Manfredo Tafuri was an Italian architectural historian known for his critical analysis of architecture and its role in society. As a Marxist, Tafuri emphasized the importance of understanding the historical and social context of architecture in his writings, and he often focused on the relationship between architecture and power. Thinking broadly about how ideas, values, and methods are passed down through the generations, he invoked the “genealogical” relationship between history and historian in his book The Sphere and the Labyrinth—
[...] to link the problem of history with the rediscovery of mythical "origins" presupposes an outcome totally rooted in nineteenth-century positivism. In posing the problem of an "origin," we presuppose the discovery of a final point of arrival: a destination point that explains everything, that causes a given "truth," a primary value, to burst forth from the encounter with its originary ancestor. Against such an infantile desire to "find the murderer," Michel Foucault has already counterposed a history that can be formulated as genealogy: "Genealogy does not oppose itself to history as the lofty and profound gaze of the philosopher might compare to the mole-like perspective of the scholar; on the contrary, it rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significance and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for ‘origins’.”
(Tafuri 1987)
As a neophyte reader of theory, a sort of double meaning has harmonized in my mind while reading about a genealogy of ideas and a genealogy of humanity— the intertwined processes of biological and cultural reproduction. I introduce Tafuri here to gesture toward a larger body of writing I’ve developed over the past three years, in which I explore connections between the experience of playing videogames and ideas drawn from the study of visionary or “paper” architecture. Tafuri spent much of his career critiquing the ideological traps of architecture—how avant gardes either become absorbed by the systems from which they emerge or retreat into a self-referential, hypnotic isolation. In my own work, I’ve tried to position videogames as zones of possibility. Yet I also recognize that, for me, games have often served as spaces of withdrawal. Tafuri’s writing, while challenging, touches every signpost in what has become, for me, a kind of spatial allegory—a dungeon raid into history rather than a trip up an escalator. In his explorations of the suffocating, subterranean, neo-classical ruins of visionary architectural artist Giambattista Piranesi, Tafuri descends into what I’ve come to call The Dungeon Mode. In his critiques of the paper-architecture avant-gardes of the twentieth century, he ascends into an Arcology Mode. These imagined architectures—of both past and future—are part of the theoretical scaffolding of a series of art installations I developed at the UCLA Game Lab between 2021 and 2023, collectively titled Grotto. Grotto includes an experimental, multiplayer, persistent, web-based game framework. Within Grotto, every person in a family tree is represented by a room, creating a rudimentary system where genealogy becomes spatialized. This database has served as the substrate for a series of projects that grapple with history as experienced through The Dungeon Mode, an abyss that has no bottom or pithead. In this document I’ll focus on practice, outlining some of the experiments performed in this mode. This writing was adapted from a chapter of my Master of Fine Arts thesis writing at the UCLA Game Lab. A full exploration of a Dungeon Mode of games and culture is forthcoming.
- Tafuri, Manfredo. 1987. The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.