multiplayer virtual reality videogame, 2019

Desert Mothers is a game where players are connected across a network, and each individually interact with an environment that expresses its emotions through weather. 

Players begin in the same randomly-generated environment. This diverges for each as their personal environment, composed of individualized weather and hallucinations, responds to the player's actions. 

The constraints within which the players interact are discovered during play, and revolve around the body, simulated breath, drawing in the air, and out-of-body exploration of flora, fauna, and abandoned human habitations. 

Participants are invited to sit on cushions on the floor while playing. In an in-person exhibition, they would be facing each other. In the proposed virtual exhibition, they will be at home. They use either desktop virtual reality (VR) devices, or non-VR (flat) systems with monitors and Xbox controllers.

In the game world, they are also sitting, either looking out across the desert at one another or lost in an exploration from the perspective of an environmental object. They see one another's drawings and any two players are rewarded for returning each other's gazes. 

The intelligent landscape watches the manner in which the player draws with their hands in the air, the frequency of their simulated breath, and other movements. The world enters a mood based on what it has observed and expresses itself abstractly by changing the environment in a manner similar to weather. All environmental objects move expressively based on the entire system's current mood. The player can attempt to provoke changes in behavior from this entity, or explore interactions with other players while the environment reacts. Although the player might not interpret the game environment as having a mind that responds to their actions, it's a feature of the game's reality, and a logic that underlies the gameplay.

There is a slippery relationship between the player and their body as separate from elements in the environment, as they explore the landscape from the perspectives of other environmental entities. The player can select a plant, animal, or human-built structure and view the environment from its perspective. They can also leave their body sitting in the sand and roam freely around the latter structures.

There is also a tension between the stillness of meditation and the preoccupation with activity in an interactive space.

This is a multiplayer game where players can discover ways to communicate and interact over the network, but the individualized environmental behavior pushes the experience inward. The game has its inspiration in group psychedelic and meditative experiences, such as Ayahuasca ceremonies. Although it is ostensibly a group experience, it is intensely personalized.

videogame, 2016

The world of Islid is one that emulates the ephemeral images of hypnagogia, the visions passing before one’s eyelids before sleep. On a two-dimensional plane, the player guides a flickering speck through randomly-arranging visions. I created these visions by shining a light into my eyes, closing them, then drawing and animating the mutating shapes from memory. The world the player is traversing has the texture of the dark inner lining of the eyelid, and the shapes come in and out of vision with the peripheral persistence of the hypnagogic state. 

Although this is inspired by a landscape that one encounters internally, the patterns formed by the brain in a state of play mirror those that the outside, natural world produces in its own procedural generation. Neuroscientist Oliver Sacks draws a comparison between the “spontaneous self-organization” of populations of visual neurons as a part of perception, and the geometric formation of snow crystals. In the latter example, “self-organization can produce geometries and patterns in space and time very similar to what one may see in a migraine aura. In this sense, the geometrical hallucinations of migraine allow us to experience in ourselves not only a universal of neural functioning but a universal of nature itself”. Whether creating hypnagogic visions or migraine auras, our brains produce geometric landscapes in a manner similar to that of the physical world. In a nod to its connection to external, earthly formations, the title of the game is a combination of “island” and “eyelid.”

The medium of digital play-spaces is also appropriate as a metaphor for this state, as hypnagogia is described by Sacks in his book, Hallucinations, as:

the visual cortex playing with every permutation, playing with no goal, no focus, no meanings—a random activity or perhaps an activity with so many microdeterminants that no pattern is ever repeated.  Few phenomena give such a sense of the brain's creativity and computational power as the almost infinitely varied, ever-changing torrent of patterns and forms which may be seen in hypnagogic states.

It is essentially interactive, procedural seeing, with little information required from the outside world. It is a reminder of how much of sight is created by the brain in a response to stimulus. In the case of hypnagogic sight, the required stimulus is essentially a random seed.

(The above text is from my article "Heaven and Hellscapes: Exploring Altered Mind States through Procedural Environments", presented at the International Symposium on Electronic Art, 2018)

Tools used: Procreate and iPad Pro, Unity game engine, C# programming language.

Selected for the LeftField Collection at EGX Rezzed 2018. Also exhibited at solo and 3-person shows in Rockville, MD:  Procedural Experience at VisArts (2017), and In Play, Flow, and Ritual at King Street Gallery (2018). It was a part of the group exhibition Art of Mind at Imurj in Raleigh, NC, in 2019.

videogame, 2016

I created this work in the Unity game engine after a visit to the site of Pol Pot's cremation in Cambodia. The visuals and audio consist of photos and ambient sound collected at the site. I programmed the gameplay and the procedurally-generated environment that is slightly different each time it is played. I also played the guitar for the small bits of soundtrack, and acted out the player character's pantomime via motion capture.

Visit the cremation site of Pol Pot as a sleepwalker. Interpret the world your character is inhabiting by their gestures and brief glimpses inside their head.

This game does not have an ending until you decide to leave. Game time is connected to the current real time in Cambodia, which affects the sun's position in the sky.

The real life cremation site of Pol Pot in Cho-Am* is a place of contradictory spiritual and political significance. As a "good-luck" shrine, offerings are continuously left by visitors who hope to have assistance in their prayers from a main architect of the Cambodian auto-genocide. One of these visitors, a Thai businessman, constructed a hand-made spirit house at the site as thanks for Pol Pot appearing in a dream to him and giving him winning lottery numbers.

