“S for Sisyphus” by Yuk-Yiu Ip

Title:

S for Sisyphus

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Creation Year:

2015

Medium:

Video game

Artist Statement:

A contemporary update and a creative reworking of Albert Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus”, S for Sisyphus is an experimental video game project aiming to explore action, meaning, and human intentionality via a simple animated and playable experience. It consists of two related but standalone versions: S for Sisyphus ¬ (playable version) and S for Sisyphus ∞ (machinima version), each articulates the theme of the work with a slightly different accent and experience.

In the playable version, the player is confronted with a cube, and is left with the choice of a single action in the game world: pushing the cube forward in an endless horizon, or else ending the game by taking the character’s life. The player has the choice to experience from four different perspectives: the Player, the Cube, the Other and the Anonymous God, as the action unfolds.

An alternate and extended version, S for Sisyphus ∞ is a live animated film that complements the game version of the project. The major difference between the “game” version and the “film” version is that no human player is involved in the latter. Instead the game is “played” by the computer software automatically in real-time.