54 HAPPENING Video Vortex – Exhibition
Words by Neal Romanek
who are busy exploring aspects of our ever-evolving digital environment. The works on display benefited from presentations and discussions with the artists, who were on-hand during the conference. FEED talked with some of them about digital imaging, artificial intelligence and the nature of reality.
his year’s Video Vortex conference was held in association with the host venue Spazju Kreattiv, a museum space at the centre of Malta’s capital Valleta. Video Vortex tries to incorporate digital
art as part of its programme and this year, concurrent with the conference, Spazju Kreattiv exhibited works by artists
LETTA SHTOHRYN How much free will do we really have? Can we change our futures? Are infinite versions of ourselves experiencing an infinite number of infinitely diverse experiences all simultaneously right now? And is Sims 3 actually a better game than Sims 4? These are a few of the questions that came up when talking to Letta Shtohryn, a Ukrainian artist now living in Malta. Shtohryn’s piece ‘Algorithmic Oracle’ consists of a wall- mounted display of nine portable devices – tablets and one smashed mobile phone – playing out video captured from the video game The Sims 3. Each screen shows algorithmically generated variations on a scene based on a real event in the life of the artist – a fire that broke out in Shtohryn’s house and consumed everything she and her flatmates owned. “I had been talking to the people who were involved and we were all asking: ‘What else could have happened?’. The fire was started by a tealight on a table on a very windless night. Suddenly, there was a gust of wind. The curtain caught fire and my bed caught fire and then the whole room.” “It was an unusual series of circumstances. I asked myself what other kinds of scenarios could have happened to us on that night. What kind of causality could have led to different outcomes?” Using The Sims 3 (that for sheer gameplay, she says, is superior to Sims 4), Shtohryn built an exact replica of her destroyed home and leveraged the game’s own fire probability algorithm – the chance of fire in the game can be quite high depending on how furniture is positioned. She then ran around 120 different simulations, each time quitting the game without saving so that each new scenario would start from scratch and the characters couldn’t learn from their previous mistakes.
“Sometimes nothing happens. Sometimes weird things happen. Sometimes different objects catch fire completely randomly, almost. In some outcomes all the characters died. In some, nothing happens – the character gets up, has something to eat, goes back to bed again.” She chose nine diverse scenarios for the final project – some of them funny, some pathetic, some bizarre. “In these nine scenarios something quirky always happens. It’s not just they extinguish the fire – someone passes out, too. But I liked the scenarios where nothing happens. That was probably the desire behind all of this – to see what if this fire had never happened.” One of strangest scenarios features the appearance of the Grim Reaper (in the game, the Grim Reaper occasionally appears to lead away a perished Sim). After escorting away a character who dies in the fire, the Grim Reaper randomly goes back to the house, goes upstairs and sits down to work at a computer. Shtohryn notes that since EA doesn’t make the game’s algorithms public, she had no way of knowing for sure what’s at work, but she has some ideas about what is
WORLD ON FIRE Shtohryn’s artwork ‘Algorithmic Oracle’ explores the idea of different realities
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