Tatiana Vilela dos Santos

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke

This project with Villa Albertine is part of my research on the experiential potential of gaming installations. It is built out of an observation-turned-hypothesis, which will be tested out through my meetings and visits during the trip.

One of the feats of gaming installations is that they allow us to break free from the tenets of industry and dive into the digital space. Today, the quality of a traditional video game is measured in its ability to immerse the player in the confined setting of the screen, whereby they forget about their body in the physical realm. In my installations, digital magic permeates the physical space, instead of the player projecting himself mentally into the digital space. This reversal enables the player’s body to be inserted into fictional gaming spaces.

My project will seek to find out whether bringing the digital into the real can summon up a true playfulness, an altered mental state characterized by curiosity and a sense of wonder. In a desire to anchor the gaming installation within an artistic heritage, it seems only fitting to form a bridge between it and art history. I will investigate the relationship between play and the psychedelic art movement, which espouses a rediscovery of the ordinary and an enchantment with the over-familiar through altered states of consciousness.

I will seek to identify and analyze the mechanics at play in these experiences by studying what they have in common – curiosity, a (re)discovery of the ordinary, a (re)enchantment with the familiar, a new perspective on the banal, and so forth. I will compare the active nature of the play state against the more passive, perceptive nature of psychedelia. To do so, I intend to meet with individuals involved in these two movements, born out of art and research, and to familiarize myself with their work in order to form social and conceptual bonds. These interactions will help me create a gaming piece that melds the tangible and the digital as inspired by both movements, which will be completed at a later stage at Château Éphémère, near Paris, France.

“Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Timothy F. Leary

In addition to sharing a sense of wonder, psychedelic art and alternative controller games were both born in California, and primarily in San Francisco. The world is already well familiar with the hippie community of the 1960s and 1970s, who gathered in the Bay area to spark the psychedelic art movement. But the history of alternative controller games is still unknown to most. The “alt.ctrl” movement, referring both to the creators of alternative controller games and to their creations, takes its name from the exhibition space dedicated to this type of game, which launched during one of the world’s biggest video game developer events, the Game Developers Conference, which takes place annually in San Francisco. While examples of this practice have been seen at similar European events and at IndieCade since the early 2000s, the opening of alt.ctrl.GDC united the movement under a common banner.

Nevertheless, this practice of game design and psychedelic art has not been restricted by state borders, successfully spreading across the American Southwest. As such, from Los Angeles to Denver, the region is now home to several research laboratories dedicated to this type of creation (UCLA, UCSC, USC, UC Boulder, etc.), as well as many sites that promote gaming cultural projects, inspired by psychedelic art and artists (Meow Wolf, Dreamscapes, Wink World, etc.). Native American cultures have also had a key influence on the psychedelic art found in the seven US States that make up this region.