This is a way of dealing with the memory and presence of someone responsible for pain and destruction that is outside of the realm of forgiveness and punishment.

The site itself, across from a casino in a small town on the border with Thailand, in the region of Anlong Veng (a previous base of the Khmer Rouge), has very little aside from a tin roof covering a mound of dirt where Pol Pot's ashes used to be, a burn bin, a couple of spirit houses, and a hut near the entrance where a guard (the wife of a former Khmer Rouge general) sits and takes admission payment. It is an otherwise empty area with a powerful history.

Much of the experience of the site takes place in one's head.

Selected for Games and Playful Media Exhibition at A MAZE. / Johannesburg 2016 and Signification exhibit at A1LabArts in Knoxville, TN.

* Normally transliterated as Choam, this less common spelling helps with pronunciation. Also CHOAM appears to be thing in the world of Dune.
 

videogame with neural headset and Arduino microcontroller, 2016

The player wanders a dynamically-generated environment where elements of nature are visually and behaviorally altered based on their brain’s gamma wave readings from a hacked MindSky neural headset.  Gamma waves are thought to be responsible for the brain’s unity of conscious perception, or “binding,” the brain’s interpretation of individual parts as a coherent object.  While attempting to guide the experience through their thoughts, the player explores an experience created through the often uncontrollable behavior of their brain.

videogame, 2015

This is an impressionistic game that began with documentary research on a small town in Peru that was founded by witches during the Peruvian Inquisition.  The player takes photos and shows them to local characters, who weave stories about them.  The main game mechanic is that of photographing characters, environmental objects and events in this town, then showing them to characters who give both literal and stream-of-consciousness abstract descriptions of the photos based on what they see in them.  This creates a generative narrative for the player, allowing them to cognitively build a story about the town, with multiple truths exposed by different characters.  In a way, it is a conversation mechanic:  the player asks "questions" through their choice of photography, and the characters answer through their descriptions, which often point the player in new directions.

In this project, I spent time at the site recording interviews and performing other types of documentation. I told folks that the final purpose was for a documentary videogame. I transcribed these interviews, and some are present in the game as audio clips with English translation. On my return, I pulled ideas for game mechanics from what I had documented and reconstructed parts of the town from my photographs and satellite imagery from Google Earth. The environment is composed of ambient sound I recorded on site, and models are textured with photographs of the same objects in Cachiche. 

Selected for the International Indie Den Showcase at Game Happens! in Genova Cornigliano, Italy. Exhibited at Synthetic Zero Event at BronxArtSpace, New York (2015) and the Maryland Artist Registry Juried Exhibition at Maryland Art Place, Baltimore (2016).

A full discussion of this process was published in the article Abstracting Evidence: Documentary Process in the Service of Fictional Gameworlds, in the academic journal Game Studies.

video, 2010, and videogame, 2013

The video is of the empty field in Guyana that used to be Jonestown, where the Peoples Temple massacre occurred in 1978, as well as the surrounding towns and villages. The audio is composed of selections from interviews conducted nearby with local residents Wilfred Jupiter and Carlton Daniels in June, 2010.

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I have had an obsession with physical, but often seemingly empty spaces with powerful histories. On an earlier visit to the Branch Davidian compound outside of Waco, Texas, I wondered how I could convey its essence now, the life and ghosts I felt there. They are feelings particular to historical places without official landmarks or agreed-upon ways of visiting and looking at them. I had an early interest in the multiple contradictory facets of the Peoples Temple story, the noble purpose of Jonestown eclipsed by the insanity of its end. As I am also fascinated by the blending of Western and traditional culture in parts of the developing world, it made sense to focus my research on the stories of Guyanese people who are actively participating in the living history of the place.

My project was to involve visiting the small towns around Jonestown, Guyana, and to interview residents about their memories of the community and how it affected their lives. The focus is on how the tragedy became a part of its surrounding environment, both culturally, through stories, and materially, through objects from Jonestown that were appropriated throughout the area. It is also a portrait of Peoples Temple from the perspective of their Guyanese neighbors. We know that they sold their crafts at local markets and competed in basketball tournaments in Georgetown. We rarely hear, though, the accounts of outsiders who were most geographically close.

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The process of creating this video led to my interest in creating documentary videogames. This began with a short work where I traveled to the Guyanese neighborhood of Queens to visit the bird racing community. This resulted in the game Towa Towa, where the player's task is to judge a race between two finches, the race being which bird arrives at a given number of tweets first.

videogame, 2010

This is a videogame about finding and then placing a loved one in the afterlife. The goal is to simulate an agnostic encounter with one's own belief system when dealing with death. The game begins with the death of a partner, and after, the player encounters obstacles in their life that can be overcome only by incorporating the imagined presence of their departed lover into their life.

Created in 2010 with Unity and MakeHuman. I 3D-modeled and textured the scenes and coded the interactions. Audio hum is my voice.

After has been featured in the net.works exhibition as part of Vector Game + Art Convergence in Toronto, in FILE RIO 2012 and FILE Media Art 2011 in Brasil, SIGHT.SOUND [INTERACTION] 6 in the Rosenberg Gallery at MICA, Baltimore, MD, as well as the D-Art2011 Online Gallery of Digital Art, part of the 15th International Information Visualisation Conference in London. It has also been written about in the book Playing with Religion in Digital Games.

Download here: https://aaronoldenburg.itch.io/after