Full Game Walkthrough
Juliette Lizotte, still from 'The Abyss, Sisters of the Wind', 2021
The following lines reproduce an attempt of merging an essay on art and magic with a fictional scenario informed by science fiction and videogame culture. The text explores the conditions that can be produced in integrating fantasy and magic in a digital and fictional setting (a videogame), where things are subject to constant transformation and manipulation. Ultimately, the text explores a magical perception and rendering of reality in the practices of five artists.
I barely remember how I got there. When I woke up, I felt a sense of reset, my body felt brand new. I opened my eyes. From white to green, my vision rapidly adapted to the vast territory I had just stepped in. Thousands, millions of trees gathered in front of my eyes, unable to comprehend the depth of the forest that expanded towards the horizon. So I started to walk the woods, trying to follow a linear route. After a few hours, I gave up my rationalist intentions and decided to let my intuition decide my moves. The whole forest had an eerie feeling: the heavy light of the sun produced contrasted shadows, while the air carried some weird blue particles that made the place look somehow enchanted. What side should I turn, left or right? I passed by trees and more trees, different in size but identical in appearance. I was about to faint from all the hours walking without a break so I lay down and closed my eyes for a couple of minutes.
With great effort, I opened my eyes again. I had to keep walking to find a way out of that endless labyrinth. My perceptions of time and space started to overlap, twisting my sense of orientation. To make the experience worse, a repetitive tune was sounding in the background: it was an ambient composition. No matter what direction I went, the melody had always the same intensity and volume, as if it were stuck in my head. Exhausted and disoriented, my head spun in all directions as my body kept walking with no real destination.
Instagram stories taken during Forest Walk (2021)
After a while, my body replaced the exhaustion with hunger, so I first had a wide look at the surrounding trees to see if there was food to grab, but none of the leaves or stems of the trees seemed edible; despite their green appearance, they were artificially made, probably 3d printed. I then searched around my clothes in the hope that there was a snack inside the pockets, but nothing. All I could find were a few used tissues and a little booklet. It was a user’s guide, a manual that described this uncanny environment down to the last detail. It mentioned someone called Diego Navarro, who indeed was the ‘author’ of the environment whom the manual referred to as an ‘artwork’. The text introduced the work, by saying:
Forest Walk is an ambient session located in a digitally rendered environment designed by artist Diego Navarro that was presented for the study group Kids See Ghosts, organized by Pols. Navarro depicted his personal interpretation of what can be defined as a lost future, a fictional, parallel scenario product of ongoing overexploitation of natural resources. The identical trees, the eerie atmosphere or the reiterative music set the mood for an endless exploration of a failed utopia where humans and non-humans live in harmony. Nevertheless, that desired connection ended up being co-opted by economic ambitions, turning the dream into a ghostly representation of an ideal that never came into being. Nostalgia for something, or somewhere that could never be experienced. An unreal sense of utopian optimism that eventually became an amorphous and mutant reality with no particular purpose.
Why had I been transported to this ‘artwork’? Is this another planet? Or maybe another dimension of reality? Right below the description of Navarro’s environment, there was a little map of the forest: among the thousands of identical trees, a clearing appeared in the exact centre of the woods. Although I didn’t know where I was, and what could be hiding in that clearing, I decided to reach that point. It wasn’t easy, since I didn’t have any means to guess my location on the map, but, after a few hours - or days, as time passed without any tangible changes in the environment - I found the clearing.
The clearing was bigger than it looked in the map, about one or two kilometres of grassland that also had an unnatural appearance: all the plants had the same height as if they had been cut symmetrically, and their colour was a few hues brighter than the leaves of the trees, but weirdly artificial too. At the back, I could discern the silhouette of a human-made structure composed of various objects scattered around the grass and two vertical elements that were so tall that seemed to be hung from the skies. As I was getting closer to the odd construction, I started to see that the objects were in fact buckets arranged around the two high lines that appeared to be folded pieces of garment interlaced with one another. The buckets had diverse shapes and dimensions, their muted pale colours contrasted with the brightness of the fields and gave me a very comforting feeling. I felt somehow at home when I reached the construction. I felt strong reassurance to find things that had been made by human hands and didn’t have that alien and synthetic appearance. The buckets were not empty as well but contained numerous tiny items floating in the water, which was indeed what caught my eye in the first place. I had been walking quite a lot of hours already, and my mouth felt drier than ever, so I didn’t think twice and finished most of the water in one bucket, being very careful not to ingest any of the small objects.
