Dungeon Crawl
collaborative installation with Clare Gatto
Dream Clinic, Columbus, Ohio
March 2020

Dungeon Crawl is the second “level” in an ongoing series of installations that imagine the gallery as raw material for the creation of digital assets within an immersive RPG, The Cloud of Unknowing. The installation is a reinterpretation of the “dungeon crawl”, a term used to describe a type of fantasy role-playing game that centers around the traversal of a labyrinth of dungeon gauntlets. The installation uses the concept of procedural generation, a process in game development that creates algorithmically based on a set of premade assets. Each recombination of assets creates a new and yet vaguely familiar room. Within a proc. gen. game, familiarity betrays the player, as passageways, traps, and enemy hordes find new locations and variations. Dungeon Crawl is a generated constellation of pattern and texture, using image as its central building material. The work reflects the destruction and creation that occurs in the metaphorical dungeon, considering the dungeon as a site to deconstruct and reconstruct the image. As the second level of The Cloud of Unknowing, it was created considering the artifactual nature of hybrid objects in our contemporary landscape. Images divorced from physical counterparts are thrown into the realm of physical space, creating artifacts, imperfect renderings of their digital originals. Likewise, objects existing within the physical realm are scanned, captured, photographed, and flattened into digital space, creating hollow copies. These hybrid objects reflect the loss in translation between two planes of existence, and mirror the ways in which we ourselves are now hybrid in our constant traversal of both physical and digital space simultaneously.