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by Peter Burr and Porpentine on February 25, 2015 IMG MGMT

Editor’s Note: IMG MGMT is a series of image-based essays by artists. This week’s artists are Peter Burr and Porpentine. We recommend viewing this essay in “Dark Mode” , a new feature that changes the default background on the blog to black. It can be turned off and on by using the button just above our ads.  

Burr is a current NYFA fellow in Digital/Electronic Arts whose work has been shown in a range of spaces over the past decade including floating cinemas, cartoon schools, semi-legalized squats, libraries, and national museums. This includes MoMA PS1, Le Centre Pompidou, and The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Porpentine is a fem organism whose games and curation have contributed to the popularity of accessible game design software Twine. She’s won the XYZZY and Indiecade awards, had her work displayed at EMP Museum and The Museum of the Moving Image, and been profiled by the NYTimes. 

In video games there is the concept of an infinite dungeon – an endlessly regenerating death labyrinth. There’s an intimate quality to a structure that remakes itself after each horrible demise and invites you to try again. Dungeons are the study of structures as living things. Their diet is your curiosity, and their luring plumage is gold and gems.

There is another kind of labyrinth — a zone that has been subtly, horribly altered by something beyond human understanding. It has a set of strange rules that must be understood to survive. In this zone, the opposite of survival is not death–it is change.

I like the word Zone because maze feels so architecturally prescriptive–after all, the prayer labyrinth proves that the walls of a maze are not its defining characteristic. The zone is vague like god is vague. It’s whatever you want it to be. It doesn’t give a shit about you.

The Zone is feral architecture. City aesthetic, jungle biology.

The Zone is an infinite hallway, or claustrophobia under an open sky.

The Zone is full of monsters. Thank god.

 

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