Beyond the Fractured Boundary is an interactive site-based game that explores the fissures between digital and physical spaces. Against a backdrop of accelerated urbanization and fragmentation, it reexamines urban identity and the privatization of space. Players navigate a fractured city, redefining their sense of place and self.
Set in an era where physical space has lost its meaning and virtual spaces are increasingly fragmented, players collect fragments of the city, uncover symbols and desires, and experience the paradox of freedom and control in virtual realms. The game visualizes the changes in intangible spaces and the privatization of the physical, portraying traces of physical spaces alongside the fragmentation of societal structures.
Ultimately, it encourages players to reflect on their real-world position and identity, questioning power, bias, ideals, and reality. Despite its appearance of endless expansion, Beyond the Fractured Boundary challenges players to confront the flattening and fragmentation of their surroundings.
SQUARE OF REMEMBRANCE
In the game, the square is first map set as a place where fragments are gathered to restore a crumbling space. The fragments are traces that once held important memories, and the process of touching, restoring, and interacting with them is an attempt to slow down the passage of time, to go beyond mere reminiscences of the past, and to overcome the contemporary temporal crisis. The fragments are not just objects or data; they also contain power and political context. At the same time, they reflect today’s reality where culture is consumed like a museum collection, showing the ruins and artefacts left behind when rituals and symbols disappear.
The goal is for players to reflect on their own fragmented selves, and in doing so, to feel both uncomfortable and comforted in a space where ritualistic beliefs have collapsed.
Street of Fragments
This map of Città della Pieve, with its narrow alleys, explores the digital transformation of spatial textures through pixel-level decomposition and recombination. Surfaces, distorted in the digital realm, exist only as images, embodying desire akin to Anastasia in Invisible Cities.As development erases the past, the city becomes purely functional, and streets, once spaces of connection and life, gradually vanish. This work examines the disappearance of these vital spaces, reflecting on the loss of continuity and dwelling in the modern era.
Forgotten Quarter
Beneath the city lies a forgotten underground world, where players encounter traces of memory and confront the realities of class, rediscovering the shifting meanings of public and private spaces. Underground spaces, once shelters, residences, or labor sites, have transformed into symbols of luxury, reflecting changing social dynamics.
As public spaces disappear and private spaces are isolated by market logic, the city’s surface may seem glamorous, but its core reveals a web of chaos sustaining its existence. These underground layers serve as vital clues, exposing the fragmentation and inequalities produced by urbanization and redevelopment.
THE FORTRESS
Città della Pieve, historically fortified, embodies its essence in the Rocca dei Perugini. Once a defensive stronghold for Perugian soldiers, now a tourist site, the fortress symbolizes the tension between the “visible and invisible,” reminiscent of the cities in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Calvino merges the city’s memories with its structures, transforming them into vessels of narrative. The Rocca’s walls, like Zaira in Invisible Cities, hold layers of time, reflecting the intertwining of human presence and space, as in Calvino’s Fedra, where stories and marks shape the terrain. “The city, through its own changes, merely repeats hidden symbols to sustain itself, reminding us that we are simply remembering the memory of the city.”.
The Garden of Ruins
This place serves as the final map where the city’s nature has been restored, a process that confirms the reproduced reality. Oratory of Santa Maria dei Bianchi’s Adorazione dei Magisy symbolizes past glory, while the Garden of Ruins presents the possibility of recovery and reconstruction, looking toward the present and future. At the same time, just as cultural objects in a capitalist society lose their power when there is no longer a fresh perspective to view them, the goal is to free ourselves from the “fatal abstractions” that created the “ideologies of the past” through a process that liberates the mediators within the painting.