ExhibitionEssayDanyaGonsales
DanyaGonsalesExhibitionEssay2 BȢGENĒ is an experimental digital environment set within a fractured, postindustrial landscape. It offers no clear instructions, no conventional objectives, and no stable narrative to follow. Instead, the process itself becomes the puzzle: viewers gradually learn its hidden structures through movement, repetition, and misinterpretation. Drawing on ancient religion, experimental music, glitch aesthetics, and the archaeology of unfinished digital worlds, the project treats opacity as a method rather than an obstacle. Neither fully game nor installation, BȢGENĒ invites participants into a space where decay generates structure and interaction becomes a form of initiation.
DanyaGonsalesExhibitionEssay3BȢGENĒ (Bougene) operates as an ongoing artistic research project realized through a playable prototype. Rather than presenting a finished game or self-contained artwork, it functions as a testing ground — a space where ideas about architecture, interaction, and perception are tested through use. Interactivity is not about winning or progressing toward an endpoint; it is a way of exploring how the system behaves. Meaning emerges through contact with its limits, inconsistencies, and internal logic.At its core, BȢGENĒ engages with a specific experiential memory of digital culture: the sensation of encountering unfinished, restricted, or abandoned software. This includes the exploration of raw beta materials, hidden or inaccessible levels, and out-of-bounds (OOB) spaces — environments never intended for the player, yet discovered through curiosity, technical intervention, or accident. The cultural afterlife of the Half-Life 2 beta, with its broken geometry, placeholder textures, and ghostly megastructures, stands as a key reference point, alongside other works that treat incompleteness and instability as generative conditions rather than flaws.A space to be entered, navigated, and interpreted under uncertainty.
Architecture, sound, and movementact as one.
DanyaGonsalesExhibitionEssay5This lineage extends to games and digital works such as LSD: Dream Emulator, The Beginner’s Guide, NaissanceE, and experimental projects by artists including Lilith (Oneiric Gardens, Symbol, No Escape Saga), Devine Lu Linvega / 100 Rabbits (Oquonie, Hiversaires), Orihaus (Xaxi, To Burn In Memory), Distraction Collective (Aggregate), and the demoscene tradition. In these works, exploration is inseparable from uncertainty, and discovery arises not from challenge design but from attentiveness to space, rhythm, and system behavior.The environments of BȢGENĒ are composed of vast, often empty industrial and post-industrial megastructures: corridors, voids, suspended architectures, and infrastructural remnants that suggest function without ever fully revealing it. Visually and sonically, the project draws from industrial, ambient, and post-industrial traditions, where repetition, noise, and mechanical residue form a distinct emotional register. Architecture, sound, and movement operate as a single system, emphasizing scale, isolation, and the persistence of structure beyond human intention.Glitch within BȢGENĒ is not applied as an aesthetic filter or surface effect. It functions as a structural condition of the world itself. Visual errors, spatial inconsistencies, sonic artifacts, and system instability are treated as equivalent components of the environment. Rather than disrupting an otherwise stable reality, glitch reveals the underlying logic of the system — making visible the fractures, shortcuts, and assumptions embedded in software.Glitch functions as a structural condition of the world.
DanyaGonsalesExhibitionEssay6The game itself functions as a puzzle, though not in the conventional sense. There are no explicit objectives to solve or challenges to overcome. Instead, the puzzle is the system itself: how movement works, how the environment responds, what actions are possible, and how the invented language operates. Progress is inseparable from understanding. Moving forward requires learning how to read the world, how to listen to it, and how to inhabit its logic without expecting full disclosure.This approach draws from practices historically situated outside the digital medium. BȢGENĒ aligns itself with experimental literature, performance, conceptual art, and indeterminate musical traditions — including compositional approaches associated with John Cage, free improvisation, and strands of the academic avant-garde. In these contexts, structure exists without prescribing outcome; form is present, but meaning remains open. The project translates this logic into an interactive framework, where exploration replaces narration and encounter replaces instruction.A useful conceptual parallel is the Situationist concept of the dérive: a practice of drifting through space guided by affect, chance, and local intensities rather than by maps or goals. BȢGENĒ can be understood as a digital dérive, where free movement and random encounter are central mechanisms rather than side effects. The player does not follow a path; they generate one through attention and presence.Controls, feedback, and rules are deliberately obscured. Learning how to move, look, and interact is part of the experience rather than a preliminary hurdle. This design choice resists the contemporary emphasis on clarity, onboarding, and optimization, favoring instead a slower process of attunement. Agency here is not about efficiency or dominance over the system, but about adapting to its rhythms and constraints.The puzzle is the system itself.
Shaped by drift, indeterminacy, and the willingness to remain within the unresolved.
DanyaGonsalesExhibitionEssay8 Language within BȢGENĒ operates under similar principles. An invented minimalist language appears throughout the work, functioning not as a code to be translated but as material. Symbols operate visually, spatially, and rhythmically, contributing to the world’s structure rather than conveying explicit narrative content. Communication is displaced from explanation to presence. The project’s title references Bougenē — an ancient ritual described in Greco-Roman sources, including Virgil’s Georgics, in which life is said to emerge spontaneously from decay. This reference is not illustrative but conceptual: BȢGENĒ treats emergence, error, and breakdown as productive forces. The work frames interaction as a quasi-ritual act, where repetition, movement, and attention generate meaning without fixed outcomes. In this sense, the project occupies a meta-narrative position: it does not tell a story so much as stage conditions under which interpretation becomes possible.Although realized through a game engine, BȢGENĒ resists stable classification. It exists between game, installation, performance, and digital artifact — and occasionally against the expectations of each. The prototype functions as a test site rather than a product, foregrounding process over completion. Its current form is intentionally limited in scope, serving as a proof of concept within an active development process.BȢGENĒ is not concerned with clarity, resolution, or reward. It invites participants to enter a space where systems do not fully explain themselves and where meaning remains provisional. What emerges is not a message to be decoded, but an experience to be inhabited — shaped by drift, indeterminacy, and the willingness to remain within the unresolved.Learning how to interact is part of the experience.
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