simulation hypothesis

ARTICLE: THE LOCKDOWNS NEVER ENDED

Adonis Archontides, Adonis and the Lockdown Tactics, digital video, sound, color, 4’ 05”, 2020, Cyprus.

VRAL is currently presenting The Death Trilogy by Adonis Archontides, a tryptic of works starring his ersatz Sim-clone. To better appreciate the breadth and scope of his video art, we will we will embark on a critical exploration, beginning with Adonis and the Lockdown Tactics.

Archontides’s Adonis and the Lockdown Tactics (2020) is an introspective short machinima created with/in The Sims 4 (2014). Originally developed as part of a broader cultural initiative by the Cypriot Cultural Services during the COVID-19 pandemic, this work was among fifty projects that received accolades for promoting audio-visual creativity in challenging times. This machinima leverages Will Wright’s popular simulation game to explore themes of repetition and monotony, resonating with the enforced isolation and government mandated "social distancing" experienced globally during a series of shelter-in-place initiatives. Watched in 2024, this work feels at once anachronistic and very timely, remote and fresh. 

The premise of Adonis and the Lockdown Tactics is deeply influenced by the Simulation Hypothesis, a concept prevalent in science fiction - and particularly loved by Silicon Valley’s edgelords - where reality as we know it is posited as an elaborate artifice, a cruel joke concocted by a superior, likely malevolent, intelligence. In Archontides’ piece, this “theory” is subtly referenced through the repetitive, looped nature of the Sims’ existence, mirroring the monotony of lockdown life, which seems to have lost its sense of progression, its teleology. The protagonist, a Sim replica of Adonis himself, navigates the so-called daily life in a state of perpetual loop, echoing the equally apathetic anti-hero of…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited 

Adonis Archontides

Adonis and the Lockdown Tactics

machinima/digital video, color, sound, 4’ 05”, 2020. Cyprus.

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ARTICLE: ON “THE PSEUDOSCIENCE OF DIGITAL PHYSICS”

PATREON-EXCLUSIVE CONTENT

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PATREON-EXCLUSIVE CONTENT 〰️

VRAL is currently exhibiting Mikhail Maksimov’s The New Game is Over.To better contextualize and appreciate his multi-layered oeuvre, we will examine several works by the Russian avant-garde artist. We begin with The Death of Father Men (2018).

The Death of Father Men is a 2018 video work by Mikhail Maksimov inspired by the unsolved mystery surrounding the tragic murder of Orthodox priest and intellectual Alexander Vladimirovich Men also known as Father Men in 1990. The work, which combines video game footage, CGI and real life footage, defies clear labels or easy definitions. Balancing on the threshold between an enigmatic video-game and an avant-garde cinematic experiment, The Death of Father Men is a truly uncanny piece. 

In a fascinating conversation with Vladimir Nadein on Vdrome that touches on Maksimov’s interdisciplinary practice spanning video, gaming, animation and other media to explore ideas of mortality, mysticism, and technology’s relationship to reality, the artist explains — cryptically — that he imitated neural network algorithms to generate speculative simulations of Father Men’s death. Among the most interesting tidbits Maksimov's analogy between means of transportations, such as trains — which figure prominently in this video, as well as in The New Game is Over — and media like video games that can effectively transport someone to another state of being. The former moves bodies, the latter minds. 

Additionally, Maksimov argues that video game worlds can be seen as forms of simulated digital reality governed by software physics and logic. When he talks about”digital physics”, he is likely alluding to the philosophical concept that the universe itself could be some kind of computer simulation, which is the main premise of the so-called simulation hypothesis. By capturing moments within video game environments, Maksimov suggests artists can isolate and manipulate aspects of a physics-based virtual world in creative ways, editing bits of digital existence (“chunks”) into artworks…

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Matteo Bittanti

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