Aaron Oldenburg.
Constellations
Artist Statement
This takes place in a virtual reality space with a black, silhouetted foreground. The Styly installation has excerpts of gameplay on a video loop, with a link to the software. The application can be sideloaded onto a Meta Quest 1-3. Quest 1 is preferred, as its screen shows the darkest black.
The landscape is coming toward you. With you, your neighbors look out from their balconies. The time of day is always sunset. Bodies disappear and re-appear in different forms.
The future arrives like waves and washes things away. Entities like fireflies move and flash in the darkness. They buzz when you touch and transform when you grasp them: a body, a parasite, dirt.
Each body is in a state of transition. Some have roots and mud. Some are moved by mysterious, microscopic processes.
Disaster repeats and death transforms, both of which you are watching happen from a frozen point in the ongoing collapse. The darkness obscures the details that might illuminate what happened up until now.
You and your neighbors are separately all staring vacantly at the horizon. You can feel the vibrations of the memories of this place through your hands.
About the artists
Aaron Oldenburg is a Baltimore-based game, interactive and video artist. His work has exhibited in festivals and galleries in New York, Johannesburg, London, Buenos Aires, São Paulo and Los Angeles, including SIGGRAPH, A MAZE. International Games and Playful Media Festival, the LeftField Collection at EGX Rezzed, Slamdance DIG, Game On! – El arte en el juego, and FILE Electronic Language International Festival. His games have been written about in Kill Screen, Baltimore City Paper, BmoreArt, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
He teaches game design as a professor in The University of Baltimore’s Simulation and Game Design program and has an MFA from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His writing on games has been published in Game Studies, Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, Hyperrhiz, and the proceedings of the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA). In October 2003 he finished two years as an HIV Health Extension Agent for the Peace Corps in Mali.
Credits: Aaron Oldenburg