LISA JAMES
RETURNING TO PARADISE [AND SAYING FAREWELL], 2025
Video game installation (semi-circular projection, HD, sound 8.1), 3D print (compostable) and cotton gauze, game text, blown-out pigeon eggs.
Eve, Adam‘s former assistant gardener, returns to paradise after the Fall. In a paradise garden in Norfolk (UK), she encounters apple trees, gardening rules, walls, a dovecote with pigeons and a rare beetle. In an installative video game, players can enter Eve‘s memory space of this garden, follow her footsteps and find thoughts and traces that Eve left behind. What was paradise?
The black-and-white game environment is based on pointclouds that where collected during a monthlong research period in the garden and dovecote in England. Players explore paradise from a first person view and activate 3D scans that are linked to audio-text-fragments. If they choose wisely, they gain access to multispecies perspectives. If not, these remain inaccessible and they are left behind as humans – confined in an alienated version of the garden.
Credits: Maximilian Selvi (Game Design & Development), Maria Wildeis (Sound Design), Maxim Diehl (3D Modelling & Animation), and many more.
Supported by Academy of Media Arts Cologne
Images © Lisa James
