Buried Accomplices- Online LARP
by Carina Erdmann & Nick Koppenhagen
The future is there ... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now. ... I only know that the one constant in history is change: The past changes. — Pattern Recognition, William Gibson, 2003, page 59.
An Online LARP that lets you reflect on your present through the lens of historic imaginaries of the future as well as speculative future visions onto the past. The game is set in the world of E.M. Forster’s 1909 novella The Machine Stops in which humans have abandoned the surface of the Earth and live buried underground fully reliant on and connected in telepresence through a global machine.
Leave behind the information overload of our time to deep dive into the dark age governed by corporate control and imposed amnesia. Suspended in scarcity, scavenge fragments and scan the archival footage that has survived to reconstruct your version of history. Let your mind become engaged in the search for meaning and the constant risk of apophenia.
Which past future or future past will you choose to revive?
Computer memory degrades fast. The thirst for continuous energy flows doesn’t forgive interruption. All we know of your culture is what you have left us in the CRYPT, an archive of video files transcribed as binary code in stone, saved below ground from the crumbling world.
You can now store one video fragment with CRYPT. What do you want to communicate across the threshold of oblivion? How do you want your time to be remembered? You don’t have to be honest. Sometimes lying is an act of kindness.
Image: Polish Center of Mediterranean Archaeology Archives, Fonts by Floriane Rousselot
This journey is also a process of individuation. Everyone lives and dies alone in Shellworld. But if you have ways to gain Ⓣ (time) you won't need to feel lonely.
How do you earn your Ⓣ? What is the name of your job or venture?
Individuation also begins with naming.
What is your name?
Dates:
20.02.2022: School of Commons, on discord