These images are undoubtedly "spectacular". They remediate the logic of traditional postcards. They feature "impossible", a god-like, all-seeing-eye, omniscient views that require technical trickery and cannot be achieved by the average player/photographer. In contrast, the images included in the book highlight banal and trivial details, like a rusty guardrail, a brick wall or the unrealistic lack of trash on the side of the road. Additionally, the virtual Belpaese is a pastiche of several existing locations: a mixture of landscapes and towns located in Campania, Piedmont, Liguria, and Tuscany. This is the Italy as imagined by Hollywood, the quintessential "Postcard Italy" that does not exist. A drive through this ludic Italy produces cognitive dissonance in those familiar with the "real thing". This is what we call the video game pastoral style: idyllic and thus impossible, with no trash and garbage, potholes and graffiti, sex workers and strip malls. Italy has the highest share of elderly population (65 and over) compared to the total population in the European Union, and yet the video game only features teenagers and youngsters. In short, Boring Postcards from Italy deals with complex politics of representing space within a simulation: each photograph was shot with a deliberate unspectacular style. We are more interested in critical scrutiny than pure aesthetics. Boring Postcards from Italy represents a kind of experimental documentary photography in video games. We were inspired by Vilém Flusser notion of unspectacular revolutionaries that he advances in his book Into the Universe of Technical Images, written in the mid 1980s: "Contemporary revolutionaries are not actively opposed to the images themselves but rather to the integrated circuitry. They actively promote dialogical, rewired images. Contemporary revolutionaries are envisioners (photographers, filmmakers, video makers, computer programmers) grounded in the revolution in technical images. Their visionary powers are focused on a society in which people exchange information through images and, in so doing, constantly produce new information, improbable situations. Only as a result of this new capacity to visualize does it become possible to conceive of such a social formation. The revolutionaries want to change not only the underlying structure but the surface of the so-called information society." (p. 67). According to Flusser, entertainers deal with spectacular images while revolutionaries are deliberately unspectacular ("[T]hose who count as revolutionaries are really entertainers. They are spectacular, and the spectacle they present assists the images in dispersing us more and more effectively. The true revolutionaries, on the other hand, do not appear in the images", p. 66) We wanted our images to be completely unspectacular. 

RP: Does Boring Postcards from Italy have a narrative? I noticed that the images are often mirrored and/or paired and some motifs recur throughout the book... 

MB: Not exactly. Boring Postcards from Italy is more like a disassembled movie, a para-cinematic slideshow, an experimental graphic novel. There is no explicit story, although a reader may identify some themes, e.g. infrastructure, buildings, situations and also recurrent characters. Parr's postcards revolve around four main tropes: transport, civic pride, recreation and industry. Boring Postcards from Italy is not a "fotoromanzo" (photonovel, Ed.), although we were certainly aware of this form of vernacular production while working on the book. Jerome Bruner argues that we are naturally wired to see narratives in everything we encounter - we literally construct reality in narrative terms -, so perhaps there's indeed a story within Boring Postcards from Italy. Maybe readers will figure it out.

LINK: Boring Postcards from Italy

LINK: EXTRA MILES. Estetica della guida videoludica

LINK: Orizzonti di Forza. Estetica della guida videoludica