Society. Spaces. Screens
Abstract
What is walking if not a contemplative action that can lead us to reflect on, test and transgress boundaries, even those separating physical and virtual spaces? Photography has in the last few decades seen rapid technological changes, fostered in part by the arrival of new digital imaging technologies. Over the past fifteen years alone, photographic media, images, tools and techniques have become a quintessential part of contemporary videogaming as a hybrid form of image-making; in addition to its application and use as a graphical style or aesthetic. This provides players with ways to explore and visually express their experiences of game worlds and environments, mirroring how photography has been used historically and is still used today. Can remediations and re-interpretations of photographies in videogames shed light on how we interact with different environments and spaces? Can ways we interact with virtual environments using photographies allow us to reflect on how we engage with the medium itself? I propose an altered and condensed version of a thesis I submitted in 2023 as part of my Master of Arts at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Department of Art and Media. This paper focuses on how the intentional act of walking in virtual environments in combination with a photography-based artistic or creative practice can provide different perspectives on the relationship between space and surface. In this paper, I explore how material, cultural and historical boundaries between media and art merge through the experience of walking in both physical landscapes and virtual game environments. Using my long-term project Virtual Lands, recent videogames and other artistic practices as examples, I explore how the hybrid form of “in-game photography”, “game photography”, “virtual photography” or “screenshot photography” challenges the separation of the virtual, the physical and the real and calls for a re-examining of post-photographic discourse.
Rebecca Sandelin is an artist-photographer and freelance scholar in photography and visual culture. She currently holds a Bachelor of Arts in Photography, a Master of Letters in History of Photography and a Master of Arts in Photography. Her educational background and sustained passion for the photographic medium has led to a continual development of a holistic understanding of photography as a creative and artistic practice, its many historical and contemporary contexts and its relationship to and with art, media and visual culture.