Modding the Mirror World

@MaMA,
SEPTEMBER -- NOVEMBER 2023.

Modding the Mirror World is a cybernetic exhibition addressing the increasing reach of networked devices in public space and the resulting effects on privacy and freedom of movement. Programme maker, Louisa Teichmann, envisions a potential near-future in which the municipality of Rotterdam collaborates with a gamified smart travel app to choreograph and track every citizen's paths within the city. The storyworld of the exhibition becomes playable through the role-playing sessions of Eixogen.

With work by: Amos Peled, Lawrence McGuire, Sophie Allerding, vo ezn, Werner van der Zwan. The exhibition was on display from 15 September until 12 November 2023 in Showroom MaMA. Modding the Mirror World is made possible by: Gemeente Rotterdam, Stichting Volkskracht, Mondriaan Fonds and Nieuwe Instituut. Image credit: Tomas Mutsaers.

Eixogen

@MaMA @rib @.zip @Nieuwe Instituut,
OCTOBER -- NOVEMBER 2023.

Welcome to Eixogen, an experiment in collectively exploring and imagining the city of the future in the context of emerging smart city technology. Smart cities represent the future, offering significant advancements in efficiency and quality of life within urban areas. The recording and processing of data, such as traffic patterns, sounds, air quality, and consumer behavior, enable improvements and optimizations in traffic flow, reduced air pollution, crime prevention, mobility enhancements, and energy conservation. Many cities, including Rotterdam, are actively pursuing this transformative journey.

However, the collection and processing of data also raise complex social and ethical issues that impact how we live, work, and interact socially. The substantial amount of data recorded and processed poses technical challenges, often delegated to private companies for management. Questions regarding privacy, equality, and sustainability arise.

Who determines which data is relevant, and whose interests are considered in the processing of this data? The collection and archiving of this data represent a form of the city's inhabitants' history. Yet, by what criteria is this history written, and what is excluded, overshadowed, or unheard in these records? Over the course of a six-week experimental RPG, we invite you to delve into these questions together and participate in envisioning a city of the future. The website https://eixo.codes is a simulation of a city travel app, typically used for analyzing and organizing the movements of a city's residents. In our fictional scenario, we aim to repurpose these often consumption-oriented apps to facilitate a city exploration experience that shifts from a focus on efficiency, profit, and goal-oriented behavior to one centered around randomness, wonder, and mindfulness. This approach allows us to generate data about citizens based on their emotions, dreams, and personal desires.


Game design by Sophie Allerding and Louisa Teichmann. Code by Louisa Teichmann, vo ezn and Joseph Knierzinger. Supported by MaMA in 2023.

Radio, what's new?

@Tetem,
NOVEMBER 2023.

Tune into 868MHz, a hyper location-based, personalized radio broadcast speaking straight at you through your handy dandy handheld device. In our smart city, there's really no need for linear stories, generic jokes or excess information. Instead, we've seamlessly integrated our fragmented radio station into the cityscape, so you'd better be quick on your feet to catch those fleeting signals. 868MHz is embarking on a journey with its listeners, leading them on an immersive audio-based treasure hunt in the dark. Players are equipped with a handheld audio device to navigate their surroundings, discover story tags, and tackle puzzles, all in the pursuit of uncovering the answers and, of course, scoring big.

"Radio, What's New" is a gamified audio tour that utilizes NFC tags in public spaces. The handheld device comprises an NFC reader module, Arduino, speaker, and power bank, allowing users to receive location-specific clues and narratives when encountering each tag. Realised for Tetem in 2023.

868 MHz

@Piet Zwart Instituut,
JUNE 2022.

868 MHz is a hybrid reality game running on the same standardized frequency as the LoRa gateways of The Things Network. Rotterdam is one of many cities world-wide in the process of building an Urban Data Platform (UDP), a sort of mirror world of real-time data collected in public space via smart devices. A major facilitator of this development is The Things Network, a global IoT Network connecting thousands of sensors through long range radio transmission. From lamp posts to advertisement screens, sourced information is not only collected, but can be processed and fed back into the city streets to adjust spaces and manipulate citizens' movement through them.

