Angelos Floros
Research project: National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Production: Robotixlab, MakeBelieve
Presented: Polymechanon @ Allou Fun Park, Athens, 2008
Polymechanon was Greece's first technological amusement park — an interactive space for entertainment and learning, built on results from the Educational Technology Laboratory of the University of Athens, under Professor Chronis Kynigos.
Its premise is that visitors are invited to play, and in order to play they have to understand basic principles of technology; and that in order to win they have to cooperate, drawing — consciously and unconsciously — on mathematics, computer science, geography and physics. The exhibits belong to a family found in the Exploratorium in San Francisco, NEMO in Amsterdam and the Cité de l'Espace in Paris.
The research question underneath is narrower and more interesting: can gesture and bodily interaction carry meaning, or only commands? The work sets out to study the physical exploration of concepts and systems by moving inside an environment and acting on it — visitors handling both virtual and real objects, joysticks and push buttons among them, in order to reach a goal.
The Metro is a simulation of a railway network. Players change the orientation of junctions, and open or close bridges, in order to route their own team's vehicles through particular stations — and, at the same time, to prevent the other teams from routing theirs.
Which makes the game a small model of a shared infrastructure: a network nobody owns, where every move that helps one party constrains another, and where the only way through is negotiation.