Journey to Lavender Town (2019)
A 27-hour long video piece created by hacking a version of Pokémon Red for Game Boy.
Using a specially-modified emulator, I created a version of the game where the player's data is randomly written into the data for the game cartridge - in particular the data that represents the creatures that live in the virtual ecosystem.
Over the course of 27 hours the game world corrupts, succumbing to ever-increasing entropy. Even the most basic of actions become slow, repetitive and incomprehensible.
Entropy is the fate of all things. It is the heat death of the universe, it is the demise of humanity due to climate change, and it is the driver of the phenonomenon we perceive as time.
To reflect the themes of time and entropy, the video is presented as a still life. Drawing on the Vanitas still life paintings, the video is presented alongside plants, candles and clocks, all changing over the course of the video.
Journey to Lavender Town was exhibited at The Overkill Festival in Enschede, The Netherlands, in November 2019.
Exhibition Photos
Photos from The Overkill Festival 2019 in Enschede, The Netherlands
Tech Stack
Gambatte OpenEmu Objective-C
The gameplay footage was made using a modified version of the Gambatte Game Boy emulator, running in the MacOS OpenEmu wrapper.
I modified the code to trigger new routines when an opponent Pokémon was present. These would periodically swap the data values loaded in RAM for the player's Pokémon and the opposing Pokémon, and apply those same changes to the in-ROM representation of these Pokémon. The idea was to simulate the infection of one species with genetic data from another. The player's influence would infect all species they encountered.
Data from Pokémon encounters would also be written randomly into text and graphical data which, due to the way the original game was programmed, would cause corruption to occur in other parts of game functionality as well.