name: go touch some grass
format: video game
genre: interactive virtual audio installation
year: 2024
The virtual, interactive art installation " Go Touch Some Grass " is a virtual park dedicated to human hatred and discrimination.
This installation intends to ask the question - how did we come to the complete normalization of hatred,conflict and discrimination on the global level on all the grounds on which the Nazis once led people to concentration camps? How to establish a culture of dialogue, a culture of plurality, a civil society of diversity? Also, one of the intentions is to point out the potential of the video game format for social criticism, political engagement, encouraging critical thinking, which makes this work a subversive critique of mainstream video games as a product of uncritical, thoughtless consumerist leisure. The process of creating a hybrid work of art in artistic-technical will be a process of searching for new aesthetic languages, combining procedures and principles from disciplines such as spatial and sound installations, video art,video games, etc. This project strives to dance on a fine line between experimentalism and the attractiveness of an attractive game, combining the most modern flows of production with the language of an interactive virtual audio-visual installation. Discovering the expressive potential of new technologies, it encourages artists to use them in their art, acting as a generator of new values and the local scene, thus positioning Serbia on the world stage of new media.
It can be consumed as a video game on a computer. The duration of the work itself would can be from 10 minutes to 6 hours. It was conceived as a hybrid work of virtual art that combines elements of audio, video works and video games.The strong development of information technologies has fundamentally transformed social dynamics. Due to novelty and constant changes, as well as the global reach of the network, law enforcement on the Internet is still a gray area that is being established on the fly. This, in addition to many positive things, brought many negative ones as well. Namely, the old interpersonal ideological polarizations have now been given a platform with unprecedented reach, thus opening the door for mass radicalization, the spread of socially harmful ideologies, and the general normalization of hate speech in the virtual space. Numerous studies show the negative impact this has on the human psyche at all ages, and therefore the psycho-physical health of the population. However, mere changing or softening the rhetoric is not enough-hatred and misinformation are perhaps even more dangerous when wrapped in pseudo-intellectual arguments. That is why this work aims to show the most diverse forms of discrimination (neo-Nazism, nationalism, racism, misogyny,classism, homophobia, ableism, transphobia, anti-intellectualism, discrimination based on age, geographic origin, height, disability, level of education, etc.)and as a solution offers a radical redirecting man back to nature and its harmony. Alienation from other people and antisocial behavior can be seen as related to alienation from greenery and nature. Interpersonal violence as a norm is reflected in man's violence towards nature and his environment, and this work also has a strong ecological dimension.