Marina González Guerreiro, Una promesa (2020). Courtesy of Galería Rosa Santos. Photographs by Guillermo Etchemendi
Once my body had recovered to a normal level of hydration, I wanted to figure out what this construction was and why it was the only sign of humanity around there. Why would these buckets contain all these objects? Is that water not drinkable? Is it a sort of shrine? Little stones, coins, dry leaves, a watch, necklaces, a green figure of an eagle, more necklaces, coins, jewels of all kinds and finishes, plants and flowers made of plastic. These things were floating in the water, scattered around the perimeters of the buckets, or inside those pillboxes that are segmented around the days of the week - is this shrine dedicated to time? There were also a lot of damp cloths and that eerie column that hang from the sky, dripping water to the buckets. To clear out my doubts, I went back to the guide:
Lavadero is an artwork that artist Marina González Guerreiro displayed at Galería Rosa Santos as part of her solo exhibition Una promesa. Occupying the centre of the main space of the gallery, the piece features items that the artist has been collecting throughout the years. These objects have been introduced to the recipients in a nostalgic but also transformative gesture; each one of them channels memories and generates other stories as well. Instead of freezing these memories with, say, synthetic resin, Guerreiro plunges the objects in water, an element where they can still move. Subsequently, these buckets of water form little worlds inhabited by objects-memories. Guerreiro has performed the magical notion of animation to these objects, allowing new stories to grow inside the water. The artist mentions that the gallery staff had to take care of the artworks as if they were living organisms, since they needed to put water into the buckets when it evaporated.
Marina González Guerreiro, Una promesa (2020). Courtesy of Galería Rosa Santos. Photographs by Guillermo Etchemendi
This text didn’t give me any useful clue on how I could get out of here - it confounded me even more if anything. I sat next to Lavadero and tried to link it all together. Another couple of hours passed by. I spent all that time closely examining all the tiny objects. I looked at the hanging cloths, unable to see where they were hanging from. I then noticed thin drops of water falling on my head - it was raining.
From this point of the story, I don’t feel able to describe what happened in detail. If my perception of time had been weird, at this point it became completely alien. The rain was falling on the field and the surrounding forest, it was pouring. The buckets in Lavadero were completely overflowed and the green sleek grass was turning into mud. In just twenty or thirty minutes I found myself in a swamp.
As weird as it sounds, the aspect of the wood and the clearing had changed dramatically in a few minutes. The fog enveloped this newly created swamp; the crisp separation between forest and grassland had now disappeared, since a low layer of water covered everything. After that sudden acceleration, time had somehow stopped. I don’t remember very well what I did at that moment, my memories are as foggy as that swamp. But I can recall my bodily memories. Despite being able to walk, since the water only covered half of my legs, I stood still for the longest time, unable to move. While I was petrified in that hallucinatory marsh, the mud underneath me pulled my feet downwards, slowly sinking my body into the earth. The quicksand would eat me in a matter of time.
Danklands’ cover designed by Marian Tubbs, courtesy of Arcadia Missa.
I fell into a vertical annular tunnel with no visible end. I wasn’t exactly falling, but floating in weird gravity. I felt my body being pulled downwards, descending across this large tunnel. It was as if something was dragging me from the bottom of that strange planet. A good thing was that my arms recovered full mobility, so I was able to take the guide out of my pockets, and I read:
Edited by Arcadia Missa, Danklands is Holly Childs’ second novel. The book takes place in Melbourne’s Docklands, a vibrant neighbourhood of the Australian city that was a swamp before its construction. Without any linear plot, the novel is written using a technique that the author calls “dredging”. Inspired by the process of removing mud, grass and rubbish from the beds of the rivers, Child meshes prose, poetry and random thoughts to address disorientation in the digital era. Instead of telling a story, the author sets a mood by smudging the edges between the characters, whose personalities get often confused. The events are blurry as well: it is difficult to tell if they are real, a hallucination or a bad dream, and time doesn’t seem to advance linearly. Like the swamp Docklands is built from, the novel tackles the confounding navigation between the real and the digital realms.
That explained my dreamy state and my bewildered perception of time. But it didn’t say anything about this endless tunnel. The background music, which had been muted when I got to the clearing, could be heard again, but it had changed. The monotonous, tranquil, sound had turned into a more dramatic pulse. An orchestra played a melody whose intensity kept increasing, while sound effects added to the dramatism: explosions, vehicles running, rockets taking off. I had the feeling that something terrible was going to happen.
Metaheaven, A Circle, A Spiral (2020), lyrics video for song by Holly Childs and Gediminas Žygus. Courtesy of Subtext Records.
Where was the end of this tunnel? I was trapped in a descent into nothingness. Turning the page, the guide contained another description:
A Circle, A Spiral, is a song released by Holly Childs and Gediminas Žygus as part of their album Hydrangea. The work problematizes normative time with deep time through the figure of the circle and the spiral. In the lyrics video made by Metaheaven, the viewer is transported to a far-reaching tube that symbolizes the concept of deep history as a continuous loop. With a reiterative rhythm that increases throughout the duration of the song, and sound effects of takeoffs that don’t conclude, the artists create an atmosphere in which time is not bound by human norms but flows in all different directions, a sentiment also present throughout the whole album.