868 MHz suggests a player's mod of this framework of scattered, hidden devices feeding into one central server. Chase the electric currents of the asphalt to locate gateways and encounter a being which has nested itself beneath the city streets, all the way down the power lines woven amidst to its whirring epicentre. Encased in its concrete and metal armour, lie the keys to the pulsating veins of a mirror world. Whatever makes it inside its bloodstream, will travel fast and eternally through the nexus of time and space it occupies in that instant.

EtherAxis

@THE OVERKILL,
NOVEMBER 2021.

EtherAxis is an interactive game installation and reflection tool aiming to challenge the inner paradigms that shape our perception of realities. The physical relic that forms the base for this game shape-shifts in different contexts.

The structure of the gameboard emphasises four main axes, each connected to multiple ancient symbols of alchemy, hacked to uncover their original meanings. In this constellation of four interlaced geographic grids, the dreamer wanders through bridging fields on a spatiotemporal axis. Throughout the Overkill, EtherAxis lures you into the streets to find its messages hidden in plain sight, stepping over to the worlds floating in the ether.‍

EtherAxis is the result of an ongoing collaboration between Camilo García A., Emilia Tapprest, Erik Peters, Federico Poni, Louisa Teichmann & Victor Evink, as part of the Hamburger Community of Live & Art trajectory of Roodkapje. With the participation of Queer Arcana as performers.

COUPLED WORLDS ❃ GAMING STATION

@Roodkapje,
September 2021.

'The 1 Euro Cinema is back and transcends from its physical form into one that is fully digital. In a current world where the online forms of communication have overruled physical ways, we are looking to explore the role of cinema in a digital environment. We continue with emphasizing the role of non-physics, online interactions, while flipping coins and getting together to watch films. Time to think beyond dimension and context!' – telemagic.online

With Telemagic, Susanne Janssen & Noemi Biro.

Earthrise × Zhouwéi Network

@Roodkapje & MAMA,
MAY 2021.

Something is rising in the midst of the city surrounding us. In between the many microcosms of the infinitely unfinished city of Rotterdam, three potential futures are emerging in the nebulous atmosphere. A city mirroring a constant construction site opens up doorways to realities close enough to sense. The realities of the year 2041.

In a game of chance, players are led to a series of geographical locations, to try and unlock artefacts of the societies of Zhouwéi Network. In the form of an ephemeral soundscape, EARTHRISE infiltrates your perception of the changing sceneries you find yourself in as you follow the directions of the game makers. As you surrender to the game, your destined path will unravel before you. Do you feel at home in your own reality? What about the one you are moving towards?

EARTHRISE × Zhouwéi Network is a location-based game I co-created and produced as part of my residency at Roodkapje in 2021. As an extension of my research into geocaching as a game tool, I set up a collaboration between MaMA and Roodkapje, inviting the research duo Liminal Vision to co-imagine this hybrid format in relation to their work Zhouwéi Network. In this inspiring effort, we opened up portals in different locations in Rotterdam, where stories from characters of Zhouwéi Network could be found, iterating life in the future on the various locations based on three potential future societies. For this project, I imagined an alphabet in which symbols correspond to syllables, which can be read by players into code words, using an in-game dictionary. The alphabet was designed by Camilo Garcia Aycardi, based on the aesthetics of the three different societies of Zhouwéi Network. -–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
The code of the web game https://earthrise.zhouwei.network/ was implemented by Federico Poni.

On Zhouwéi Network
Zhouwéi Network is a worldbuilding research umbrella that explores the design of affective undertones in different speculative future societies, in dialogue with currently emerging technocultural developments. The fiction series ‘Embodied ambitopias’ (2021) zooms in on hypothetical mind-body exercises, combined with speculative interfaces and contrasting rhetorics to shed light on the differences, as well as the occasional similarities, between the three worlds.
Liminal Vision is a creative collaboration between Victor Evink (s x m b r a) and Emilia Tapprest (nvisible.studio).

Climb the Firewall

@Roodkapje,
DECEMBER 2020.

