A walk-through of the game environment 'Spectral Plain', an interactive space that explores the capacity and limits of text-generation algorithms and randomising technologies (a cosmic radiation sensor) to form cosmologies. In the environment of Spectral Plain, the player awakens to a world that follows a geomagnetic reversal, where the Earth’s magnetic field has shifted. The player then needs to traverse three plains of unchannelled energy—celestial, terranean, and infracosmic—searching for new energetic alignments.
In its playable format, the game uses real-time data capture and text-generation algorithms to create and log information (time stamps, players’ interactions) via the integrated blueprint of the game engine. This data is then used to inform the game’s outcome: an audiovisual cosmogram read as the journey ends at a campfire. Here, decisions made while navigating the three plains converge to generate stories and visuals of a multispecies network of energies—a new spectral world.
Spectral Plain was developed in collaboration with Isaac Clarke, Mārcis Lapiņš, Filip Setmanuk, and Jim Zweerts. It was also made possible through the support of Creative Industries Fund NL, V2_Lab for the Unstable Media, and Cultuur Eindhoven.
Biography
Guillemette Legrand is an artist and designer affiliated with the Reflective Interaction research group at the EnsadLab, Paris, and IXDM, Basel. Their practice explores machine-fictioning practices to simulate other possible imaginations of computational logic and the visual culture that emerge from it.
Vincent Thornhill (NZ/NL) is a designer, an artistic researcher at KU Leuven / LUCA School of Arts, and an educator at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Their practice questions humanistic readings of digital image infrastructure, with a focus on image-processing algorithms.