in a car and operating it through the streets, so could I treat it like a game and host a gaming session? So I actually hosted a game offline, and in post produced this highly dystopian short film that mimics the style of live TV.
The film may not be intuitively "expressive" when viewed on its own, but when combined with the social environment of the time, which was often controlled by the government, it has a different feel.
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The film has been selected for the Experimental section of the 2022 "Hishorts! Flim Festival”
I started by posting an entry on my social media platforms to recruit "drivers". Participants had to use the Street View function in the Baidu Maps app to drive and record their own screens.
The competition was completely real for the drivers, and I didn't have a script or lines in advance. Afterwards, I edited these real images into this short film with commentary. It can be said that this work is a documentary, a pseudo-documentary and an event.
