The Digital is a Ruin: Digital Space, Geography and the End of the World

Using the case study of urban and ruin imaginaries in the virtual worlds of digital spatial media, this presentation examines the potentiality of digital space as both a conceptual term and increasingly prevalent shorthand for the perceived hybridity of digital and material experience. The focus on urban ruin engenders questions of visual representation and meaning making, the production of digital space, and the politics of encounter through play and imaginaries of the end of the city. Ruins in virtual worlds are navigable, computational, and representational forms, which, I argue can be understood as simultaneously masculine and normative (as in the practice of urban exploration), and open to radical potential and possibility (as in a Queer reading of the end of the world). In this reading, ruinous framings are a marker of fundamentally fragmented digital forms, understood against cultural contexts of chaos and disintegration and established discourses of urban and everyday life impacted by crisis and disaster. How does the multivalent spatiality and signification of ruin provide a useful inroad to the critique of emerging technologies and environments like video games, the ‘metaverse’, and augmented or mixed reality?

Here, I make the case that the emergence of spatial, navigable, and increasingly large-scale virtual worlds is a phenomenon that demands a reconfiguration of existing and emerging geographical thought. To understand the contemporary formation of digital spaces in virtual worlds - which I describe in terms of digitality and ruinality - it is necessary to expand key frames around space, place, and cities. Further, Walter Benjamin’s work on urban experience and modernity also enables the articulation of a relation between digital worlds, discourses of crisis and catastrophe, and the figuration of the ruin as a material and symbolic index of decline under capitalism. Finally, this presentation argues that the prevalence of ruined cities and imagined catastrophes in contemporary digital media is significant to the form and spatiality of digital worlds and cultures, providing considerable grounds for a critical interpretation of digital media as fundamentally spatial and geographical.

Speaker: Emma Fraser, UC Berkeley