Monster and Ghosts of the Far North got a Honorary Mention from Prix Ars
Electronica
My tasks in this project where as Game Designer and Unity Developer.
As Game Designer I helped to design the Gameplay of the characters and the interaction between them.
As Unity Developer I implemented the Multiplayer API (PUN) and the Gameplay of the characters.
Monsters and Ghosts of the Far North searches for an alternative cartography through which we can
rethink relationships across
species in the Arctic region, and beyond. Developed as part of the Driving the Human arts and science
collaboration, the project is
concerned with modes of environmental data representation in contexts of multispecies cohabitation and
negotiation of space
following the development of extractive industries at six sites located within the Arctic Circle. Scenes
from the habitats of Arctic
Terns, Caribou, Shipping machines, Ice Islands, Arctic Cods, and Methanogens have been reconstructed in
a digital worldbuilding
exercise.
Points of departure for this project are some of the spatial manifestations of social, economic, and
geopolitical conflicts caused by environmental degradation. The space of the Arctic Ocean is a site of
intense geopolitical and infrastructural intrigue, with incompatible and interlocking border claims
rooted in colonial and cartographic history. This has inspired a pursuit for a medium and methodology
that would capture natural processes, and allow them to be intertwined with speculations and
environmental model projections.
By embodying one of the six characters positioned along the vertical axis of the Earth against the
backdrop of spatialized environmental data, the multiplayer interaction is one in which new, generative
relations can be established, allowing hidden structures to surface. The work is not intended as a
precise reconstruction of events, it is made up of a series of constructed narratives that are guided by
environmental data. In the game space, narratives of the non-human, the man-made, and the
more-than-human collide. Scientific knowledge and speculative first-person impressions are incorporated
in an attempt to interpolate between datasets and the gaps therein, leaving the human present only by
proxy. The project is thus both a platform for and a manifestation of ‘bodies tumbled into bodies.'