::surface ::project description

SCALPING TERRAMOTTO presents simultaneously both a video documentary-narrative and an interactive gaming environment.

Video Docu-Narrative: Compositing Place is in movie format shot on video and edited together with other digital elements such as animation, text and sound. This is designed to be screened as SVHS.

Interactive Gaming Environment: half-Place interactively allows the viewer to run around a 3D environment constructed with a gaming level-editor. This requires several networked PC's, each with dedicated 3D graphics card.

video docu-narrative: compositing Place
 

The process of creating a map can be loosely divided into:
gathering and application of surfaces;
modelling of objects;
& playing the environment.

All parts of the process can be read as having a significant transformative impact on the semiotics of place. However, this project focuses on the gathering of surfaces from the real world, and their application onto modelled objects within the virtual environment.

Viewed on video, a narrative is played out by documenting the activities of level editor Chad Chatterton in his construction of 3D virtual 'places', designed for use as gaming maps.

The production of place within the virtual is inherent to the Construction of that environment, by Chad, as well as gameplay within the finished map.This means that the processes and motivations of Chad gathering surfaces from the real world, and re-compositing them within a virtual simulation of that space, is just as much an act of territorialization as all the bloody events which that environment will eventually host.

Chad meticulously photographs real-world surfaces such as stonewalls, pipes, grass and buildings. He processes the photographs, scans them into his home-PC, and re-places these 'texture maps', (literally peeled free from a structuralist real-world thoroughly codified), onto modelled objects simulating the real-world place just visited. Spliced with this is footage which both records and mimics the kinetics of Chad's body as he produces places by actively traversing them.
We compare:
[i] Chad both wandering in anticipation and frenetically playing game within a gaming map of his own making; with,
[ii] Chad rushing across the surface of the real-world on his scooter, scalping textures from site to site.
interactive gaming environment: half-Place
 

Alongside the video a map created by level editor Chad Chatterton interactively allows the viewer/player to roam around within it.

Eerily however, the environment is not yet complete: sounds, textures, and control over the kinetics of your virtual body, are missing. Gulfs of digital grey interrupt pockets of richly fleshed-out areas - our line-of-sight reveals the environment in the process of having its significations assigned. An apprehensive and rarely seen half-Place - we can compare the workings of place internally by moving from geometric substrate to referential surface, sensorial vacuum to activated world. We can see bare structure where a texture should be positioned next, hear the sharp silence of voids where our body no longer has sonic impact on the environment. This is how a place might be the circular collaboration of environmental elements in performance with the player.

The viewer/player, (without weapons and therefore prior to gameplay), also encounters other entities populating the environment. Some of these derive their personality from the gaming engine's own Artificial Intelligence, but some could be other viewer's also strolling through the map.