About Gaming the Bonaventure

Twenty-five years ago geographer Edward Soja published Postmodern Geographies, a bold assertion of the spatial turn in geography. He argued that "it all comes together in Los Angeles." Soja claimed that global economic trends, the internationalization of finance and human resources of "late capitalism," had combined to produce downtown L.A. in its own image—a fragmented, segregated, defended, privatized space facing inwards, turning its back on the streets and diverse peoples of the urban area. In addition to Soja, Mike Davis and Fred Jameson published contemporary interventions into debates about American cities, capitalism and postmodernism. Their work shaped significant academic debates around architecture and the organization of space in the 1990s. For these writers, L.A.'s Westin Bonaventure Hotel, built between 1974 and 1976, was "a concentrated representation of the restructured spatiality of the late capitalist city" (Soja). Seeing the Bonaventure as carceral, dislocating, confusing and demanding submission to an unseen authority, Jameson, Davis and Soja each made of the hotel a nightmarish, yet theoretically seductive, icon of a dehumanizing postmodernity. 

Gaming the Bonaventure re-imagines the meanings of the Bonaventure Hotel. Using this foundational scholarship and contemporary photographs of the hotel as a jumping off point, Gaming the Bonaventure engages in a playful exploration of the hotel and its environs. The game stages a real-time exploration of the Bonaventure, confronting the architectural and structural aspects of the hotel so roundly criticized in the literature of the 1990s and revisiting the politics of dislocation and disorientation in the present as a gaming strategy. Gaming the Bonaventure suggests that enacting transgressive flanerie, producing speculative geography, or otherwise "gaming" a space, engages profoundly with the dialectics of pleasure and pain at the heart of capitalism (early and late), and shows how the Westin Bonaventure in downtown L.A. is a pivotal site for analyzing "the fun and the fury" where urban studies and game studies intersect. 

Credits:

Aubrey Anable teaches digital media and game studies at the University of Toronto. She is currently working on a book about video games and affect. Playing With Feelings engages with game studies, digital media studies, and theories of affect to provide an account of how video games compel us to play and how they constitute a contemporary structure of feeling emerging from and alongside the last sixty-plus years of computerized living. Anable’s articles have appeared in the journals Afterimage, Television & New Media, Mediascape, Ada, and Social Text Blog. She has also contributed to the collection Game On, Hollywood! Essays on the Intersection of Video Games and Cinema (McFarland, 2013) as well as The Encyclopedia of Video Games (Greenwood, 2012). Her essay on mobile gaming and the contemporary rhythms and measurement of labor and leisure is included in Contemporalities: Keywords for the Present (forthcoming, NYU Press).

Art Blake is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Ryerson University, Toronto, and Faculty Lead on the "CanadianCity" university-community initiative in the Faculty of Arts. He received his B.A. in American Studies from the University of Sussex and his Ph.D. in History from American University, Washington, D.C. Blake specializes in U.S. 20th-century urban and cultural history and sound studies. Originally Angela M. Blake, he transitioned in 2011 and is now Art M. Blake. His first book, How New York Became American, 1890-1924 (2006) examined the place of New York City in the American national imagination in the first two decades of the 20th century and the role of the tourist industry in remaking the city’s image. Blake is currently completing a book project, Talk To Me: Culture and Politics of the Heard Voice in Postwar America, examining the histories of gendered, racialized and digitized voices and the technologies through which they were communicated. Recent publications related to this project include “An Audible Sense of Order: Race, Fear, and CB Radio on Los Angeles Freeways in the 1970s,” in Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, eds. David Suisman and Susan Strasser (2009) and "Audible Citizenship and Audiomobility: Race, Technology and CB Radio," American Quarterly, 63:3, 2011. Blake's research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Smithsonian Institution, Harvard University, the Library of Congress, and most recently by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. Blake's new research combines games studies and urban studies.

Erik Knutzen is an avid tinkerer, vegetable gardener, beekeeper and backyard poultry wrangler. He is the co-author, with his wife, Kelly Coyne, of The Urban Homestead (Process Media, 2008) and Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post Consumer World (Rodale, 2011). They also maintain the blog Root Simple, in which they use the rubric of “urban homesteading” to advocate for creative interventions into the landscape of Los Angeles, reclaiming curbsides, medians, bicycle lanes, and disused land in the service of local communities. Knutzen was one of the founding members of PeopleMover, a creative intervention into discourses around public transportation in Southern California in the 1990s. He remains active in issues of transportation in Los Angeles, lobbying for increased use of alternative modes of transportation, and organizing walking and bicycling tours that feature alternate histories of the city.

Nic Sammond is an Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator in the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto and author of Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 (Duke 2005). He has published widely on media and social practice, including “Walt Disney’s Dumbo: Governing Individualism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature (Oxford 2011), “Hidden, or Fear of a Black Planet.” Jump Cut 52 (Summer 2010), “Gentlemen, Please Be Seated: Racial Masquerade and Sadomasochism in 1930s Animation.” in Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), and “The Writing on the Wall: Learning and Teaching Graffiti,” with Anna Creadick. Transformations, forthcoming. His next book is Biting the Invisible Hand: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Industrialization of American Animation (Duke, in press). He is currently working on two projects that involve a critical intervention into media-archaeological conceptions of the hive and the swarm. One, examines an outbreak of intermedial mass conversion disorder amongst teen-aged women in LeRoy, New York. The other engages with incidents, such as those in Steubenville, Ohio and Maryville, Missouri, in which social media were used to perpetrate and celebrate sexual assaults, then subsequently mobilized in a quest for popular justice in those cases.