Chapter 4: Shiva's Dreaming
(HD Video Game, site-specific audio-visual installation.
Shiva’s Dreaming is a virtual world exploring the creation and destruction of simulated architecture. Players roam around a digital replica of The Crystal Palace at Sydenham on the night of 30 November 1936, just as the building is slowly being consumed by fire.
As players explore the smoke-filled scene, their movements trigger explosions that transform the crystalline architecture into cascades of glass shards, falling apart in slow motion - only to regenerate itself afterwards.
By utilising the typical perceptual skills of a computer gamer into project oneself into a game’s landscape and interact with its rules, Shiva’s Dreaming positions the viewer at a precarious threshold between real and simulated physical encounters with architecture and its materials.
With reference in his title to the third Hindu god Shiva, whose role it is to destroy the universe in order to re-create it, the work sets in motion a series of infinite cycles.
COMING SOON
A project for
Re:presence
An exhibition featuring work by:
Adam Nathaniel Furman
C. Fredrik V. Hellberg
Lawrence Lek
Ilona Sagar
Studio BAAKO
The Werkstatt
7-9 Woodbridge Street
Clerkenwell
London EC1R 0LL
21st May – 21st July 2014
Curated by Amy Croft & Adam Nathaniel Furman
Text
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Credits
CHAPTER IV
SHIVA'S DREAMING
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ABOUT
Bonus Levels is a utopian world-in-progress that unfolds as an ongoing series of software, videos, performances, and installations.
Conceived as a virtual novel, each chapter uses simulation as a medium to assemble site-specific collages of objects and places drawn from reality.
These critical fictions draw from the language of architecture and cinema to explore altered states of presence and memory that exist in digital space.
Each level is rendered visible to the observer through a first-person perspective, a flaneur's point of view where the desire to explore and the need for individual agency both exist.
BIO
Lawrence Lek (b. 1982, Frankfurt) explores the physical experience of simulated presence through software, hardware, installations and performance.
ABOUT