Am I travelling in time? Am I descending into the deepest vestiges of history? I started to see a dark hole underneath me: the end of the tunnel. Once I reached the floor, I recovered my usual sense of gravity and was able to walk again. I had descended into a subterranean cave, probably hundreds of kilometres under the surface of the earth.
Cristina Spinelli, Amador (front) and Nosotras con tus geranios (back), 2021. Photographs by Goro Studio. Courtesy of the artist.
I had landed on a wide chamber lit by some torches. The air was cold and dry, but I couldn’t feel any stream of air coming from the various accesses that the room had. Instead of rocks or stalagmites, there were other – I presume – artworks dispersed around the space. There were two variations: two big objects that looked like mineral formations and a series of thin columns that reproduced the shape of an ear of corn. While the two rocks were placed around the centre of the chamber, the columns surrounded them: it looked like another shrine or a monument of sorts. Or a mausoleum buried under the ground. The two objects in the centre looked like rocks, but they were in fact made out of a mesh of paper and resin. One had blueish tones and the other one was grey with hints of purple, orange and white. The blue one was taller with a smoother surface that made a clean contrast with the rugosity of the cave, while the other was shorter, with a rough finish that reflected somehow the cavities of the chamber. I bent down to look closely at the blue object, noticing that there were lines of text running throughout the surface. They were disjointed, superimposed letters and numbers, resembling a sort of computer code. I took the guide again and read:
Amador, Nosotras con tus geranios and Untitled belong to two series of sculptures made by artist Cristina Spinelli for her solo exhibition Escribir como un jardín at Can Felipa, Barcelona. Entangling diverse techniques and procedures, the artist addresses the idea of transmutation, that is, organic and artificial transformation in the matter. Amador and Nosotras con tus geranios is a conglomerate of computer code that has been printed on the paper that gives form to the two sculptures. The code, barely noticeable in the works, corresponds to a series of images collected by Spinelli in her personal archive. The names of the pieces equate, then, to one of the images. This way, the digital code is transported into a physical object with only paper and ink. A similar mechanism occurs in Untitled, 3d printed sculptures with the shapes of ears of corn. Here, the artist creates a literal representation of the material that the works are made of, since PLA filaments are produced with cornstarch, which indeed comes from corn. This thread of relations between the digital, the machinic and the physical transcends the representation of reality to address the ever-transforming character of matter, and the artwork as a site of transmutation.
Cristina Spinelli, Nosotras con tus geranios (detail), 2021. Photographs by Goro Studio. Courtesy of the artist.
Am I in a digital environment, then? I kept exploring around the cave for another couple of hours, unable to find a way out, until I reached the access to the cave, a large chamber that opened to the dark starry sky. But it was certainly more surprising to find a spaceship in the middle of that chamber. It had a moderate size, bigger than a car but smaller than a yacht, the surface was pitch black with a beautiful shine made by the reflection of the bright stars. The ship looked empty, so I entered to see if it could get me out of this nightmarish videogame. I got to the flight deck and tried to switch on some of the many screens. I succeeded in turning on the on-board-computer – or at least it looked like it. Dozens of folders and files filled the screen: there were maps, video tutorials, photographs of some ladies, thousands of lists, encrypted files… After spending some time looking at the pictures, esoteric drawings, and documents I couldn’t understand, I stumbled upon a video where the same women of the photographs address their daughter, who was left on Earth while they escaped to space in the search of better places to live. Despite they departed 15 years ago, they have predicted that, for the time that she watches the video, they will be waiting for her in the location detailed in the 15yrslocation.pdf. I then read some news reports claiming that the women of the photographs and the video were part of an activist coven. It seems that these witches had advocated for the survival of the multiplicity of species of the Earth, aiming to foster life in far-away galaxies. There is another video that shows the daughter, named Saga, promising her mothers that she will find a way to see them again. Hooked by the poignant story, I logged off the computer and went back to the guide:
Juliette Lizotte is the author of “Witches in Space: True Journey is Return”, a short story published in the book Schemas of Uncertainty, edited by Danae Io and Callum Copley. Saga has just turned 18 and is finally able to log in to the cloud vault her mothers left for her. She finds out they belonged to a coven that did protests and actions to safeguard the environment, and, observing the disastrous situation of the planet Earth, decided to move to space to discover other forms of lives and protect them. Under this dystopic narrative, influenced by Octavia Butler’s writing, lies a particular writing technique that reminds the choose-your-own-adventure books, in which children were encouraged to choose between different ways that the action of the story could develop. This active engagement with the story allows the reader to embody Saga’s various lives in only one story.
This story gave me the definitive clue to understand that I was trapped in a sort of videogame, but it also provided me with the perfect tool to run away from there. Observing every button and switch on the control panel, I finally saw one that said: PRESS TO LEAVE.
And I pressed the button.
Jorge Van den Eynde 