“the Fold: episode II”
'the Great Buddha'
Title:
- the Fold: episode II
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Symposium:
Venue(s):
Artist Statement:
“the Fold: episode II” is a virtual reality-based art game involving synthetic agents driven by machine learning. Each level of the experience involves agents of differing complexity. These agents are non-playable characters (NPCs) and are comprised of historical elements found from either Eurocentric or Sinocentric history and philosophy. The game itself is essentially an ‘escape the room’ experience, some rooms involve puzzles while others are more spatially challenging.
Inspired by Yuk Hui’s book, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics, this VR-based ‘escape the room’ project highlights the similarities and differences of technics as it relates to Western (episode I) and Eastern (episode II) philosophy including structuralist & surrealist literature, sentient bodies, metaphysics, mathematics, the virtual object, Buddhism, Zen principles, Qi (氣), and problematizes the affirmation of technics, its outputs and technologies as anthropologically universal within the frame of VR, AI, 3D animation, and video games.
Elements from ‘episode I’ creep into ‘episode II’ as an allegory of the colonialist impulses East Asia faced throughout much of the modern era. Spatial thinking differs structurally between these two spheres of knowledge. Because of this, technical thinking (technics) evolved differently throughout much of the period before modernism. ‘episode II’ begins to fold elements of these two spheres together as a symbiotic virtual world of knowledge. ‘the Fold: episode II’ provides a glimpse into the performative potential of AI as a machine collaborator to create new forms of artistic expression.
