THE MIGRANTS

2018

Video game

Co-created by Santiago Arcila

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The Migrants is a video game based on a real bird-migration history from 2014. The Golden Warbler birds faced adverse conditions due to global warming that generated storms on the coasts of Florida, which were their main destination. This caused the birds to alter their migratory routes, being forced to explore an alternative way through Mexico and Central America until arriving in Colombia.

 

The video game recovers the Amerindian technological gesture of adopting the point of view of the animal. The prosthesis is the control of the main character of the game, who must overcome obstacles by detecting magnetic fields and seeds with infrared vision. The game problematizes Umwelt relations with the technological and political activities that pollute the environment: walls, electric fences, communication antennas and pollution.

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Understanding the implications of migration has to do with understanding that the bird, in its journey, is a seed disperser, a forest weaver. The bird recovers and feeds ecological niches. This Umwelt serves as a contrast to think about the complexity of migrations and massive displacements in the human sphere, which make the news and whose motives involve climatic, industrial, political and technical causes of the contemporary form, but also are displacements in which cultural and communal fabrics are produced.

 

Rethinking the relationships between technology, animal worlds and culture through art generates the possibility of imagining new scenarios and alternative atmospheres where biodiversity as a production of difference from nature recovers its power in a gesture of resistance to our current global scenario.

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Special thanks to: Asher Remy-Toledo, Hyphen Hub and Sofía Rojas