Some supplementary thoughts and info on the project

The Folded in online video game is a project about the notion of borders.

And borders could be seen as ''the rank and score'' of the competitions that take place inside a gamespace. At the first place, the Folded-in competition is happening in Youtube. Youtube is already a gamespace but a hidden one. Hidden because although it is a cazino and a gambling space it presents itself as a television and keeps the rules of the game for itself . This happens in the same way that in real life the global economy system presents itself as an ''open market'' but it is nothing more than a strictly controlled Las Vegas area.

Hidden because although it is a sports' arena that aims to define the limits of the human by offering a sense or image of wholeness, -as if that was a physical idea- neglects the fact that no honest personal, individual art or act, could repeat that sense or that idea.

(It would be like if the International Olympic Committee was announcing that every human on the planet can be a world champion and moreover organise Olympic games by itself).

It was said that it is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.

But the notion of the gamespace and the role of the game elements could possibly be repeated.

And that's why we are designing the Folded-in 3D online video game. To render visible what is doomed to be unexpected.

In the Folded-in online video game the users/players are taking the role of the pilot and are asked to demarcate and control their own territory. Precisely, they are asked to compete, to trace but also to map a territory and as the competition will grow to re-trace and to re-map again and again. Please note that tracing and mapping could be two completely different things.

G.Deleuze put it clearly enough by saying that: ''The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged ''competence''.

And please note as well, that the players compete one another all the time, but barely think of a possibility to compete against the gamespace which hosts and channels their competition itself.

What is the role of art and artists' work in that game?

What is the role of art in a usual commercial video game?

McKenzie Wark a propos of a very popular videogame the Grand Theft Auto (Vice City) says that: ''Art provides the images and stories for mediating between the gamer and gamespace.[..] Art is now in the service of the game.[..]

Art expands the reach of the game to imaginary games played in a purely digital realm, anywhere and everywhere, on every desktop and cellphone.''

The same description could go for Youtube. Youtube appears more and more as a huge art screening.

There is no need to analyse categories. Video art, animation art, painting, sculpture, cinema, everything goes. Youtube is a Vice City and Vice City's gamespace.

Since there is a certainty of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws which govern commercial circulation and democratic communication, the empire of Youtube (or Myspace or Facebook or..) no longer censors anything. Certainly, there are exceptions of censorship, that are mostly based on the hypocritical interpretation of what stands as ''mature content''.

But this is nothing else than a safety valve that guarantees the free data flow inside the system.

Prosumers, in other words the users of social spaces as Youtube, have the right to provide art, content and narratives in the ''arena''. Then, the arena assures the competition, which in its turn provides ''the rank and score'' that is the game.

But as Mark Lombardi says on this case: ''all art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy''.

Folded-in project uses Youtube videos that refer to conflicts and wars; works, stories and narratives that have the potential for tracing and mapping; videos that want to reveal the rules that form the gamespace and at the same time to act in open and catalytic on the gameplay.

Through the tracing and mapping process there will be warplane dogfights and players might run out of ammunition or their warplanes can be damaged. This is where the videos made by artists come to play their role. Their video can work as counterbalance factors and therefore add stamina or missiles (depends on the player choise) to the warplane.