Paper short abstract:

An ethnography of the game Encounter in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. In Astana, the aesthetics of urban space has acquired great political and ideological significance. Encounter players inject surreality into various spaces in the city, opening up socio-spatial temporary zones of liminality.

Paper long abstract:

Encounter is an online-coordinated network of active urban games, present in cities across the former Soviet Union. One of the most popular varieties of Encounter games consists in searching for codes hidden at various locations in the city, from industrial ruins to mid-construction skyscrapers to most celebrated nation-state monuments. Another game type requires taking surrealistic, absurd, difficult to arrange photographs in public space. Thus, by being played directly in the real spaces of the city, Encounter introduces stark aesthetic contrasts and unsettles the meanings and functions of various sites. In Astana, urban renewal has been used powerfully as means to represent a vision of the nation-state's future. The aesthetics of urban space has thus acquired fundamental ideological significance. Simultaneously, some older parts of the city are being abandoned to oblivion and decay. Encounter's unanticipated uses of space suspend and subvert such fundamental categories as central and marginal, thriving and abandoned, or serious and absurd. The game changes the meanings and functions of space. While not confronting any official ideology head-on, Encounter manages to carve out interstitial space of ephemeral autonomy. It defies any attempt at extending hegemony over the imagination by means of control of spatial aesthetics. While particular interventions of Encounter are only temporary, I suggest that the game may have more lasting social effects. It is an experience of possibility, of society in the subjunctive. Moreover, it creates autonomous socialities centered on creative practice. Encounter players form social networks whose relevance extends beyond the activity of playing.