Transcoding the Zombie

Performance, Gaming and Augmented Reality

Abstract

As several studies have demonstrated (including, Boni 2016; Barra and Scaglioni 2017) the zombie lends itself to becoming a useful metaphor for understanding some traits of our relationship with the media, in terms of passivity and active involvement. Starting from this consideration, in the following article I will therefore try to consider some strategies of "extraction" of the diegetic motifs of zombie fiction and its imaginary, relating them to the dynamics of horizontal appropriation and vertical materialization. To this end, the following analysis will focus on three types of performance-interactive formats that are based on the re-location (Casetti 2015) of the zombie imagery in other contexts and through other channels than film and television: zombies walk, zombie run and some recent Augmented Reality contents transcode the fictional world of the zombie by fixing it in urban spaces, triggering collective experiences that deserve to be explored with a provocative touch. The topic of this short text is motivated by the intention of bringing the examples treated in a broader context of analysis, trying to create a dialogue with the reflections of Domenico Morreale and Mattia Thibault, thus providing stimuli and ideas to enrich the debate on gamification processes outside the mainstream contexts, on the creation of autonomous socialization spaces through collective experiences, and on the ways in which players build playful experiences that "resist" or otherwise "succumb" to the dynamics of industrial entertainment.