As wildfires rake the steep canyonsides of a digital landscape, I fly over the terrain searching for an elusive mountain lion I keep glimpsing in the distance. I’m playing The Alluvials, an ecologically minded open-world video game set in an alternative Los Angeles, at the launch of the Octobre Numérique festival in the city of Arles in Provence, southern France; a festival devoted to exploring virtual worlds. The nave of a 17th-century church has been converted into an exhibition space, filled with plasma screens and sofas bound in lime plastic banding to look texture mapped. Outside, less than 300 metres away, is the timeless flow of the river Rhône, unconcerned by this digital hoopla. Maybe not, though: according to the accompanying blurb for The Alluvials, “multiple stakes” link the Los Angeles Basin and the Camargue delta near Arles.
Octobre Numérique is all about the incursion of the digital into the real world, the merging of the modern and traditional, and it is very aware that such forces are putting a rapidly changing Arles under strain. The delta port – stomping ground of Roman emperor Constantine II, French writer Frédéric Mistral and, of course, Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh – had become another pauperised Provençal outpost by the late 1990s. With its main industries dying out, only the first-century amphitheatre and other Roman remains gave it a brief tourism-related lift every summer.
