Void

DEBBIE DING
VOID

2020
Interactive digital media / Mixed media installation

Developed for Otherworlds - as part of Singapore Art Week 2021

CONTROLS

A/D to steer the boat.

W/S to accelerate or decelerate.

DESCRIPTION

The work is a dream world between the void decks of the safety and familiarity of our homes, between the cracks of a game.

The player finds themself swimming through the sea at night, exploring a mysterious lost floating city. The ruins are composed of decimated 3D scans of HDB void decks, like the eroded pilings of an ancient underwater city.

Ding was intrigued by the painterly qualities of an intentionally lowered quality 3D scan done with haste, littered with digitally generated voids through which one can gaze through into another world.

Some of the early game environments made by Ding had small gaps through which one could accidentally step through and free-fall through a void. For some players, they feedbacked that the unintentional feature of freefalling through the cracks became their favourite part of the game.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Debbie Ding is a visual artist and technologist from Singapore. She reworks and re-appropriates formal, qualitative approaches to collecting, labelling, organising, and interpreting assemblages of information – using this to open up possibilities for alternative constructions of knowledge. Inquiries are sparked off by the unexpected discoveries and hidden labours of amateur explorers – whose voices are often concealed by the contemporary professionalisation of academic disciplines. Prototyping is used as a conceptual strategy for artistic production, iteratively exploring potential breakthroughs and dead ends faced by amateur archaeologists, citizen social scientists, and machines (programmed to perform roles of cultural craftsmanship) in the pursuit of knowledge. Works take the form of computer-aided investigations into archaeological and historical finds (eg: the former island of Pulau Saigon, 19th century colonial shipwrecks), studies of changing features within urban geography, and informal approaches to collecting and mapping.