Nightmare / beta
Interactive horror web-play developed together with web engineer Alexey Accio.
The project can easily be played from a computer screen. To do this, you need to equip a small computer desk, chair, monitor with mouse and keyboard or laptop with mouse, and have internet there.
Concept
Freelancer falls asleep, his nightmare wakes up. All you have is a monitor screen, keyboard, mouse and iron nerves. In this work, the personal and the professional are mixed together: the same interfaces are responsible for both. In the same window, you console a friend, fake laughter, talk to an employer, and try to sit on two chairs at once. It seems that the world around is drying out and you are reduced to the screen plane — but this is not accurate.
It seems to your partners that you are not busy with anything — because you are sitting at the computer, you are not doing anything all day, because on your screen there are only social networks — what kind of work can there be? Misunderstanding, alienation, the lack of demand for artistic work, financial pressure, and domestic problems merge into one endless working day — or working night — and become an incessant nightmare..
The project is a web play that develops non-linearly, and where the user can solve the problems that arise before him in stages, choosing them to his taste. The situation of a working day is reproduced through the browser space, turning into a nightmare in which urgent questions are raised through surrealistic images — loneliness in the network, the materiality of Internet processes, the dependence and instability of precarious work, the endless bureaucracy of the art world and the specifics of art work in our time.
The play also exists in video version (watch on Vimeo)— in the format of an interactive video, and my goal is to expand and update the script lines and, together with the web developer, make it a full-fledged game that maximally imitates the work processes of remote workers.
Video .12 min, 2019
Related interview
Artist Anastasia Vepreva on collecting rejection letters and the distinguished history of failure. Calvert journal, 2020. https://vimeo.com/424101996