What do I mean by Cyberspace ?
Cyberspace is a mythical land, the same as mount Olimpus or the celestian planes in Confucianism. It is a place where our modern Gods live, a place where we get our moral compass from (for good and bad). But for me personally, cyberspace is the fantasized version of reality that we have created to give meaning to our times. It’s still a young place and its heroes are still to be discovered. So we thought it was appropriate to create a story that would allow us to see into this world, to imagine what it could be like.
In a way this game is our attempt to synthesize the current spirit of our times into a modern fairytale. It is based on the universal narrative that exists in all legends: that of self discovery and of confronting one’s shortcomings in order to open up a broader view on the universe.
Phantom Landscape,
by Yang Yongliang.
Video piece from the dslcollection
What creates a myth is its fictional universe composed of its laws and expressed through the different entities that inhabit it. They are all designed to be caricatures of defining trends in human behavior that serve to set the bounds of the moral spectrum, the bad the good, the generous, the selfish. But what gives credibility is its symbological aesthetics (visual, semantic, behavioral, acoustic). Symbology is the glue that ties all of this belief together.
All Watched Over by Machines of loving Grace,
by Richard Brautigan (1967)