Controller, computer, projection, software
dimensions variable
2003
[domestic] uses a software engine normally used to generate violent first-shooter video games (UNREAL) in order to reconstruct a remembered childhood space where a dramatic event has taken place: a house fire.

In the work, players navigate a dream space, an oddly constructed world that is actually a memory map of the inside and outside of Flanagan’s childhood home. Spaces alternate between claustrophobic hallways and rooms with seemingly endless ceilings, breaking with the visual conventions of 3D gaming in its more predictable interpretation of physical space. In [domestic], player-visitors encounter ambiguous spatial scales, family snapshots and shifting, morphing unstable texts. The snapshots, soft-focus images of typical domestic scenes, are projected to be huge textures. The perfectly crisp and squared walls typical of computer game geometries further abstract the sense of space.

Players encounter fire in the space and are able to shoot “coping mechanisms” at the walls and at the fire in order to contain them. These mechanisms manifest as book covers from romance novels, popular as an escape from the mundane aspects of domestic life.

[domestic] functions as both a virtual, interactive installation and a flexible means of storytelling, where the navigator is free to explore and linger. There is an intentional, subtle anxiety between traditional 3D game conventions and the highly stylized nature of the [domestic] experience.The ‘house’ depicted is less a physical space as a psychic one, a container for memory, with texts lining and extruding from walls. Recalling simple childhood memories (“it was springtime. A little muddy”), the world offers conflicting impressions and suggests a gap in memory (for example, a staircase built from the word ‘reconstructed’).

The work provokes the questions, what are the ways space and memory are cognitively tied, and can such places be re-experienced? What role, if any, does narrative and memory have in contemporary computer games? How can we ‘see’ memory?