Climb the Firewall is an interactive *real-life* scavenger hunt throughout Rotterdam. Grab your bored roommates, venture out into the real world and follow the traces of De Tapijttegels all the way through the center of Rotterdam to enter their secret head-quarters. If you make it on time and bring their lost treasures, they might reward you with an exclusive *real-life* performance. If not, at least you made it out of the house. But beware: Winners don’t fall from the sky. You will have to master multiple channels to find your way.

With De Tapijttegels, Roos Groothuizen, Federico Poni, Camilo García A., Jacopo Lega, Floor van Meeuwen & Kendal Beynon.

Tardigrade Estate

@DE SINGEL,
AUGUST 2019.

An immersive theater piece on the notion of inhabiting virtual space. The virtual estate agency “Tardigrade Estate” is collecting the preferences of their clients with the promise of a personalized digital paradise. The only catch is that there seems to be a bug in the program. And since the visitors are stuck between the physical and virtual realm, this bug is very lively. Run before it gets you!

With Valerie Lim, Carmine Santavenere, Emilie Morin & Ewoud van Eetvelde.

Ultimate Dragon

@GOGBOT,
SEPTEMBER 2019.

Ultimate Dragon is an adventure game which lures you in with a promise: your personalised utopia. As you move through the fictional landscape in constant dialogue with the programme, your input generates a 3-dimensional digital landscape hidden behind its interface. The programme secretly constructs a world based on your activity in the game.

Every time the player is making a choice within the game, another layer is stacked onto their virtual terrain. This results in a feedback loop, depending on constant input from both sides of the screen. As soon as enough information has been stored, the personal landscape is revealed. Can the programme’s creation compare to the world the player imagined based on the writing? Is technology able to translate their fiction into a liveable digital environment and if not, whose fiction is it?

The text adventure is the grandfather of computer gaming, reaching straight into the player’s imagination, as their fantasy slowly unfolds within an interactive landscape. This role-playing game of depending on a mediator between the player and their desired information has expanded into a permanent interface over the years, limiting the users to a set of premade choices and paths.

These choices reflect in their digital environment, as their activity is being interpreted and fed back to them. Technology is giving us a hand with distorting our perceived reality and we grip it tightly. We are facing a new, gamified reality covering the means of its construction behind opaque interfaces. A personalised environment compromising your idealistic vision into its digitised representation.

With 3D scenes by Auryn Parkinson.

I am the Dungeon Master

@Gamers of the West,
MARCH 2019.

I Am the Dungeon Master is an experimental multi-media escape game inspired by the table-top game Dungeons & Dragons. By making use of interactive chatrooms, players are able to co-write the storyline through the use of the different media in the room. Simulating a digital text-based game, so called Multi-User Dungeon or MUD, which were on the rise in the early ninetees, this interactive installation aims to visualise the basic structure and workings of virtual environments in a playful manner.

With Auryn Parkinson.

Digital Masquerade

@Waag,
June 2018.

Who are you when the lights go off? A better, more honest version of yourself, or do you feel tempted to embody a different person entirely? During Digital Masquerade, we explored the freedom of anonymity in a physical chatroom. After "logging in" (by putting on a mask with an image of choice clipped to it) visitors joined an online chat on their phones, entering a darkened room with two large projections on the wall. One of them being the anonymous live chat, the other one being a livestream to an online game which showed a realistic simulation of the room. The simulation was filled with eccentric avatars of gamers who were joining the chat discussion and following the course of the evening through a livestream simultaneously. Confronted with a statement on identity by Cyborgs rights activist Aral Balkan and a preview of a film on identification technology by Robert Glas, visitors in both realities were commenting and discussing anonymously in the joined chat. No speaking, just staring at phones and screens, typing, reading and occasionally chuckling at a comment. Digital means of communication fused with a physical setting blurred the lines between reality and virtuality.

The experimental band OptionY was performing in-game, filling the room with peculiar sounds and visuals. The host of the evening was a computer-generated voice, which read out parts of the chat discussion throughout the night, highlighting the clash of banal comments with complex thoughts on identity.

In-game scenography by Helen Fermate, curated by Louisa Teichmann.

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