For a while I have struggled with some of the existing terms attached to games and media art- specifically words like virtual or immaterial. I am a materialist (in as much as I understand the word, I was challenged by Graeber’s use of it in Debt, which seemed to be implying the opposite of my use, or at least to imply it was part of a false dichotomy)– I believe that everything exists fully in a material substrate. The important distinctions for me within games are not materiality and “unmateriality” but are possibly semiotic- I care about the distinction between the specific and the iconic. Mud Room/ Dušičky are challenging because they are both iconic and specific and I’m having to invent two visual languages to straddle both ways of visually representing things (three if you count words), just as I attached significance to iconic videogame play in specific life situations, or how ritual can pull the iconic into the specific flow of life by the embodiment of spirits or the recreation of historic situation.
So this means there’s an iconic visual language (atari-esque art rendered in pencil) that exists as a sort of virtual console, with peeks in to a 3d world, either with a performance and physical objects, or the 3d view attached to individual cenotaphs (I’m currently experimenting with unity, but the final version will likely be webxr using A-Frame).
