BIOGAME. Here and now: The Anthropocene

BIOGAME. Here and Now: The Anthropocene

BIOGAME. Here and Now: The Anthropocene is a card game that takes the form of an experimental artistic device, nourished by speculative-possible thinking and radical imagination. The game invites us to reflect and imagine concrete actions in response to the environmental challenges faced by ecosystems, integrating their materiality, inhabitants, and surroundings on a horizontal plane, and proposing interdisciplinarity as a key factor in critical and collective knowledge.

Its main objective is to generate a critical and dialogical exercise that allows us to reconfigure our contemporary imaginaries, to recognize and embrace the diverse powers, vitalities, affections, and agencies of nature and their direct relationships with human beings.

This game seeks to become a tool for thought, one that nurtures the idea that everything that unfolds in the world can be understood as a form of play. This metaphysical conclusion does not intend to trivialize the depth of natural processes; rather, it arises from the conviction that play can be understood as a cosmic event, whose praxis is built upon multiple dimensions: the transformative potential of actions and the experiential-sensorial nature of the cycles of life, intertwined with chance and spontaneity.

In this sense, the project embraces play as an intrinsic physiological phenomenon of the world. It is through this reconstruction of the sensible that we aim to act upon things, living beings, and, above all, upon other humans. Nature and culture are symbiotically forged in infinite ways of constructing both mind and world. Yet, it becomes increasingly urgent to weave new ways of dwelling, coexisting, and collaborating—ways that articulate practices thought with and for nature and the environment, their care, and above all, their revitalization.

Thus, BIOGAME is a card game that brings together a series of concepts, materials, visualities, and exploratory practices that embrace the interdisciplinary and undisciplined intersection of electronic arts, philosophy, ecology, speculative storytelling, illustration, plants, animals, minerals, fungi, territories, and environmental phenomena. It seeks to challenge human exceptionalism, the construction of knowledge about the world, and our contemporary reality.

The game invites the player-reader to build and imagine new spaces of intimacy and reflection among humans, other beings, and terrestrial materialities, from an ecology of knowledges.

Project authors: Ana Laura Cantera, Gabriela Munguía, Laura Palavecino, Guadalupe Chávez, Paloma Márquez.Collaborators: Mariela Yeregui, Hervé Jolly.Texts: Mariela Yeregui, Alejandro Ponce de León, and Hervé Jolly.

Supported by:Master’s Program in Technology and Aesthetics of Electronic Arts (National University of Tres de Febrero),UNTREF Research and Development Office,INNOVART Program – France-Argentina Bilateral Program for Art and Innovation,PIESCI – Program for the Internationalization of Higher Education and International Cooperation (Ministry of Education of Argentina),and the École Européenne Supérieure de l'Image in Poitiers, France.