Cyberside Picnic

CYBERSIDE_PICNIC

Cyberside Picnic is an interactive elegy for a lost cyber-utopia, probing the "digital itch"—that compulsive, unfulfilled craving for connection and meaning in our hyper-mediated world. Inspired by Byung-Chul Han’s "aesthetic of the smooth" and Lauren Berlant’s "cruel optimism," this new media work invites players to navigate a fractured digital landscape, embodying the cycles of desire and disillusionment inherent in our toxic entanglement with technology.

You play as a worker tasked with maintaining 2ELLIOT, Arteon Corporation’s AI-driven media algorithm. Through splintered video games and shifting text adventures, you explore a decaying archive of collective cyberspace, engaging in dialogues with the AI and a partner to uncover shared trauma and the illusion of techno-optimism. The work’s nested games—games within games—manifest the digital itch visually and interactively, using glitchy aesthetics, fragmented narratives, and looping mechanics to evoke the relentless scroll of fleeting gratification. Rejecting polished interfaces, Cyberside Picnic embraces raw, handcrafted visuals—drawings and sculptures integrated into the digital—to disrupt the smooth, manipulative allure of mainstream media. By slowing player interactions and embedding moments of idleness, it mirrors the practice of edging, resisting instant validation to provoke reflection on our digital compulsions. Exhibited at the 2024 Independent Games Festival and Playtopia 2023, this work uses mouse-driven interactivity to immerse players in a critique of parasocial displacement, questioning what we truly long for in our endless digital loops.

A mouse is required to step in and play in our Cyberside Picnic.

Duration ~1 hr

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