{"id":1352,"date":"2017-04-06T13:18:42","date_gmt":"2017-04-06T13:18:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/?p=1352"},"modified":"2017-05-20T15:31:21","modified_gmt":"2017-05-20T19:31:21","slug":"artist-statement-tower-of-babel-space-memorial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/2017\/04\/06\/artist-statement-tower-of-babel-space-memorial\/","title":{"rendered":"Artist Statement – Tower of Babel Space Memorial"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I personally find the most fulfillment in creating things that don’t already exist. Bringing imagination into some form of reality (in this case virtual) through which the realm and idea can be shared is something I strive for. Having said that, what better way to share an idea than through a video game. I find the power of strong visuals in combination with audio to be very powerful in immersing an audience. For this project, I wanted to create an alternate scenario, versus something grounded in our current reality (I figured there would be a lot of the former as project decisions, and little of the prior). I decided to use the unreal engine (which is known for its powerful graphics capabilities) and give it a retro twist, both in sound and visuals. The decision came about after re-reading Kirkland’s\u00a0Resident Evil\u2019s Typewriter Survival Horror and Its Remediations.\u00a0<\/em>For my haunted media project to feel more like a relic or bridge to the past, it made sense to make use of a technological aesthetic that is from the past as well. The pixelated graphics and 8-bit music\u00a0tap into the origins of digital technology and given the background story of the Space Memorial, it would make sense why our robot successors have a more meaningful connection to the advent of digital technology. (Their own creation was most greatly influenced by the digital age – apparently) The space memorial itself is haunted by ghosts which will harm the player in their endeavor to explore the space memorial. The whole point of a haunting is that it instills some kind of emotional effect on the one who experiences it. Usually fear. So I tried, in the limited time to actually build and code the experience, to create some semblance of fear in the player.<\/p>\n

There is a whole art to creating emotions in players and an audience in general, and it usually requires a little more composition on the part of the creator to be effective (due to time constraints, there almost were no ghosts). Coding AI for a horror video game is challenging in that the AI must, in its idle state, be roaming the world, so that the player can never be certain about what lurks around the corner. This is in line with the whole goal of creating a haunting, a haunting isn’t cool (cool? attractive?) unless it’s uncertain.<\/p>\n

My inspiration for the ghosts comes from a video game I played when I was young (unfortunately, never learned the name of the game, I played it on my cousin’s console).\u00a0<\/em>The sounds, poses and general feel of the ghosts was something that really stuck with me growing up. I had a few chances to play the game when I was younger, and it was devastating. I literally couldn’t even play it. I’d start, and I’d hear that terrible moan that the ghosts would make, and I’d drop the controller (I was young, okay?). Fast forward, I’m older now, and still scarred (and scared, no pun intended). The point is, I learned something, and I wanted to use that to my advantage in this project. From the get-go I knew what I wanted the haunting to be. It was just the execution that became the difficulty. Needless to say, after a lot of work, I had created something that is just slightly what I imagined, but it was something.<\/p>\n

Of course, creating ghosts means there need to be hiding spots, safe zones for the player to fully relax. I used the whole concept from Amnesia: The Dark Descent<\/em>, hiding in closets and cabinets does one thing specifically to further the feeling of being in danger. Hiding in closets means that whoever you’re hiding from reigns over the rest of the domain, and your “safe space” is actually a secondary space in the grand scheme of things. It’s a powerful way to say that, you are second to some other creature, you don’t belong here, and you should stay in the closet. All of this sounds exciting and potent in theory, but of course, again, given the time limit, it was difficult to really execute the idea to its full extent. I wish that the player has to mostly traverse through vents, closets, and side routes (inside walls and whatnot) – so that the player never feels like they belong to the world. The idea is there nevertheless.<\/p>\n

Moving on. You have a lantern, which gives you some control over your surroundings. You can light dark areas, and see details that are otherwise not visible in the old space memorial. The lantern attracts ghosts however (not actually, because I didn’t have time to code that), but the effect is that your actions in the game can directly endanger you, even those actions which seem to be helpful, can at times be your greatest source of danger. (AGAIN, this all is how it should work in theory, and as much as I actually implemented a lot of these feature, it takes much more than pure intent to actually execute these ideas effectively ala\u00a0Amnesia<\/em>).<\/p>\n

The setting is an homage to the works of\u00a0Mobeius<\/em>,\u00a0Sergio Toppi<\/em>, and\u00a0Tsutomu Nihei<\/em>. All three are very inspirational artists (first), graphic novelists and comic artists. The world is meant to be monotonous in that it uses a very repetitive pattern, but spectacular in scale and vision. The idea behind it that it is created by robots, and computers tend to specialize in certain aspects and lack in others. For instance, a calculator can calculate at incredible speeds, but cannot learn a language. Back to the project, the setting is in many ways extremely ambitious (an enormous space memorial with huge hallways, bridges, and constructions), made in a very repetitive way with little consideration for beauty and pattern-breaking.<\/p>\n

Another important point of inspiration came from Kocurek’s article\u00a0Who hearkens to the monster\u2019s scream? Death, violence and the veil of the monstrous in video games. <\/span><\/em>I figured, when we talk about <\/span>a haunting, the “antagonist” is a person from the past. Usually due to some unresolved issue from their life, they remain in our realm to send messages, warn people, harm people, scare people, but in some way communicate. For my project, I wanted to further this idea. The ghosts that roam around are nothing more than dangerous apparitions with no backstory or personality. They are stripped of their own \u00a0story and purpose, and instead are just one of (presumably) many others stranded in our world, with nothing to do other than hiss and roam around. When we think of othering in the form that Kocurek speaks about, we usually think about things unrelated to “us”. What I mean by that is that we other things we find foreign. I thought it’d be interesting if this was a robot world in which we, humanity, is the “other”.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I attempted to create an experience of a haunted space memorial created by robots in commemoration to their, now gone, creators. The memorial is haunted by the ghosts of our past. But more so than the literal haunting in the project, I was aiming at the meta-haunting which is our species haunting another species. We’ve always been on the end of the chain, looking back at “common ancestors” and histories we didn’t belong to. It’s entirely possible that one day, we become someone’s common ancestor, that one day, humanity will be a collection of data and information, or a digital footprint for other intelligent species to decode and learn from. It is an interesting notion, to think that maybe one day, none of us will exist any more, in the capacity that we witness each other. The notion that we move from the spotlight, into a display (like in a museum) of intelligent life, and none of it will matter to us, because the last of us will be gone. It is a somewhat tragic notion, but interesting nevertheless.<\/p>\n

In conclusion, I had a strong vision which I wanted to bring to the digital realm in all its glory. Of course, I would not say that I was successful in fully (arguably even partly sometimes) translating the theories and effects I wanted to. However, the concept is there, and the intent as well. With such a time constraint, it is the closest my vision would become a reality. Technical difficulties are many when creating any project, but this project was deceivingly costly on the processing end of things. Correcting errors and moving through technical obstacles was the greatest issue I had, and it is the reason many features either didn’t work the way they were intended, or didn’t end up in the final version. The experience, despite its horror theme, is supposed to be meditative, with moments of tranquility in which players can just immerse themselves in this world, take a moment, and consider a world without humans, but with humanity. What I mean by that is, humanity seems like it can live on even without us, and it can be the greatest gift we impart on our successors, or our excavators (in the case that we don’t have a successor, but an intelligent species that is able to observe us or find us and our physical and digital remains).<\/p>\n

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