An Innovative Digital Environment Based on Research with Elements of Immersive Aesthetics and Serious Gaming

ended

ImGame will be an innovative digital environment that interweaves the fields of serious gaming and immersive aesthetics. It will serve as a dissemination tool to interactively demonstrate the research results concerning the phenomenon of immersiveness in contemporary art. Globally, there are almost no playful and educational media that would teach the history of contemporary art, inform about its antecedents, its conceptual background, and the network of related ideas. ImGame invites the user to dive into the immersive stylistics used in new media art and other types of modern culture. It will help build a new and currently underrepresented category of serious games that explains the rich intertextual context of digital artefacts today. The objective of the project is to develop a new genre of gaming in the crosscut of serious and art games that documents the cultural capital of contemporary aesthetics, especially focusing on the young artists’ work in the three partner states – Latvia, Hungary, and Greece. As well as, the objective is to transfer knowledge about contemporary artistic thought to the public not just to the connoisseurs of art. The project will develop new technological knowledge (node-based shader creation workflow for A-Frame) and thus offer the possibility to students to create multi-platform interactive experiences without the need for them to have programming skills. The main expected result is an increased knowledge transfer between the sector of artistic research and serious gaming. The planned activities are research into the phenomenon of immersiveness, the creation of the prototype and its dissemination. There are eight persons working in the project including artists, researchers, and managers. The project continues to develop the prototype of game designed through a post-doctoral project of Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences. Next to the prototype of ImGame, a scientific article will be published to present the results of the project.